Maintain a sense of optimism during setbacks. For a leader in an entrepreneurial environment, there’s always going to be setbacks, there’s always going to be so many challenges to overcome, and if you’re not optimistic, if you don’t think the glass is half full, you’ll never be able to be, first of all, yourself successful in overcoming this obstacle, even more importantly, you’re not going be able to convey that conviction to those who work for you.
People generally know when there’s a setback, so the first step is [to] acknowledge what happened. People will be more open-minded if they feel you’re being truthful to them. But then the key is to help them provide the context, help them understand that all companies and all people have setbacks from time to time. Anyone who says that they don’t is not being truthful. Make them get comfortable with that — it’s just a part of the process of building a company, part of the process of running a company.
The next step then is to frame out with their input in terms of what happened — why did the setback occur? Lastly, help lay out a plan in terms of how you can fix it and how you can overcome it.
Show employees there is meaning in their work. I think that another really important thing, in terms of from a culture perspective — how you build a culture of a company — is to help communicate why what you do as a company matters, that gives meaning to work and everything else.
People want to believe that what they’re doing at work, which is a significant part of their life, means something. In our case, it’s actually easy because what we do is we help people who are ill with chronic health care conditions stabilize, and that keeps them out of the emergency room and keeps them out of the hospital, so in one sense, that’s easy for us because we’re having a meaningful impact on people’s lives on something that is very important to them, health care. But my point is that every company needs to come up with a way of framing how what they do matters.
Create an environment of inclusion. (The culture is) not going to work if you have a very rigid, hierarchical environment where, for example, management lives in an ivory tower. The core essence of having people be comfortable with that is to create an environment where people feel included, and that goes to everything from titles and approachability of supervisors, the approachability of management. It’s a combination of a lot of different things.
As a small example, we’re a clinical company. Most of our employees are clinicians or perform clinical functions. My office is right off of our main work floor, so when I’m coming or going, I’m walking right through the middle of where most of our people in our facility in Tampa are working.
How to reach: Health Integrated Inc., (813) 388-4000 or www.healthintegrated.com