Hold people accountable
Even if your company has values, they won’t thrive if you don’t have the right people in your organization. Stefanski says there are four types of people out there. First are the A-players.
“Those are people who understand and get the values, and they’re good producers,” he says. “They’re hard workers. They understand their job. They accomplish a lot.”
Then there are those that are the B-players, who have the values but aren’t as good at their job. These are people you can work with.
“Give them more training,” Stefanski says. “Give them more support, give them more love, give them whatever to be more successful.”
At the very bottom are the D-players. “The D-players don’t have the values, and they don’t understand what’s going on,” Stefanski says. “They’re easy to not have work here.”
But in between the B’s and D’s are the C’s, which are a bit trickier because they don’t have the values but are really good at theirjobs.
“The folks that are C-players, they can’t last in the organization because they’re just running over people to get their work done,” Stefanski says. “They’re running over people maybe to feather their own cap.”
When it comes to your C-players who are good at the job, you have to sit them down and talk to them. For example, Stefanski has had to sit down with even some of his top-level people before.
“It’s not unusual for us to sit down with someone and say, ‘Look, you’ve accomplished a lot, but on the other hand, you didn’t do it with a whole lot of respect, or you took all the credit, and you shouldn’t have taken all the credit. That’s not how we operate here,’” he says.
Many times, they’ll try to point out their accomplishments some more, but Stefanski will go on to explain that he’s more concerned with people having genuine concern for their fellow co-workers and treating each other with respect than he is with the results themselves.
“We’re talking about the trust that’s built up,” he says. “You can’t build up trust if you’re taking all the credit. You can’t build up respect if you’re taking all the credit. It just doesn’t happen. Those people either they try and they can change, or they can’t, and most of them can’t.”
When you have a situation like that with a C-player, give them a chance to change.
“If their behavior doesn’t change and their attitude toward an associate doesn’t change and they’re still trying to hog all the credit and they say, ‘OK, I can do that,’ and they go back and do the same thing they were always doing, it becomes obvious,” Stefanski says.
He says, again, this is why it’s so important for leaders to live the values so they’re not being hypocritical when reviewing an employee against the values. He’s learned this firsthand with his five kids.
“Boy, I can tell them things till I’m blue in the face, but if I do something a certain way, then they’re doing it,” he says. “People will do what you do, not what you say.”
