When Jim Cable was appointed president and CEO of Peregrine Semiconductor Corp., the right culture and ideas were in place for the company to succeed.
But the responsibility for maintaining the culture can be just as big as the challenge of defining it, he says of the 80-employee, $70 million company.
“One of the things that you find as a company grows is [the challenge of] communicating that culture and indicating behaviors that you would like your employees to have and pushing activeness and decision-making down inside the organization,” Cable says. “We got to a point where we felt that there wasn’t enough of that going on. So we launched a thrust to restimulate that type of behavior we were describing.”
That thrust is called Team ME, an initiative focused on continual company improvement through opening the lines of communication and evaluating behavior.
Smart Business spoke with Cable about how to communicate and maintain a culture.
Openly communicate. One of the things that you keep learning as a CEO is that you really can never communicate too much. Your employees crave information. As much as you think you provide, as much as you think people know what’s going on, I really find that they always want more.
One of the things we do is we try to have quite regular communication with employees.
It’s not all good news as you’re growing a company. There’s bad news. There’s a tendency sometimes not to project all the bad news. Certainly, I think we’ve been guilty of that at times.
But, on the other hand, I think we try to do a very balanced job of, ‘Here’s what’s going on, here’s what’s going right, here’s what’s going wrong.’
We have monthly all-hands meetings. Basically, everybody in the company can attend by person or by phone. Generally, I give a 45-minute update on the business (then have) an open Q&A.
There is an attempt to maintain communication, and that is an important part of the culture — that your employees believe that they know what’s going on; they hear the truth.
It’s something you have to struggle with. Sometimes I look at the effort I put in to preparing a 45-minute pitch to the employees, and I do it, and I sometimes think I didn’t learn anything from this and it was a lot of effort.
You can easily look at it and say it’s not high on your priority list. But you shouldn’t view it that way because the benefits are really quite significant. People feel like, after an all-hands meeting, they know what’s going on. The feedback I get is that it’s well worth the time, energy and sweat to go through the process.
