Build a sturdy stool
The culture at AmeriQuest is supported by a four-legged stool: transparency, collaboration, trust and confidence. They’re four principles you need to cement in the minds of your people during prosperous times, so that they’ll have the right mindset during trying times.
“Transparency and collaboration build trust among the working group, and through those three endeavors, everybody has a high degree of confidence,” Clark says. “With that resulting confidence, you will come into work with the attitude that we will persevere and we will win.”
Construction of that organizational stool needs to begin in your office, with the help of your management team. You need to decide how you want to communicate and also model the values that you want your employees to embrace.
“You have to start at the top,” Clark says. “I’d like to believe that the people who work with me in this organization truly believe that there are no hidden agendas, that there is nothing being kept from them and we are transparent. Ultimately, the culture is embedded by doing what you say you are going to do, and that keeps filtering down through the organization. The management team builds collaboration by ensuring that there are not walls being built between divisions, and that helps build trust.”
At AmeriQuest, transparency and collaboration are enabled through a great deal of in-person contact between top management and the employees in the field. The company has four offices: the headquarters in Cherry Hill, N.J., and additional offices in the Chicago area, McLean, Va., and Coral Springs, Fla., in addition to sales staff dispersed throughout the country. Clark and his management team maintain consistent contact with the other offices either by logging air miles or getting on the phone. But maintaining open lines of communication is the key.
“It’s particularly challenging when you’re not all in one place,” he says. “But we spend a lot of time on conference calls or in face-to-face meetings just trying to accomplish what we set out to accomplish. We’re a fast-moving organization, so we need that constant communication among us.”
It can be tempting to look for an easy solution to communicating, particularly in the current economic climate, when there is so much else you could concern yourself with. But Clark says now, more than ever, is the time when your people need to see you and hear from you.
There is no way around it: Promoting and maintaining your cultural principles is going to involve a lot of hard work from many different people.
“There is no one silver bullet for this,” Clark says. “It’s blocking and tackling to maintain the culture. It doesn’t come from books or once-a-year meetings where you tell everyone that this is the culture you’re going to have. It’s every day, you have to live it and adhere to it. And if you’re not adhering to it as part of the team, you should be called out on it.”
Part of communicating is modeling the right behavior. In tough financial times, when sales might be lagging and customers are hesitant, it can become easy for people to begin playing the blame game when a sale falls through or an account dries up. That is a recipe for cultural disaster. To build a collaborative culture, you need to set an example, from the top, that demonstrates a willingness to shed light on internal conflicts.
“If there is a dispute, I don’t take one person’s word for it,” Clark says. “I bring everyone who is affected into the decision circle. Everybody knows that. They know that if they have a complaint about someone or something, we’re not going to whisper down the lane. We’re going to address it and meet it head on.
“The other part to that is I try not to let things linger. If there is an issue out there, if it is a morale issue or a financial issue, we try to explain where we are and why we’re doing what we are doing. We want to communicate our reasoning with everyone. They might not end up agreeing with it, but at least they know the reasons why we’re going down a particular avenue. It’s all about continual reinforcement through your actions and words. That is how a culture is created and sustained from the top.”
