Reinforce words with actions
As the lead spokesman of your organization, it is your role to
communicate your vision for the company and for the execution that is needed to make it happen.
Your attitude about doing so can go a long way toward determining the success or failure of that execution.
“When we sit around the table, we don’t operate it as a dictatorship,” Laikin says. “It’s more of a collaborative working environment. We empower our people.”
People need to know what’s expected of them in order to do
their job. You can never communicate your company’s values and
behavior standards enough, whether it’s through an e-mail blast or
a quarterly newsletter.
“Things like the customer is always right,” Laikin says.
“Complete customer satisfaction is what we strive for. Focus not
only on your customer, but your supplier. It’s OK to negotiate as
long as you do it in a respectful manner. It’s OK to disagree with
your co-workers as long as it’s done in a respectful manner.”
You also reinforce your values by your behavior. When Laikin
travels around the world to his company’s international locations,
he makes it a point to do more than just preach from the lectern.
“I might present an overview of the company as a whole for
someone in Sweden, but we also have a lot of informal time where
people can approach me,” Laikin says. “At our dinners, I don’t sit
at the table typically with our country manager of Sweden. I’ll walk
around and talk to the people whether they are in sales and marketing or the warehouse or in finance. I move around a lot.”
Laikin also brings others along, such as his chief financial officer
or the company’s general legal counsel or a vice president, to give
their own presentations to the group.
Training should also play a role on how employees are supposed
to handle various situations. When a new office opens, the new
employees who will work there are often brought into the home
office for a series of training sessions.
When you have people going to work in a different culture, you
want them to be familiar with both your vision and the values of the culture to which they are traveling.
“When a key corporate person goes to the field, let’s say they go
to Sweden or Australia or India, they are briefed when they land in
the country by the country manager and or the regional management team,” Laikin says. “Typically, they’ll brief them on local custom.”
The bottom line is that you need to constantly reinforce your corporate values to your people if you expect them to buy in.
“We spend a lot of time communicating with the key folks in each
region and the key leadership teams as well as talking about the procedures of how you do it,” Laikin says. “Then communicating what’s
agreed to within the senior leadership to the broad employee base
in the different regions. We share a lot of what’s said and discussed.
We overcommunicate to the broad base of employees. That helps
people who are part of the leadership team say, ‘You know what,
what I said was heard. It was thought about, and it was considered.
It mattered.’”
