“It isn’t just talking down; it’s listening up.”
These are words Theodore Carpenter Jr. lives by when it comes
to communication.
Carpenter, the president and CEO of SelectCare of Texas LLC,
says a great communication culture isn’t based solely on your
ability to reach your employees. As important — and maybe even
more so — is the ability of your employees to reach you and your
senior leadership.
Carpenter says any CEO can get on a soapbox and preach
teamwork. It takes an active, involved CEO to get out in the field,
on the shop floor and in the hallways and engage employees.
You probably won’t be able to make yourself accessible to all of
your employees all the time, but he says if you concentrate on
building relationships with your employees above and beyond the
simple transaction of payment for a day’s work, you will gain a better understanding of the people who make your company run and,
by extension, the company itself.
“What I’m interested in is what they’re talking about in the lunch-room and in the hallways,” Carpenter says. “Then we can address
whatever those concerns and issues are and also know what else
we need to do. So creating really good, upward-moving information about what is going to happen in the organization is the key
capability of listening. That channel of communication needs to be
a two-way street as much as possible.”
Carpenter says strong relationships between leaders and
employees gives everyone involved a better understanding of how
their job benefits the company as a whole. As a leader, you get
increased knowledge of the people in your company and what
makes them tick. Your employees get motivation and a sense of
purpose.
But it has to start at the top with what you communicate. A motivated work force won’t happen unless you take the steps to make
it happen. This is how Carpenter has done it at SelectCare of
Texas.
Meet in small groups
SelectCare of Texas is a $480 million, partially owned subsidiary of Universal American. The company provides benefit
plans to Medicare-eligible clients throughout Texas.
As such, Carpenter must make sure that his work force — which
includes nearly 600 people in the Houston area — is on the same
page when it comes to communicating with clients, physicians and
each other. With the number of interactions that occur on a daily
basis, keeping everyone focused on the same goals and objectives
and communicating clearly with each other can be daunting tasks.
“I meet with employees periodically in large employee meetings where I will address an issue and ask for questions — that
kind of thing,” he says. “But my favorite is to meet with employees in small groups; when there is a reason to celebrate something a department has done or the entire organization has done,
then I really like circling up with them, having them tell me about
their accomplishments and getting into a broader discussion.
That’s the most efficient way I have contact with my employees.”
He says smaller groups allow employees to feel more like they’re
addressing you one-on-one instead of holding a microphone at a
large seminar, which allows people to relax when they talk to you.
“In the smaller setting, they feel safer asking me questions they wouldn’t ask in a large group,” Carpenter says. “I can also work to
create a climate in the room where employees feel like it’s safe to
speak up. It’s critical that they do that — tell me what’s working, what
they’re happy and unhappy about. It’s simply easier to create an open
environment for discussing the good, bad and ugly in smaller groups
than in larger groups.”
Smaller-scale meetings are an integral part of taking big-picture
concepts and driving them down to a personal level for your
employees. Carpenter says your employees need to know how
their job affects the greater goals of the company or you will have
a hard time motivating them with a sense of purpose.
“It’s important people get paid appropriately and have a decent
work environment,” he says. “But if you’re talking about commitment as a motivator, then they have to believe in what they’re
doing and that it’s adding value to the total mission.”
The difference between employees who do their job and
employees who embrace the mission of your company comes
down to something called “discretionary commitment.”
Carpenter says it’s a long-standing concept in human
resources, and it’s the effect of employees knowing their place
in the company and feeling empowered to do their part to help
take the company into the future.
“It’s the issue of do I understand what I do, where it fits in the
process and how it fits to the customer. Those are the things that
hold people up to a higher level of commitment to the organization. That’s the difference between showing up for work and just
getting by and getting a full measure of productivity and effectiveness out of every employee.”
In the small-meeting format, Carpenter tries to meet with everyone in the company at least two or three times a year in order to
strengthen the relationship between employees and management
and, by extension, the relationship between employees and the
company.
For employees to achieve a high level of buy-in, they have to first
believe that your communication is authentic.
“Most employees have pretty good B.S. sniffers,” he says.
