Gary Base learned what it means to lead people while he was in the military.
The president and CEO of 630-employee ViewPoint Bank says that his military career taught him that a leader can’t lead without the confidence and trust of those beneath him.
And you build that confidence and trust by engaging the people in your command, communicating with them and putting them in the best possible position to succeed at their jobs.
“The first person who needed to be engaged would be the first lieutenant, or else no one would follow you,” Base says. “So, throughout my 40-year career in banking, I’ve always been very engaged with everyone, where I’m active in participating and I just don’t sit back. But at the same time, you have to be supportive and a mentor.”
Smart Business spoke with Base about how you can better lead by developing stronger relationships with your employees.
Show employees your process. The very first thing you have to do is clarify your expectations. They have to understand what the target is.
You also have to make sure that they’ve been completely trained to accomplish their goals. If they don’t have the skill sets that are necessary, you have to make sure they gain those through training.
You have to support them in going ahead and helping them be successful. Even though you give someone else responsibility, you can’t really abdicate that responsibility. You need to support and mentor your employees throughout the process. Then you need to do some measurements to measure the progress and success. Then, after it’s all done, you need to sit down and evaluate the results with them. It’s really a multistep process.
A good example of clarifying your expectations would be if you had a brand-new type of product you were going to offer. You would go ahead and talk about the product and the vision for that product, what you hope to accomplish with that product, why the institution is doing this. Then [you talk about] what the expectations would be in terms of measurements, rolling out the product, what date, what level of success and sales you expect to have.
If there are any losses as you start out, you need to be clear on what kind of income you are expecting and when you are expecting it, when you expect to be turning a profit and what kind of budget would be associated with it.
Show employees that they’re valued. You need to recognize employees in front of other people. You need to tell them that you appreciate them.
You also need to talk to them personally if there are some shortcomings. Obviously, you don’t do it in front of everyone, but you do need to give them negative feedback if it’s necessary.
The other thing that you shouldn’t do as a CEO is claim all the credit yourself or hold them responsible for all the negative outcomes. That really takes the air out of somebody, when they don’t get the credit for something they’ve done. You see that every day, where people take credit for things they never really did.
You need to develop a lot of star performers in a large organization, and then you have to retain those people. You do that by giving them incentive to stay, but just giving your people a (cash) incentive is a lot different than giving them personal recognition. Recognition by others is the most important thing you can possibly do. When you do a lot of things and it’s never recognized, you don’t feel like everyone appreciated you quite as much.
Recognize what it means to lead. To be a true leader, your people will decide that. You are a leader if you show initiative, if you are well-informed and if you have a good track record of your leadership working out.
It’s kind of like your starting quarterback. He could be the leader of the team, but he needs to win, as well. Leadership is something others give you and allow you to have. It’s not something that you just deserve because of your position.
The way other people give you leadership is that even when they’re away from you, they’re still moving forward with the same targets you set. They have confidence in your position; they’re not questioning that.
You can try to overlead, which could be viewed as meddling. But if the direction that one of your departments is going is not the proper focus, then you need to get that back on direction. You learn those boundaries over time.
At the end of the day, in order to lead, you have to set a positive example. I’ve worked for some people who were very negative examples over the years. You can be an example, but you can be a bad example and a bad leader or you can be a good example and a good leader.
But the first thing is, you can’t show up at 10 a.m. and expect everyone else to be here at 7 a.m. That is an example of totally negative feedback.
You can evaluate yourself as an example-setter by doing 360-degree evaluations of your performance and by having peer evaluations. We do that with our top executives. There is nothing like an evaluation where someone you work with gets to fill something out.
How to reach: ViewPoint Bank, (972) 578-5000 or www.viewpointbank.com
