Share the wealth
Steinback believes it’s one of the smartest things he’s ever done, and a key to his ability to develop his own leadership authority and keep everyone happy at the same time.
“It’s called ownership,” Steinback says. “The smartest thing I ever did was open up the ownership. A lot of people that started in this industry in the early days, some of them that were in and out of the business, the reason they left the business was because their bosses took all the money and ran.”
Steinback wanted to prove to his team that he wasn’t that type of individual and that he could be trusted as the leader. He also knew that the problem in the company’s early days was not with who owned what but with who was in charge.
So how do you convince people to follow you?
“Someone has to take the helm and create an organization and create an infrastructure and create a chain of command,” Steinback says. “Whatever your stock percentage is has nothing to do with your management responsibilities.”
Steinback decided to continue sharing the role of ownership of the company. He would fill the role of leader but share the role as owner of the business with his leadership team and other employees at CSI.
By sharing the profits or losses with those people who were putting in the hard work to make the company go, his goal was to put employees in a better position to respond to his authority as the leader of the organization.
“We have an infrastructure that says, ‘Here is the organization,’ and because there are 80 stockholders or whatever it is, that doesn’t mean they run the company,” Steinback says. “That just means if a dividend is paid, they get paid a dividend based on how many shares they own. They get a bonus based on what their job is. That’s the way it is run, which is the way any company should be run as far as I’m concerned.”
Give employees a stake in the economics of your business and they’ll have a better feel for how the company is doing and how their role contributes to that outcome. Spell out very clearly what the parameters are of their ownership so that there is no confusion.
“They all participate in the ups and downs and they like that,” Steinback says. “That wasn’t given to them. They bought in to it. Every key employee has a stock ownership in the firm.”
There are obviously other things that contribute to an employee’s level of satisfaction with an employer. But giving them a chance to own even a small part of the business is a good place to start toward earning some of that contentment.
“We built an infrastructure and built a foundation of good people that all participate in the wealth of this company,” Steinback says. “I haven’t, as the largest stockholder, raped this company and taken everything out of it. Now they are the ones that are going to sit around along with me and reap the rewards.”
