Get people involved
Steinback knew buy-in from employees wouldn’t come strictly because they owned stock. He needed to show them that he could create a team that could work together for the betterment of the business and that those on the team would be valued for their efforts.
“If you respect and believe that the person on your management team is qualified and good and is someone you want to retain, you have to support them and challenge them and work with them,” Steinback says. “Give them responsibility. We engage them in what we want to do and we make sure they do it.”
You have a leadership team for a reason, to help you run the business. And while you may position yourself as the leader, you still need to use your team to help you guide your business.
“Involve the entire leadership team in all the operational and strategic meetings that the company has,” Steinback says. “When we talk about planning, monthly planning, semiannual planning, long-range planning, they are part of that. When it’s new product development or new plans or new marketing approaches, they are part of it. You have to have buy-in and everybody has to understand it.”
So how do you avoid the problems that Steinback had previously, where there was bickering about the direction of the company?
“The difference was none of my employees are equal partners or equal stockholders,” Steinback says. “They don’t have a say.”
While they don’t have a say in ultimately making decisions, they do, and should, have the ability to contribute their thoughts to how those decisions should be made.
“Keep on challenging these people and keep giving them responsibility,” Steinback says. “You just have to do it. You have to give up a little bit of that day-to-day responsibility of your own and just have a little more oversight on them.”
If you operate with authority that isn’t cloaked in secrecy, you’ll stand a better chance of gaining support.
“We have them buy in to everything and have them understand what the hell is going on,” Steinback says. “That’s what it’s all about. There’s
a lot of employees that don’t disclose anything to their employees and half the employees don’t know what the hell to do. We don’t do it that way.”
