Educate new employees
You have to communicate what makes up your culture to new employees if you hope to maintain its strengths.
At Linbeck, new employees have about a four-hour “Cultural Distinction” group meeting with Greco and Chairman Leo Linbeck III. The duo lays out the company’s values and the importance of integrity and a collaborative work environment.
To avoid giving the perception that the meeting is an orientation that’s going to be a snooze-fest centered on a timeline of the company’s achievements, be careful how you refer to it.
“Don’t call it orientation,” he says. “Just tell them you want to talk about the organization.”
Greco and Linbeck give an actual story behind how the company evolved, instead of just listing off important moments in the organization’s history.
“It tells everybody that you are not coming to a meeting just for us to lecture to you,” he says. “But, basically, we just gave you insight into the whole business and, from henceforth, everything you are going to be exposed to that is off of that springboard or platform. If you don’t buy in to creating value in a collaborative way, then you picked the wrong company or we picked the wrong individual.”
Greco tries to keep the meeting to four hours, but sometimes it can go longer.
“It depends upon how interactive they get,” he says. “Here’s a time when you have the chairman and the CEO, dedicating time for you to ask whatever you want to know. Some of them follow up later with e-mails and some people want to test you right there — test the convictions right there and that’s interesting and that’s always good because it lets you amplify where the boundaries are. It’s a good meeting to get that out of the way. Sometimes there can be as few as five people in the room. There’s no more than 10 though. I try to keep it a very small group.”
As important as it is to delegate tasks in business, the initial communicating of what your culture is should come directly from you.
“You can’t delegate this to HR. You can’t delegate this to a VP even. I don’t think it works. I think it has to be the CEO,” he says. “They know that they are at the end of the line. In other words, they are getting it straight from the top. We challenge them that if they ever hear it differently than what we’ve expressed it, and they’re confused, they are to come back to us to straight
en
it out.”
Greco uses the meetings to give a full plate of information regarding the company’s way of doing things, because he wants new employees to understand everything faster than employees did in the earlier years of the organization.
“I want to do it this way because what I observed before was that it would take someone about 10 years to get all the code and to understand why we do what we do, and we don’t have that time anymore,” he says. “Things move too quickly. My challenge as a CEO is to have people understand the fundamental principle by which we are making this decision or what we’re doing. They have to learn quicker. Nobody has that apprenticeship time anymore. They need to be productive quicker, and they can be.”
While Greco finds the meeting is a great way to initiate new employees into the culture, he realizes that every employee is not going to learn everything he or she needs to know from this meeting.
“That’s not the point,” he says. “The point is there is a tremendous amount of information in mentors out there that you will have to tap into in order to be able to operate within the organization.”
Looking back, that’s why Greco started these cultural distinction meetings. He thought about what it was like being a middle manager after 10 years with the company and the knowledge that could have made him a better manager.
“Executive strategy — we think it’s beautiful, everything is thought out, it just has to be executed,” he says. “Then, all of a sudden, you find out the people who are implementing it on the very essential ground level haven’t heard it or haven’t heard your message in a way that they understand it. Then you find out where it got filtered and … that’s at midmanagement. You find that your young project managers, they are not as confident about their leadership as you are. Therefore, they tend to control information, instead of being disseminators of it.”
That’s why you need to explain to new employees the nuances and subtleties of your organization. So employees know what they are doing and when to seek help when they can’t grasp something.
Because of the cultural distinction meetings, it doesn’t take them 10 years to know what to ask their immediate supervisor.
“They come out within two weeks and they are able to say, ‘Hey, I need to know more about this. I want to know more about that.’ That keeps my managers on their toes and keeps them locked in and just speeds it up,” he says.
Giving new employees information about the company’s culture upfront will give future leaders of the company better tools to be successful.
“What we’re trying to do is perpetuate the success,” he says. “So, I’m not trying to create a false culture that doesn’t exist. I want to build upon the one we have. So, you just express what you do, why we do it and hopefully as generations come through, they will take that as a basis and they’ll add to it and make it better or look at something that causes us to be weak in a certain area and then find a way to make it stronger.”
How to reach: Linbeck Group LLC, (713) 621-2350 or www.linbeck.com
