Shan Padda needs employees to buck the status quo.
“Part of the challenge of being a CEO of, hopefully, a fast-growing company, is how do you create a culture and employees that are comfortable with constant evolution and constant change?” Padda says. “Embrace it as opposed to being something that they’re afraid of.”
To set a culture that supports rapid growth, you need employees to see change as a positive and you need them to take everything in stride, even setbacks. The ability to do so comes down to how you communicate and what you communicate.
“It’s very important to be honest and not be misleading,” says Padda, chairman and CEO of Health Integrated Inc. “When things are going well, share that, and when things are not going well, also share that, but also explain why and what can be done about it so that people get energized.”
That philosophy has helped the innovative health plans partner grow to 220 employees.
Smart Business spoke with Padda about how to form a culture around growth.
Create a culture around communicating change. In order to create that kind of a culture, it’s really important to communicate, and from the very beginning, be very transparent and vocal about the fact that change is a natural part of the landscape. The ability to change is one of the advantages that a smaller company has, i.e., it’s nimbleness in meeting customers’ needs. Help people understand or frame the thought process around the ability to evolve and change as a positive trait versus something that they’re afraid of.
In order to do that, you certainly have a lot of different mechanisms for communicating with employees, but what I’ve found is most effective is you have to get in front of people and communicate with them.
We try to accomplish that through something called all-staffs, where we’ll get up or I’ll get up with other members of the senior management team. We probably do this once every six weeks to communicate with everyone on both what’s gone well, what hasn’t gone well, and then also to share with them what’s changing, what’s different, and why that’s good and why that’s a part of the process.
I think what’s important is you need to help people get a context of why it’s important to be able to change. The bigger message you have to communicate is that every company that is successful is successful because it’s providing value to its customers. In terms of being able to provide value to your customers, inheritably in that process is the ability to shift products and functions so you continue to be relevant to your customer base.
Also as a corollary to that, as I was mentioning earlier, the fact that one of the advantages of a smaller company is just the ability to move very quickly to innovate. It’s important for employees to recognize that, and that applies with the proper context of why it’s a positive not a negative.