Draw support through fair practices. I wanted to make sure we had fairness of practices and fairness around pay, career promotions, positions and recognition. Once people believe that there’s a fair system, that if something is not right, they have a way to be able to scream or just cry foul, change management is a whole lot easier.
We had a roll-up of many businesses that were bought in a consolidation, so they grew up with all different practices, including compensation and organization structures, so things like making titles and positions more equalized across the organization is helpful.
Make sure you really take a look at pay and compensation and understand the levels and positions. Have a way to benchmark and a fair way to assess work and compensate for it, making things a little more transparent.
Obviously, the supervisors and managers communicate that and they can get behind that when they have issues inside the organization.
The thing that always stuck with me is what can be found out will be found out. Don’t ever think you can keep a secret, because what can be known will be known.
Just take the high road as to how you deal with that — not sharing salaries or anything. When they start to see that you’re actually doing benchmarking in the industry, and they’re seeing why they’re not getting a raise at this time because the average position salary is this and they’re kind of at the mid or top range, it’s a little easier for them to understand.
For the most part, they’re not going to look at their next-door neighbor and feel like they’re getting an unfair advantage.
Clear your mind to focus on your labor. Make sure you don’t spend all your time just managing the what-ifs and make sure you’re innovative enough to grow your business.
It is a lonely job … because you have to make fundamental changes in your business constantly, and you want to be able to think out loud about it. But how do you get your deepest inner thoughts and communicate that and make somebody your sounding board without making it your management team? That’s a tough challenge for most CEOs.
It’s more quiet time, it really is isolating myself, and then I kind of map the world. I sort of write what this all looks like and sometimes you can get some clarity by doing that. It’s like a whiteboard — you start to work yourself through it and eventually you start to find a path using chaos theory: What are the three things that keep you awake at night, and then what plans do you have for those?
That starts to clean it out so you can say, ‘Now, I have my energy on the right things.’
How to reach: K/P Corp., (877) 957-2677 or www.kpcorporation.com