To establish a culture, John Berger finds that actions speak louder than words.
“It spreads like wildfire within the company,” says the founder, chairman and CEO of Standard Renewable Energy LP.
“Even as geographically diverse as we are, you don’t need to get on a pedestal or an all-employees meeting or send out an e-mail and say those kinds of things.”
For example, the distributed energy services company installed a high-efficiency heater but found out after they installed it that it didn’t meet a municipal building code.
However, previous heaters somehow passed inspection even though they shouldn’t have. Berger could have looked the other way and saved the company, which posted $11 million in 2008 revenue, the money it would have cost to reinstall them. Instead, he had them all replaced.
“That set an example and people knew it, and you didn’t have to tell everybody about it,” he says.
Smart Business spoke with Berger about developing an open and honest culture.
Allow for mistakes. I was doing an interview yesterday with a gentleman who’s interviewing for a senior position and he asked me that question, ‘If I make a mistake, how do you treat it?’ Here, I expect you to make mistakes. If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not trying hard enough. I make plenty of them.
I think that it’s proper in management — you have to have guidelines, so we can’t have somebody in the company going out and signing up the company to a million-dollar liability and (saying), ‘Oh sorry, you messed that up.’ That’s not acceptable.
But pushing the envelope in the sense of cutting costs and trying to do what’s best for the customers etc. and something just didn’t work out … you have to say, ‘Look, it’s OK to fail, because if it’s not OK to fail, then you’re not pushing and you’re not improving. You’re not improving the company; you’re not improving yourself.’
So, I think it’s having the understanding out there within the culture, which obviously we do, that it’s OK to fail.
Leave your door open. Coming in and just griping about something is something I don’t tolerate. What I would like to see is, ‘This is what I view as wrong and this is what I would suggest to fix it.’ I’ve always set it up to where you should feel free to come in. I’m not going to hold you, nor will my other managers hold you, and say, ‘God, this person is just a troublemaker.’ If you do it every week, then, yeah, that’s a problem.
But you’re accepted. We may not agree with your viewpoints and we may say, ‘No, this is why we’re doing it, and we are going to continue to do it this way, and I expect you then to get in line to do the best job that you can with that decision. But it really is never held against you for bringing a constructive criticism up and with some other ideas how to fix that.’
So, it’s got to be open, and you cannot penalize people for not agreeing with you. If you demean them in a public way for not agreeing with you, that’s an issue.