Gary Base learned what it means to lead people while he was in the military.
The president and CEO of 630-employee ViewPoint Bank says that his military career taught him that a leader can’t lead without the confidence and trust of those beneath him.
And you build that confidence and trust by engaging the people in your command, communicating with them and putting them in the best possible position to succeed at their jobs.
“The first person who needed to be engaged would be the first lieutenant, or else no one would follow you,” Base says. “So, throughout my 40-year career in banking, I’ve always been very engaged with everyone, where I’m active in participating and I just don’t sit back. But at the same time, you have to be supportive and a mentor.”
Smart Business spoke with Base about how you can better lead by developing stronger relationships with your employees.
Show employees your process. The very first thing you have to do is clarify your expectations. They have to understand what the target is.
You also have to make sure that they’ve been completely trained to accomplish their goals. If they don’t have the skill sets that are necessary, you have to make sure they gain those through training.
You have to support them in going ahead and helping them be successful. Even though you give someone else responsibility, you can’t really abdicate that responsibility. You need to support and mentor your employees throughout the process. Then you need to do some measurements to measure the progress and success. Then, after it’s all done, you need to sit down and evaluate the results with them. It’s really a multistep process.
A good example of clarifying your expectations would be if you had a brand-new type of product you were going to offer. You would go ahead and talk about the product and the vision for that product, what you hope to accomplish with that product, why the institution is doing this. Then [you talk about] what the expectations would be in terms of measurements, rolling out the product, what date, what level of success and sales you expect to have.
If there are any losses as you start out, you need to be clear on what kind of income you are expecting and when you are expecting it, when you expect to be turning a profit and what kind of budget would be associated with it.
