When Karen Bankston became
the site executive for Drake Center Inc. in 2005, she knew she
was stepping into a whole new
culture. But she didn’t realize just
how different it would be.
Bankston had been working as
an executive within the Health
Alliance, an area network of health
care facilities that has an open
culture and that values frequent
communication with employees.
But when the Health Alliance took
over Drake Center — a physical
and medical rehabilitation hospital
with 2007 gross patient revenue of $97.4 million — and named
Bankston to lead it, it was a whole
new ballgame. She says that
when she arrived, the culture was
not as open and walls had developed between employees and the
previous management regime.
“The employees didn’t trust us,”
Bankston says. “We had to spend
the first 30 to 45 days just getting
them to trust us by being overly
communicative.”
Those first weeks at Drake
Center taught Bankston a great
deal about the importance of
establishing trust between
employees and management.
Smart Business spoke with
Bankston about how to gain the
trust of your employees and how
to get them to buy in to your
vision.
Establish trust through communication. The key is to communicate, communicate and communicate again. But even with
that, the goal of communication as it pertains to getting
people to buy in to your vision
or your core values really is to
establish a sense of trust in the
environment.
People need to be able to
trust that you’re leading them
in a direction that, first of all,
they want to go, and that you
are in control — not from the
perspective of turning left and
right but in control of the rockiness of the environment. The
first thing you have to do is
establish that sense of trust so
that people know that if the
ship starts tilting, you’re going
to be able to throw them a life
preserver fast.
That’s why communication is
so important.
When I talk to people about
leadership and getting people
to follow you, one of the
things I share with them is that
in addition to communication
and transparency, when you’re
trying to establish a sense of
trust, you need consistency of
message. You need consistency in the message that is going
to all of the individuals.
It starts with me and my senior team really owning what
the vision and the direction is,
and then the ability to articulate it to the individuals who
are right with the rank and file
on a daily basis. We all have to
be talking the same language
and modeling the behaviors
we expect as we go forth on
this journey.
Recognize and respect different
opinions. Gaining trust really is
a lot of hard work, and I share
with folks that it doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes, folks don’t want to go into the
direction you want to take the
organization.
We share with them that it’s
OK to be that way. You might
not want to work here and go
in our direction, but it’s OK to
have a difference of opinion.
We have to have a willingness
to hear those differences
because it might be that we’ve
set a vision or a direction without all the right information or
not understanding a small
quirk in the pathway to getting
to that particular vision or goal.
So you have to try to listen to
everyone, and then really try
to overcommunicate consistently at different levels so that
people start to feel that they
have some ownership in it.
Part of that is people have to
understand what’s in it for
them. They have to understand
the ‘why’ of it. It’s not OK to
say, ‘We’re doing this because I
said so.’ That can work in
some organizations, but in the
new millennium, people are
generally more educated and a
little more in tune to their environment, so they know,
‘Because I said so’ is just not
enough of an explanation.
