Create expectations for feedback
While Kahn wanted to encourage direct communications, he
didn’t want them all to come from him. In a company where
bad surprises pop up because people are reluctant to speak,
you need to encourage people from every level to speak up.
“One of the things that I had said to our staff when I got here
is I don’t want to be surprised by something that happens
inside this organization, and I don’t want our board to be surprised by something we’ve done that they should have known
about,” Kahn says.
So again he did something symbolic: He asked everyone to call
him Howard instead of the dreary Mr. Kahn name that was commonplace. It was just a small move to soften his persona, but
Kahn says you need to make simple moves everyone can see to
get employees comfortable with the idea of talking to leaders.
“I started asking everyone to call me Howard because I said,
‘When we’re working together, I want to call you by your first
name,’” he says. “‘And you’re working here, so you deserve as
much respect for the time and effort that you put in here as I
do.’”
Kahn then began a program where he had breakfast with
small groups of people from the company. There was no special mode to selecting the group — except that he insisted on
having employees from different levels of the company present.
“We invited small groups of people to come up and have a
breakfast and coffee and just sit for an hour,” he says. “And I
would tend to make about five minutes worth of points at the
beginning, and then we would just open it up and let folks just
talk about what they’ve got going, and I purposely designed it
to include all the staff so that people would communicate
across levels within the organization.”
While he believes in being direct, Kahn was willing to let
these informal conversations flow at will to help break the ice.
“I figure you have to have a conversation before you get the
information,” he says. “When I got here I felt that I had to bring
discipline to the organization and focus and a strategic direction. So when you’re trying to do all of those things, it can be
viewed as overly directive and heavy-handed if you don’t at the
same time say to people, ‘But I want to hear how you think it’s
going.’”
Of course, when you have more than 350 employees you can’t
have coffee with all of them — and even if you could, some still
wouldn’t voice their ideas and issues — so L.A. Care also
began a process of using an outside company to survey all of
its employees anonymously on issues like compensation, work
environment, management support and so on. Once the results
were in, they were reported with actionable responses to the
entire company.
“We said we’re going to take that and set up programs and
report back to you on how we’re going to improve,” Kahn says.
“So one of the areas we heard about from the staff, because
we’re a medium-sized organization of 350 people, the opportunities for advancement some of the people felt were limited. So
we set up a training program to help people prepare for management positions and to help people look toward what their
next position would be to describe their career ladder.”
When you’re trying to knock out a culture of people reluctant
to speak their mind, enriching people’s careers by showing that
you are actually listening to their concerns goes, according to
Kahn, further than money.
“People do not work just for the money — people work for a
sense of mission, a sense of enjoyment of the people they work
with and a sense of empowerment,” he says. “And so a leader
taking on the role of saying, ‘I recognize these things are important to you,’ is very effective and is essential.”
In taking the time to proactively and directly respond to
those issues brought up by employees, Kahn has been able to
build credibility at L.A. Care. As a result, the company is moving forward with a culture where people are communicating up
and down the leadership ladder with clarity and focus. And
what does Kahn think would have happened had they failed to
implement those changes at L.A. Care?
“We would have a less informed and committed staff,” he
says. “A staff that doesn’t understand why it’s moving in a certain direction cannot self-direct. They would have no context
for making decisions on their own.”
HOW TO REACH: L.A. Care Health Plan, (888) 452-2273 or www.lacare.org
