Daniel B. Cunningham wears several hats in his role.
In his owner hat, for example, he sets the vision for The Long-Stanton Group. He communicates that to his 210 employees, but they can’t really change his direction.
However, they do have a say in how they’ll get there. So when Cunningham switches to his CEO hat, the strategic discussion is on.
“Strategic plans, to be successful, have to become part of the culture of your company,” says Cunningham, who serves as president and CEO of the metal stamping company and as president of its counterpart in China, Long-Stanton & Lee.
But for the strategy to infiltrate the culture, Cunningham knows he has to get all of his employees on board. That takes a lot of communication and open, healthy debate across the companies, which had combined sales of about $20 million in 2008.
“You’ve got to have buy-in,” he says. “Once you have buy-in, then you can turn the knob up or down.”
Smart Business spoke with Cunningham about encouraging buy-in from your employees.
Encourage disagreement. You make a safe environment during your strategic planning process. You make it safe for people to disagree. You explain upfront that the purpose of the strategic planning process is to get alignment and commitment within top leadership of the company. You explain that before you even go on the strategic planning process.
You have to lead by example. The top executive in the room must show leadership by not snapping at people and not allowing other people to act disrespectfully.
The No. 1 job of the top leader is to say, ‘Gee, Mary, what do you think about this?’ and bring people in. It’s a fine line because it’s not consensus management, but yet it’s not military, top-down, do it my way or the highway. You do a lot of circle back arounds, where [you say,] ‘Mary, I know you said purple with pink polka dots. It looks like it’s going to be green. First of all, does that make some sense to you? Can you support this?’
Generally they’ll say, ‘Yes. It’s not how I would do it, but I will do it and I won’t complain about it.’ Sometimes you have to say, ‘Well, I don’t totally agree with that, but I can see the point. I will do everything I can to make it successful.’
In extreme cases, if somebody says, ‘I just don’t see it. I’m not happy,’ they would have to part company with the company. If they don’t believe in the strategy, they’re going to be miserable and they’re not going to be successful. You have to be prepared for that.
What is not acceptable is that once people commit to something, in six months, they’ll say, ‘Well, I wanted to do it this way. That’s why it’s not working.’ You can’t do that. No, no, no, no. That’s against the rules. So we need to make people comfortable now to disagree, because once we get rolling, this is the way that we’ll depend on people to do it.
