In most years, Stan Kryder would set an annual budget and business plan and stick to it for the whole year, but now things are a little different for the president and CEO of Midtown Bank & Trust Co.
“We’ve gone to a much more dynamic and shorter-term review of our budget, where we literally, once a quarter, sit down with our board of directors and review it and make changes to our business plan once a quarter because the market is much more dynamic right now,” Kryder says.
Given the changes in the economy, this different approach to running his bank, which had $212.6 million in total assets at the end of 2008, is helping him ride out the storm. And while he rides, he’s trying to keep his 34 employees upbeat and positive about the future, as well.
Smart Business spoke with Kryder about how to build for the future while today seems bleak.
Keep people positive. It’s really getting people to focus on the things in their business and their personal lives that they can control and to really work on those.
Each day, there are certain core principles in each company that a company is really good at or that they can control, so focus on those things and separate out those that you get inundated with but that you truly cannot control.
Each of us may have periods, whether it’s on a daily basis or it’s at some point each week, where you’re dealing with a difficult business situation or difficult economic situation, and you do that privately, but when you go out of your office, you transition to a coach and cheerleader to be positive and create new opportunities and new business and really separate those negative things that are still having to go on. Everybody needs more positive reinforcement in the difficult times than they do in the good times. It’s playing that role of the coach and cheerleader to keep people upbeat.
Sometimes it’s stepping out of our role as a traditional leader and, in some cases, improvising and trying to find fun ways to motivate people. Everybody has a different way of doing that but try to find a way to keep people upbeat and maybe try some nontraditional ways of motivating people — some fun games and fun contests. Anything that helps add some spirit and novelty to whatever your business is.
The leader puts him or herself out there and sets the example of trying to model whatever the behavior is as opposed to just asking other people to do it. In a case of sales, if I’m a sales leader and I’m asking other people to do it, then I want to model that behavior, too, and be bringing in new accounts to be modeling right behavior as opposed to asking other people to do it. If people see that and you can have success in a difficult time like we’re all in right now, then it truly says, ‘Wow, things are tough, but there are things we can do that’s positive.’ It’s the little things that then begin to add up.