Create advocates
OK, so you’ve broken the ice a bit and employees feel comfortable around you. But, if you’re like Graham, you can’t spend all
hours of every day chatting with employees. So, while you want to
establish that you care about every employee, you have to learn to
pick the individuals with whom you spend your extra time.
“You can’t be all things to everybody,” Graham says. “However,
you have to recognize there are key people in every location that
have key people attached to them.”
Graham says those people tend to show themselves to you. If
you take the occasion to spend time with everybody at a location,
you can see who is passionate about and accurate with the mission. By mixing that with the knowledge of who your high performers are, you’ll have an idea of the opinion leaders who can
help you drive ideas.
“Identifying who they are goes a long way in extending who you
are,” he says. “I can’t spend all time with everybody, but I do spend
more time with larger producers and certain pockets of people.”
As you identify those people, they can act
as your testimonial. At those hamburger
lunches that Graham hosts, for example,
he often brings a few of those people with
him to help break down the barriers with
younger employees beyond just that day.
“I usually have people in there that kind
of bridge a generation gap,” he says. “I
would have a handful of people that have
been with me for a year, two years, someone that can give a perspective on that.
“Having testimonial, having other people
around and engaging head on that, ‘Hey,
I’m taking you out to lunch as a new
employee and want to make sure you have
the ability to indicate to me issues of concern and ways that we can get better.’ So
people know that they can approach me,
and if they still don’t, they just have to
check with someone who’s been here to
find out that it’s OK.”
The more effort you make to improve
your relationships with employees, the
more of these advocates you’ll have.
“I have a whole cadre of people who are
turning 40 and celebrating their 15th
anniversary, and I hired them,” he says. “So
these are folks that have impact, have loyalty, they’re advocates, and they’re out
there validating or diffusing perceptions.”
And the more of those people you get, the
easier it is to move the company in a new
direction or take on a bigger challenge.
“Everything we do is touching people and
having, hopefully, an impact on people,”
Graham says. “So they become advocates
and not saboteurs. The more advocates
you have, the more they can be disciples
conveying whatever the message is that we
want to permeate and also sustain.”
