Build teamwork with respect
The more ALTOUR grows, the more Chemla realizes how important teamwork is. He needs more employees to do more work, obviously, but needs to keep the connection between them strong so that work remains consistent.
“The biggest challenge I have faced as the company has grown is, in fact, to make sure that we keep what we have … that we keep this team spirit because that’s what brings a company together,” Chemla says. “That’s what creates an incredible foundation and the trust with each other and the respect of each other.”
Strong teamwork starts with mutual respect, and the leader has to be the one to instigate it.
“Respect your employees as much, if not more, than you’re respecting your clients,” Chemla says. “You earn their respect by respecting them.”
You build that respect simply by giving employees time and interest. Chemla has done that with an open-door policy that means more than just being available. To give employees fewer hoops to jump through before they get to him, he encourages walk-ins instead of appointments.
“There are no appointments within the company … so anyone can — as long as I am here and I am not on the phone — if someone wants to come up and sit down and talk to me, it’s not an issue,” Chemla says. “That is very well known in our company.”
Since the days that ALTOUR consisted of only a couple of employees, he has encouraged them to come in and talk to him, and now, his longtime managers feel comfortable chatting. They set the example for other, newer employees, showing them it’s OK to approach someone senior.
“My door is, in general, always open, and when people pass by and they see a manager sitting at my desk and talking to me, you know he didn’t ask for an appointment,” he says.
But really driving that open, available concept through the whole company means not everyone has to come to you.
“If sometimes they don’t want to come walk to my office because they maybe feel intimidated, they will have no problem to go to the manager of the office or to the CFO because we all have the same type of courtesy,” he says. “We all have the same type of spirit: being there for them when they need us.”
When you cascade that openness across the organization, you also must encourage the response — willingly helping those who ask for it.
“Anyone who needs anything at any time can always find someone else to help them, and it doesn’t have to be management, and that is teamwork,” Chemla says. “It could be the person next to you, and it could be a person who has nothing to do with your specialty. But if you have care, they will help you because they’re part of the company and they’re part of the team.”
Chemla has even eliminated certain negative responses from the company’s vocabulary.
“You will never hear, ‘This is not my job,’” he says. “This does not exist for us. And ‘impossibility’ is a word that … I try to take it out of our dictionary because we don’t believe in that.”
The key, though, is that you don’t talk about wanting an open-door policy too often, because hearing about it isn’t going to make employees believe it. They have to see it in action.
“I don’t have to tell them anything. … They just realize it themselves,” Chemla says. “They realize the kind of environment they’re in. They see how their colleagues have been treated, and they see how they have been treated. A lot of companies talk about it, but putting it in action, it’s a total different story.
“If we are available to them, we give them the time of the world, they know that they can reach us at any time for anything, I think this (goes a) very long way. You cannot fake that. You cannot say, ‘Yeah, we are family. We believe in team spirit,’ and then do nothing about it. You face reality when an employee comes to you and needs something and when it’s not a good time to do it and you’re still doing it because you want to help.”
