Talk with people face to face. I’m not big on sending out once-a-week e-mails to employees to talk about what happened that week. I think having the face-to-face communication is really what’s important. It’s walking around. It’s making yourself available.
I do not go down and ask an employee three levels down to reprioritize what he’s working on to do some pet project for me because that’s anti-chain-of-command. What I tend to do is, if I hear a little tidbit in the hallways about something that’s going good or something that’s going bad, I ask a question. I primarily use it as a way to get people to talk.
Most employees want nothing more than to have the CEO walk into their cubicle or their office and ask a question. Get them to talk about what they’re doing. It makes them feel important, it makes them feel valued.
You have to draw the fine line of having that conversation and making them think that you’ve told them to do something different. It’s more to express interest in what’s happening, so that people know what they’re doing, and it’s important to the company.
Evaluate your actions. You maintain it by continuing to act in a manner, behave in a manner that is consistent with the culture.
New employees learn what is considered acceptable behavior, what are considered the corporate values, by observing what they’re seeing as they learn the company. It gets observed, and it gets assimilated.
You have to walk the talk. One of the things we challenge ourselves on, on a regular basis is, ‘OK, we say this is a value. Did we really behave that way?’ If the answer is no, then there’s something wrong.
One of the things we’ve always taken pride in is that we feel very strongly that we should have a quality product. We had some quality excursions. That was part of this Team ME. If we have this culture of quality … what was the reason we had some quality issues come up? Were they individual issues? Were they process issues? Were they culture issues? How do we get back to, not only do we say it’s important, but it is important?
Sometimes it means you have to make some investments. You say something’s important and you put a team responsible to fix it and they come back and say, ‘We know how to fix it, we have a plan to fix it, but it’s going to require some expenditure of resources.’
If you say, ‘No, we’re not going to do that,’ that’s very demoralizing to that team. If the answer comes back that it’s a modest thing to do, you have to back it.
How to reach: Peregrine Semiconductor Corp., (858) 731-9400 or www.psemi.com