“That’s why it’s most effective to talk straight with them and try
to draw them out as much as possible on the issues that need
to surface. And try to be as responsive as we can to those
issues.”
Communicate by example
When it comes to communication, you are only going to get out
of your employees what you give them. If you want to build a culture that empowers employees to communicate with you, the first
thing you must give them is a good example.
Carpenter says it takes a willingness to look at yourself as a communicator, your own strengths and weaknesses, and ways you can
improve.
“It starts at the top,” he says. “It starts with how I act with my
management team and how I embrace both good news and bad
news. My focus is on improvement, and then that sets the standard, and that’s replicated throughout the organization.”
From your office, communication will generally cascade downward, meaning your senior managers’ ability to fine-tune their
communication skills is every bit as important as your ability to
fine-tune yours.
Much can get lost in translation if you and your managers aren’t
communicating the same things. Carpenter says it’s important to
stay in frequent contact with the people who head your departments — not just on the business matters of the day but on how
those matters are being relayed to those lower in the organization.
He says it’s especially true if there is a potential problem developing internally or with a customer. Employees will watch carefully how you handle adversity. They will watch to see if you seek
to involve others in the solution or if you tend to wash your hands
of a situation in the hopes that someone else will resolve it.
“Our business, along with many others, is a complex business,”
Carpenter says. “Ultimately, to be successful, you can’t hide problems, so you really need to embrace this philosophy of, ‘Let’s identify the issues and not hide them or bury them.’ Problems tend not
to fix themselves — more accurately, problems won’t fix themselves. They take management and employee intervention to get
fixed.”
A time of adversity is a good gut-check point for evaluating yourself as a communicator. Carpenter says employees look to leadership for direction when the going gets tough, and your response
can either strengthen or weaken the all-important relationships
you have been trying to cultivate throughout your organization.
During the tougher times, it’s even more important that you get
out among your people, engage them in person and let them see
your human side.
“Employees are reading more than your words,” Carpenter says.
“They’re assessing the body language — are you looking them in
the eye? Communication is about more than the words, and you
can’t build relationships without knowing that. You might be able
to conduct business, but you can’t build a relationship.”
As you formulate a communication strategy, remember that employees aren’t looking for you to be larger than life and fix problems with
a wave of the hand. What they want is for you to be straightforward
and honest about where they and the company stand.
In other words, don’t talk your employees in circles when they
simply want to know what is going on. That is one of the quickest
ways to kill your work force’s confidence in you and your leadership.
“If you try to gloss things over, I think you run the risk of employees being cynical about the organization, that you will say one
thing and do another,” he says. “The truth is hard sometimes, and
if you can’t tell someone something, you have to be upfront that
you can’t tell them. They’ll respect that. What they won’t respect is
spin and schmoozing.
“At the heart of every answer, every communication, it has to be
real and authentic and as honest as possible. I just think employees can tell when you’re not being straight with them, and you have
to be straight with them as much as possible for credibility’s sake.”
Develop relationships
Developing a culture that values openness from management
and input from employees is an essential part of a successful business. But Carpenter says if that culture is not reflected in your customer relationships, it’s probably not helping your business grow.
SelectCare of Texas is in a different situation from most companies
in that its primary customers are its Medicare clients and the physicians who serve them. But whether you’re selling Medicare benefits
packages, manufactured goods or consumer services, the need to
have your culture reflected in your customer relations is essential.
Carpenter says those relationships start at the customer interface. In the case of SelectCare of Texas, company representatives
hit the ground, getting out to doctors’ offices throughout
SelectCare’s coverage area, interacting with physicians and building relationships in much the same way Carpenter builds internal
relationships with his own employees.
“We have a significant amount of the organization that is devoted
to supporting the physicians at a very local level, so we maintain a
lot of face-to-face, person-to-person contact with the physicians at
their offices,” Carpenter says. “Written communication is part of
that, but when you’re building a relationship, that face-to-face contact is always best, no matter who you’re trying to build a relationship with.”
HOW TO REACH: SelectCare of Texas LLC, www.sctexas.com