Leave some room
Steinback is happy to attend a ballgame or some other leisurely activity with any one of his employees. He says there’s no problem with doing this, as long as you maintain a certain level of distance in your relationship.
“If you’re the guy signing this guy’s paycheck, you have to be careful,” Steinback says. “You have to separate most of your personal life from your business life.”
That doesn’t mean you should be afraid to talk with other employees when you’re away from the office. Just don’t get into the hot-button issues of politics and religion.
“If you’re a Republican and I’m a Democrat or vice versa and you start the conversation by saying, ‘What do you think of the health care plan?’ before you know it, you can be at odds over what we each think,’” Steinback says. “We don’t talk about that. We leave that out of the business, which eliminates a lot of the issues. I don’t tell you how to believe. You can believe whatever you want. Everybody is entitled to their own thoughts.”
What you’re trying to do as the leader is to leave yourself an opening to provide criticism of an employee, if it is ever needed. If you become too close personally, that becomes more difficult.
“I’m out on a sales call with one of our salesmen that’s worked for me for 25 years,” Steinback says. “I know his wife. I’ve been on incentive trips. I know them very well. … I went on a sales call, and I didn’t like what I heard. Either he didn’t handle the call well or he said some things I didn’t like or I thought he had a bad attitude. I always position myself so that I can sit there and say, ‘You know what Mr. Salesman, I didn’t like this, and here’s what I didn’t like.’ It’s constructive criticism. I’m not screaming at him. I’m upset because he might have misrepresented me.”
It’s just a matter of making sure you keep the roles of boss and friend separate.
“I always leave myself enough room so that I can talk to those people and tell them what I think,” Steinback says. “If they don’t like it, that’s the aspect of my job.”
And Steinback believes it’s his ability to relate both personally and professionally that has enabled CSI to succeed.
“We respect each other’s turf and what everybody is responsible for,” Steinback says. “We give everybody the opportunity to interact and be social. … I don’t think people would stay around and be as participatory as they have been for 20-plus years if they weren’t happy campers. It’s their whole life.”
Steinback says he has changed as a leader since those early days when he had problems with his partners.
“I’m probably much more tolerant today,” Steinback says. “Probably in the early years, I was much more of a micromanager than I am today. There’s a time and a place for both of those. I’m not suggesting those are bad. But when I was more aggressive in terms of my management style, I could be very irritating and intimidating to people and I don’t think that gets you as much as behaving courteously and letting people know where they stand.”
How to reach: CSI Leasing Inc., (800) 955-0960 or www.csileasing.com
