Know your role
When building and promoting a culture of teamwork, your role in the top post of your company is that of an initiator. You need to set the example that you want others to follow.
You can put your mission statement and core values on paper and you can reinforce the culture in meetings. There is value in putting your guiding principles in writing, and reinforcing them from the podium. But the most effective reinforcement happens at ground level, when you get out among your people and dialogue with them.
Cronin says the best way to reinforce your messages is to ask a lot of questions, then close your mouth and listen before responding.
“Get people to talk about what they do and how they do it,” he says. “Then, the single most important thing you can do is listen. In management, we have a responsibility to listen to our staff. On a senior level, it’s listening to our managers. They perform your company’s functions on a daily basis and best know what changes need to be made.”
As a leader, listening can be hard to master. Chances are, you either started your company or have had a heavy influence on the company’s current state. You’re used to directing and getting things done quickly. You might not be as used to taking your time to listen and consider other perspectives.
“Listening requires a lot of patience,” Cronin says. “Your instinct as a leader is to talk. I’m not the kind of person that sits around behind a desk. I like to get around and talk to people, and as a part of that, you learn to listen. Employees appreciate that, and it gives you a better understanding of what is going on and how you can do a better job in management, both for employees and customers. You can’t really sit behind a desk and make that happen.”
It doesn’t mean you devote every minute of the day to dialoguing with your employees, ignoring the other tasks on your plate. But you do need to schedule in the time over the course of days and weeks to interact with employees and make yourself visible. If you are interactive and collaborative, your employees stand a much better chance of following suit and getting on board with a teamwork-oriented culture.
“It takes discipline to schedule that time in,” Cronin says. “But you force yourself to make that time, and sometimes that’s very difficult. It doesn’t take spending the whole day. You might spend time in a particular area, walking around and reaching out to people.”
If you lead a company with multiple locations, it obviously makes having that personal interaction more difficult, particularly if covering your company’s footprint means logging a lot of air miles. Overcoming the obstacle of distance requires a combination of logging those air miles when possible and making sure that you and the leaders at each location are frequently communicating on core values.
“You ensure that the people who do get out to the various locations are interacting with their customers and listening,” Cronin says. “If you’re in the executive management levels, it all comes back to training people and developing the culture. Ask the questions, get out, and engage and listen to how you can better yourself as a company and better serve your customers.”
As a supplement to your written and spoken communication, you might also send out surveys to give employees an anonymous means of giving you and your management team feedback on the job you’ve done in communicating, listening and setting the teamwork tone for the organization.
At United Insurance, Cronin’s survey is constructed around the five team dysfunctions described in Patrick Lencioni’s leadership fable “Silos, Politics and Turf Wars.”
“It’s really almost like a report card for management,” Cronin says. “It’s done on an anonymous basis, and it’s a good way to measure yourself to see where things have broken down or where they might not be working the way they should be.
“The measurement is on the fear of conflict, lack of commitment, accountability and so forth. Is there an absence of trust; is there something where people don’t really trust what is going on in an area? It’s a measurement, and then acting on that particular area of need.”
If management reacts to the needs of employees, employees will react to the needs of customers. Just like the staff at United Insurance did in the wake of the disasters that occurred five and six years ago.
“At the end of the day, everyone has to understand the importance of the customer,” he says. “You need to work together for the benefit of the customer. A lot of organizations don’t teach long enough about the importance of the customer. But everyone needs to understand that without your customers, your job doesn’t exist and the company doesn’t exist.”
How to reach: United Property & Casualty Insurance Co., (727) 895-7737 or www.upcic.com
