Stay in front
After initially laying the foundation for Novatel’s new culture, Leparulo needed to keep the culture in front of the company, making those principles something that each person lived each workday.
To keep the new culture relevant, Leparulo needed to shift roles, from an architect charged with helping to design and build a new culture to a groundskeeper charged with maintaining and improving what had already been constructed.
“It comes down to day-to-day communication and doing it companywide,” Leparulo says. “It comes down to defining milestones for success, measuring them and announcing whether you achieved them or not.
“I went around to all our offices, presented our strategy and let that bake into the company. I talked to all of our employees in terms of ‘Here are our companywide initiatives that we are doing.’ Then, I would leave it to the managers of each of our functional groups to define the tactical items that needed to be done to achieve the strategic objectives. Every quarter, we’d measure it all, and we were very public with the information.”
By keeping employees in the know, you are showing that you respect their ability to grasp the situation and understand how they fit into the company’s plans. If you keep your employees in the dark and assume that they don’t want to know the nuts and bolts of your company goals and vision, you can begin to kill morale throughout your company.
“We have a lot of smart people around here, so one thing we needed to do was maintain their intellectual respect of management,” Leparulo says. “That was the currency to get the employees to buy in to the direction in which we wanted to go. In order to do that, you need to show them what your vision is and the progress you’re making in getting there. If you keep them informed, you can get them to respect that you are moving the company in the right direction.”
Leparulo also earned the respect of his employees by building accountability into management’s communication. If there was a miscommunication of any kind, the burden fell on the communicator to straighten things out, not the person receiving the communication.
“If there is a miscommunication, you treat that as the fault of the communicator,” he says. “It’s my fault as the leader if I’m not communicating correctly. It’s not the fault of the person on the other end of the communication. That is part of communicating with actions. I follow a saying that says a leader communicates at all times and sometimes uses words. You need to communicate with your own behavior and your own commitment to what you are undertaking.”