Connect with your employees
Above all else, you need to win and maintain the respect of your employees. If your employees don’t respect you or the decisions you make, you are going to have a difficult time accomplishing anything in your role.
Don’t confuse being liked with being respected. You want to be liked, but you need to be respected — by employees, clients, vendors, stakeholders and anyone else you come into contact with each day.
“Your greatest quality is your character and your ability to build respect,” Sykes says. “My father once told me, ‘Son, you don’t have to love me; I just want you to respect me.’ It took a long time for me to understand that. But I learned that in business, you’re really not in business to be loved but to be respected. We need to make sure we maintain who we are and what our character is. What other people believe is what your reputation is, but you have to be true to yourself, both in the good times and the bad.”
The primary way you gain respect is with honesty and disclosure in your communication. In his career, Sykes has taken it a step further, putting his employees, particularly on the management level, in the driver’s seat with regard to formulating and implementing the company’s vision.
Sykes starts out by telling his employees the straight story on where the company stands and where it needs to go based on the conditions of the market. He then lets the people on the levels beneath him figure out the best way to answer the challenge from a regional or departmental level.
“I have met with many of our people face to face over the years, and it’s just all about being open with them as to what is occurring, just to be honest and straightforward,” Sykes says. “If you do that, people will have a tendency to believe in you and stick with you.
“You have to start out by being able to articulate what your vision is, and do that in a way that everybody captures and believes in. After you articulate your vision and what your goals are, you allow your team to go and develop the strategy as to how we’re going to get there. You give it to them at the so-called 30,000-foot level and have them accept it, and as they build the plan, make sure that they’re realistic. And when you come back and put it all together, that is the finished plan.”
The ownership element is critical to achieve with your employees. If you don’t give them an ongoing opportunity to have input on the company’s direction and the knowledge that management is going to review and consider what they have to say, employees will take it as a vote of “no confidence” from management, whether you mean it that way or not. And the trust bond between you and your work force will suffer.
“I don’t believe in going in and telling everyone, ‘This is what you’re going to do’ and dictate it, because then it isn’t their plan,” he says. ‘They will still do it, but I just don’t think that you can hold somebody accountable for something that they haven’t created or that they didn’t at least participate in creating.”
