Share information with employees. We’re a publicly traded company, and we typically don’t disclose our detailed revenues and profits outside of the building, but we tell our employees everything. They know it all.
If they leave the company and go to the competitor and tell them, so be it. We tell them about our product development initiatives, we tell them about our strategic deals, we tell them about acquisitions that are pending when we can. It’s so good to keep people on the same page. I would hate to work in a company where I didn’t know anything until I read in the newspaper and saw that we had acquired somebody.
We’re very open here, and we do a lot of communicating about our strategy, our plans and how the boat is floating financially. What happens is that it ultimately keeps people informed, but it also allows your managers, who are responsible for their functional areas and objectives, to have a consistent framework within which to make sure people know how their tasks and their goals and objectives roll up to the grand strategy.
Learn from your mistakes. You can’t punish honest mistakes. I hear stories of people getting fired for having a project not come in on time.
We’re diligent about the things we do. We’re not going to have poor performance continue, but when you have key people working hard on something and just because it doesn’t come in exactly as promised, that doesn’t mean those people are useless.
There are a lot of things we’ve done in the past where I didn’t know how it was going to come out. If it didn’t come out the way I wanted, it didn’t mean the people who were working on it were bad. Maybe it was a bad plan.
To some degree when mistakes are made, that’s learning. If you lose people or fire somebody after that’s gone on, you’ve just gotten rid of a lot of experience. Typically, the people who have been through the toughest assignments — and a lot of assignments that didn’t work out all that well — were way better the next time, and the next time they were better than that, and after 10 or 15 years, they’re some of the best people I have. Guess what? They don’t make mistakes anymore at all.
People need to be able to know that they can come and give you bad news. Otherwise, they’re going to hide it from you. If you’re punishing mistakes and you’re not being honest with people or you’re treating them inconsistently, the whole thing decays, and there is no way you can have a successful business at all, ever.