When forming a vision for a company, you need a lot of things.
You need focus and discipline. You need a definite idea of where
you want to take your company. You need communication skills.
You need perseverance to overcome the inevitable bumps in the
road.
You also need an audience.
Francine Parker says ideas will never get off the drawing board
if people aren’t there to implement them. So when you are defining the direction of your company, it’s imperative to get everyone
involved.
Parker, president and CEO of Health Alliance Plan — a Detroit-based health insurance provider with annual revenue of more than
$1.6 billion — makes it a point to seek input from her employees
when formulating a plan for the company’s future. Upon becoming
president and CEO in 2004, she sought input from everyone in the
company.
And when Parker says everyone, she means everyone.
“When I was working on a vision for HAP, I used a small
group of people to react to the vision and really assist with its
development, then we tested it with our board,” she says.
“Then what I did — and some people thought it was rather
ambitious — I actually went and met with each employee and
rolled out the vision. I established a series of meetings, and I
think that at any given point, there were no more than 30 to 40
people in a room.”
By organizing a series of smaller meetings with HAP’s
employees, Parker was able to create an ongoing dialogue
about the direction in which the company was headed. The
in-person meetings spawned e-mail correspondence, and
feedback is something she continues to solicit to this day.
“You’re not going to move an organization without (your
employees),” she says. “They are the organization, they are
what breathes life into it. If they’re not involved, it’s not their
vision.”
Making your vision become their vision starts with the culture you create.
From the bottom up
A CEO has to know when to take the reins of a situation and
when to back off and let others do the thinking. You can’t turn
everything into a popularity vote, but in many cases, you need to
have your decisions influenced by what your people have to say.
Parker says that’s why a top-down approach is normally not a
good idea for creating policies that will affect how everyone in the
company will do their jobs.
“One or two people can’t know everything,” she says. “You can
set the climate, but let’s say, for example, that in quality, if you’re
working on improving the treatment of diabetics, you wouldn’t
have a top-down approach. You’d want to have a nurse-educator,
a physician, you’d want to have somebody from the pharmacy
talking about compliance. You’d want an ophthalmologist because
of the importance of diabetic retinal exams. So you’d want a team
there that would look at all aspects of something.”
Part of engaging employees on their level is to enable them to not
only provide feedback on your ideas, but come up with their own
ideas and pitch them to senior management.
Team-building is an important part of creating and developing
new ideas at HAP. Parker gets different levels of the organization
involved in each idea by assigning a “sponsor” from upper management to work with the development team. The management
member acts as a liaison between the front lines and Parker’s staff.
Having a member of management working with employees on a
project also allows Parker and her staff to keep tabs on the
progress and productivity of each project.
You don’t want to see ideas fall flat but some will, and knowing
what is going on at ground level will allow you to better steer the
energy of your people toward the projects that have the best
chance to benefit the company.
Parker says letting employees take ownership of their projects is
a tremendous motivator, but will lead to inevitable clashes when
you decide to not implement an idea. Having employees who
strongly advocate for their ideas isn’t always a bad thing. It can be
indicative of someone who is passionate about what he or she is
doing, which is a necessary ingredient in moving a business forward.
“There is danger when you involve employees in these processes and danger when you don’t,” Parker says. “Sometimes you
might not take all the ideas, so if you don’t take all the ideas, you
need to be able to say why you’re not.
“The good thing is the passion people have around their ideas,
but some days, it’s bad to see the passion when you go to say no to
something. But I’d rather have them involved than not. If somebody can’t own it and be a part of it, I don’t see the responsibility
to want to make it work.”
In an attempt to spark as many ideas as possible, Parker has
established quarterly meetings called the “basket of ideas.” She
and her senior management team host a cross section of the company’s employees in a breakfast brainstorming session centered
on a given topic, such as growth or products. Employees are
encouraged to attend and submit their ideas.
Those meetings, which began shortly after Parker assumed the
top post at HAP, are one of the primary means by which she continues to engage employees on a large scale.
“That established a climate of actually wanting to engage
employees in living a vision and helping to shape that vision,” she
says. “They actually get the information, they send it to me, I get
the e-mails from employees, we test ideas with employees. It does-n’t need much coaching because we’ve established that as our climate.”
