Get employees to believe
Sure, Sheakley plays a role in maintaining large customer relationships and he answers a client’s call when needed. But gone are the days in which he is involved with major customer contact.
“The CEO’s role when it comes to customers is setting the direction of your company so that your customers are being well serviced and their needs are being met,” he says. “The CEO’s role is always setting the direction of the business and setting the core values and what it is we’re going to do on a day-to-day basis.”
So how do you set the company’s direction and values? It’s more than just communication.
“The biggest key is whether they believe in you or not,” Sheakley says. “You as their leader, they need to believe that you’ve bought in. This isn’t just something that you put down on a piece of paper. These are really part of what your goals are and your ambitions and your core values. If they believe that, then they’ll buy in.”
You can’t make people believe anything. But you can show them you believe by how you act and what you say.
“If you have consistency and passion, then they’ll believe,” Sheakley says. “And if they don’t believe, then they’re not the right people.”
The consistency comes in your communication and reaction. With more than 2,000 employees, Sheakley can’t go to each one and explain the company’s values and his expectations — perhaps you’re in a similar situation. He specifically outlines his message to his direct reports and asks them to pass it along. In regular conversation with his direct reports and when he has a chance to directly communicate with employees, he touches on the essential topics, which to him are the company’s values, mission and customers.
While having a well-crafted, repetitive message is good, you need to make sure your values are being reinforced by not only you and your management team but also by the employees themselves.
Sheakley has lunches with employees for certain anniversaries. It’s an opportunity for him to make sure employees understand the direction of the business, and it’s an opportunity for employees to ask questions about the future of the business.
Not everyone is going to open up, but, as Sheakley says, if you get 10 people in a room, a few will guide the conversation. What the open and honest dialogue allows, though, is for employees to take that conversation back to their peers.
“Hopefully they’ll take away from those lunches a little bit more about how I think and I feel about the business, and then they go back to their department,” Sheakley says. “People ask them what was lunch like. They spread the word. They say whatever the conversation was at lunch, ‘Here’s what we talked about.’”
Sheakley has taken the ingraining of values one step further and created the Eagle Leadership Program. Three to four times a year, a group of about half-dozen employees is selected to join the Eagle class.
Supervisors nominate the employees whom they think show leadership within their own department and have potential leadership value for the company. The employees present to a panel why they’re interested in being in the program and they’re either voted in or voted out.
A series of leadership courses with lectures and books are taught by different management. For each group, the teachers, the employees and what is taught changes but the general idea of training on leadership and company values stays the same.
If you’re going to conduct leadership training at your own company, the essential element that cannot be overlooked is your core values.
“You are grooming leaders; people then see the value that you attach to it,” Sheakley says. “If you’re willing to spend this kind of time on them, they feel as if this must be really important to management.”
