Get everyone involved
With a goal and plan in place, then you have to rally the troops, and like most things in leadership, building a culture of health starts at the top, but it goes further than that — you have to involve others.
“Identify the group that’s going to move this forward,” he says. “One mistake that some CEOs tend to make is they think they can will this into their organization on their own — ‘If I believe in it, if I’m passionate about it, if I’m focused, then I can make this happen.’ The reality is … you have to have a forum or group that takes it and moves it forward.”
At Alere, Underwood has a group of values ambassadors to help him. Of his 3,800 people, he says about 75 make up this group.
“Leverage a larger group of passionate, focused people who will volunteer to make this happen,” he says.
But how do you know which employees should be a part of this initiative?
“It’s very similar to anytime you want to initiate something within your company,” Underwood says. “If you want to adjust your culture, if you want to introduce new products, if there’s a new idea, you’ve got to identify the people who can identify with the cause, who can identify with what you’re trying to accomplish and relate to it.”
The key is passion.
“Passion is the one thing that you can’t replace,” he says. “You can’t create passion. You can instill knowledge, you can instill incentives, you can instill a lot of things into a group of people, but the passion you can’t. You’ve got to be adept at identifying the people that have a lot of passion for what you’re trying to accomplish, and then enlist them. Then they’ll enlist others. It’s a bad term, but it’s almost a pyramid scheme — find the people and have them find similar people who have the passion.”
You also want to make sure that all of your managers from the top down to the ground level see the importance.
“If it doesn’t go to the bottom of the organization, what we’ve found is it’s not as effective,” he says. … “The front-line manager must understand the impact of healthy choices and help create that environment because they are the first line to the general population, so if they’re not buying in and they’re not incented and they’re not measured on the impact they have on their employees, then the program falls short. It’s a top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top commitment that creates that environment.”
Underwood does this by measuring his managers in this area.
“The most straightforward way to do it is by embedding these types of measurement tools into the performance appraisal system,” he says. “When people are measured on the participation rates of their people in the team challenges or the team activities, when those types of metrics are built into the performance appraisal system, it’s amazing how people follow.”