Effective communication
The best ideas might start near the bottom of a company and
work their way up, but the only way employees will feel motivated and enabled to help form and drive your company’s vision is if
they’re hearing the right words from management — and hearing
them consistently.
Quarterly meetings are a good way to engage employees in person, but Parker says it has to go beyond that. Good communication is something that happens every day in many different forms.
“Effective communication takes on many forms,” she says. “For
me, it needs to be down to earth, and the message delivered
depends on the communication you use.”
Motivating employees doesn’t always have to be about communicating long-range visions about where you want to take the company in three to five years. Sometimes, it’s about showing employees that good things are happening here and now, no matter how
small the event might seem at the time.
“A while back, for example, we had significant growth in one of
the companies we serve,” she says. “In the Michigan economy, as
many people might know, there hasn’t been a lot of good news.
Our major employers are the automotive companies, and that
means the top three customers have cut one-third of their work
force.
“We share news about layoffs and bankruptcies and things like
that, but when there is good news, like we had a gain of several
thousand new customers, I make a point to jot a quick e-mail to
employees to say it, to make sure we end the day on a good note,
that we grew by this much, and you all contributed to our growth.
I get so many e-mails back from employees thanking me for things
like that.”
Parker also uses feedback from customers as a motivational tool.
She has organized positive letters from customers into a slide
show that she shares with employees who don’t regularly interface
with customers. Just because an employee doesn’t work in a customer-service position doesn’t mean he or she doesn’t serve the
customer. She says that everyone in the company contributes to
the overall customer experience and should be exposed to customer feedback.
“We have 850 employees, and many of them don’t get to hear the
actual voice of the customer,” she says. “Sometimes a computer
programmer never hears what the customer thinks or the person
in charge of security or the mail room, and they are so appreciative
when you show them the positive feedback you get.”
Parker says that as you attempt to get employees involved in the
future of your company, it is important to keep communicating the
same messages in different ways. It comes down to casting the
widest possible net with your communication because people
won’t react the same way to every message.
“Some people are comfortable in face-to-face interaction,” she
says. “Other people like a note. It’s funny because I’ll send a thank-you note, and people will post it on their cubicle, they’ll share it.
For that person, the note probably means more because they can
pass the note on to other people. Just as people learn differently, I
think people react differently and like to be communicated with in
different ways.”
Making time
E-mail is a pillar of Parker’s communication philosophy, but she
says there is still no substitute for meeting in person. That’s why,
as much as her schedule will allow, she makes time to meet with
her managers and employees face to face.
There will always be something that comes up and could sidetrack you. But if you really want to make in-person communication a priority, Parker says you’ll find a way to make it happen.
Parker tries to get creative when it comes to balancing face-to-face communication with a busy schedule. If HAP purchases a
block of tickets for a charity event, Parker will use it as an opportunity to meet with employees and also give them the reward of a
night out.
“In a lot of organizations, people in senior management, they end
up having to go to a number of charity functions, and they end up
just becoming routine,” she says. “What they don’t realize is there
are a number of people in that company who would have loved to
have gone to that restaurant or that hotel.
“What I try to do is multitask. If I have to go to an event and have
an opportunity to bring 10 people with me, I’ll bring 10 people that
have worked on a project, so it’s sort of like killing two birds with
one stone. I look at my schedule and come up with creative ways
to spend time with my employees.”
If the latest daily crisis is getting in the way of your ability to communicate with and involve your employees in the company’s direction, Parker says it might be time to re-examine your priorities.
No one gets it right all the time, but you’re never going to have
employees who are enthusiastic about shaping your company’s
future if you don’t first project enthusiasm for their input.
“Sometimes I do it well, and sometimes other things get in the
way,” she says. “I have an internal gauge where I know that I’ve
reached a point where I need to stop paying attention to a crisis.
“I need to have face-to-face communication with people. I might
get more out of it than some of my employees do. Being with my
employees energizes me, and I can always tell when I need to be
recharged. That’s one of the neat things about being a CEO. I used
to be the COO, and as the COO, you get to handle all the crises. I
used to tease the former CEO, I used to say, ‘You get all the fun
stuff, and I handle all the crises.’ But now I get the fun part and get
to delegate some of the crises, which is a nice move.”
HOW TO REACH: Health Alliance Plan, www.hap.org