Communicate to promote accountability
The ability to adjust back quickly is made a lot easier when you
have a system in place to hold managers accountable. Just
because you’re waving your cultural flag for all to see doesn’t
mean a member of your leadership team will be able to wave it in
exactly the same way. As you implement changes to lead your
industry, your managers may falter and stray from those tenets
you hold most dear.
To combat such deviations, Hauck and Saccone say to turn to
your front-line staff for help. You may not be able to work alongside every manager as your company grows, so use the eyes and
ears of your lower-level employees. Develop a questionnaire that
rates their managers’ performances based on your cultural canon.
“We let our employees survey and give feedback and rate their
managers,” Hauck says. “We do that about once every three
months. When the manager’s not present, HR will go in and do
these questionnaires. We want to know how the employee feels
about how good their managers are.”
Use a mix of closed and open-ended questions for the surveys.
Have your lower-level employees rate each manager on a scale of
1 to 5 based on the tenets of which you hold them accountable.
Then have employees provide brief explanations to expound on
the ideas you’ve presented in the rating scale and to identify specific strengths and weaknesses.
“They’ll rate three or four managers, and after that’s done, we
consolidate the responses, and then we sit down with the managers and then we’ll talk to them,” Saccone says. “Say, ‘These are
your strengths and weaknesses and challenges that you have that
some of your staff members are saying you need to improve on.’”
When sifting through that feedback, Saccone says to look for
general trends.
“Of course, you have the highs and lows, so try to filter through
and see where the majority of the concerns are or the challenges
are,” he says.
Address extremes only if they represent a serious concern or
lapse in judgment on behalf of the given manager.
Even then, you can’t just rely on surveys when holding your associates accountable for your company culture. Saccone and Hauck
say there’s no substitution for hitting the road and visiting different
locations to see them in action. Getting such ground-level perspective puts you in a much better position to steer the company culture
back into alignment if it’s jumped off the tracks.
“Visitation to the units, the factories, to the restaurants firsthand
and seeing it and talking to them would then allow me to filter
through what information is coming across my desk,” Saccone
says. “You have to make the jump not only to introduce yourself to
the line people that are out there but also to find out what they’re
saying.”
