Develop your people. When you’re working with your people, you always need to look ahead at what their future may look like and not just live in the day, so it’s important to take time with your people periodically to understand what their career path may unfold into and to know which way they might want to head. What you need to do in a culture like this is to provide every opportunity for the people who are there, and you need to not be threatened. You need to develop your replacements. It’s the old adage: A rising tide floats all boats. As long as you maintain a culture where everyone wants to help each other, you have a high-performing organization that way.
Show people how they matter. You just need to take a little extra time to help people understand how their piece fits into the whole picture, and you’ll find you get a lot of benefit from that.
Make sure people understand why what they’re doing is important, and some of these things can be tasks that, on the surface, would appear somewhat less fulfilling. There are certain things we have to do that appear to be more clerical in nature. However, they could be related to something that was an initial public offering or an underwritten offering, where there is an element of risk that needs to be addressed, and if they understand what they’re doing and how it fits into the total picture of a particular offering, then all of a sudden two things happen. One is it’s more fulfilling to them because they understand why it’s important because they know exactly why they’re doing it and who’s relying on it. The second part is if they know that, they’re going to be more attuned to something that may not look right or smell right in order to get a higher quality work out of that.