Put your message in context
Keeping up communications with your people has a tricky element to it — sometimes you’ll have employees reaching for antacid rather than calming their fears. But good, bad or indifferent, your people need to have the ability to properly place what you’re telling them.
“Look, sometimes by being honest with the staff, you can raise their level of worry,” Feiger says. “I think what you want them to have is an appropriate, realistic amount of worry, not an unrealistic one. In the absence of communication, people would fear the worst or worse than the worst, and we want them to understand what reality is. So I can’t say that we’ve lessened their anxiety, I think some days I’ve increased their anxiety.”
But while he admits to occasionally creating anxieties, he always does so in an appropriate context. He doesn’t just say things are bad in a market and the company is hurting when business is down, and he doesn’t say just the opposite when things are up.
“My general feeling is the more they can understand about what we do, the better,” he says. “Even in a public company, probably 99.9 percent — or 99.99 percent — of what I know and what the senior management knows, the rest of the company can know and probably should know. A lot of companies think that only the senior management team is capable of understanding things that are going on and making decisions; I feel the opposite. I feel that virtually everybody in this company is capable of understanding what we’re doing and why, and so the more they know, the better informed they are, the closer they feel to the company, the better they can understand when we make hard decisions why we’re making them. And I think frankly it gives people more confidence that the management team here at least has some idea that they know what they’re doing.”
And even though Feiger leads most of those Monday calls, he also brings in the appropriate experts and asks them to deliver commentary on things like the market, the company’s competitors and where they are against the yearly plan.
“Once a quarter, our chief financial officer, Jill York, leads the call to report to our employees about our performance,” he says. “And there will be times when we’re explaining a particular financial issue that she’ll dig down a little deeper and explain here’s how this works and why and its impact on us. Through those calls, I think we’re able to elevate the general level of financial intelligence or banking intelligence that our people have.”
Besides giving an overview of where the company is financially, Feiger thinks it’s important to put in place the context of competitors and the market. Talking about where you are gives your employees some context, but measuring it against your top competition shows people your highest and lowest point while also helping them see where the company can take advantage in any kind of market.
“The more knowledgeable they can be about our competitors and how they’re doing or what their weaknesses are or what our competitors are trying to accomplish, the better armed they are when they go to battle against those competitors for a client — be it a current client or a prospect,” Feiger says.
And whatever your message is, make sure you mark the beginning and end dates appropriately. Don’t just tell employees one thing is important for a quarter and then never go back and celebrate your success or comment on your failures.
“We tell it the way it is pretty much in any report that we give about our company, quarterly report or otherwise; we say, ‘Look, it typically goes like this in a quarter. Here’s how much money we made, here’s why, here’s the things we did well in the quarter, here’s the things we didn’t do so well in the quarter,’” Feiger says. “For example, in 2008, one of our high-level goals was to increase low-cost funding, low-cost deposits. So we report back to them, here’s how we did, and in the third quarter, we did incredibly well, and they were very interested in knowing about that.”
To Feiger, having all of his people understanding where the company is going, what challenges it’s facing and how it’s going to face those challenges is the foundation to keeping a company that can maintain in any economy.
“My thing is, the front-line people, they make more decisions than anybody else for our clients and the better that they can understand what we’re trying to accomplish as a group, as a company, the better decisions they’re able to make. So we’ve sent a very strong message that what we’re interested in doing is building a premier banking franchise here in Chicago. … I think that’s worked out pretty well,” he says. “The client base here is absolutely top flight, really strong companies, really good businesspeople and really good individual customers, as well, and a lot of that has to do with just trying to play it down the middle in good times and bad.”