Don’t assume anything
You might think that employees pick up on the culture and
personality of a new job very easily and are able see it as clearly as you do. As Interactive began to grow, Brown quickly realized that this wasn’t always the case.
“It wasn’t going to happen automatically,” Brown says. “We
needed to take steps to ensure that new people coming in
understood the history of the company and understood the
worldview that our company has.”
One of the most important messages Brown wanted to get
across was that despite the aggressive nature of its work, the
company has a human side.
“We’re not automatons and they’re not just cells on a spreadsheet,” he says.
Brown tries not to send out a lot of companywide communiques to avoid the impression that he is speaking from the
throne in his ivory tower.
“I try not to lapse into corporate speak,” Brown says. “I try to
sound like a human being and to act like the human being that
I am. Talk in a conversational way to people. I use language
that may be borderline colorful that I use when I’m talking to
my buddies playing poker so that it doesn’t come across as this
distant, bland imaginary person.”
You need to be perceived as a real person who is in touch
with what is happening in your company, good or bad.
“There is a real person at the helm of this company who sometimes feels joy, sometimes feels bad and sometimes feels pain,”
Brown says. “Don’t try to mask that out of some overly developed sense of political correctness. … We’ve tried not to manufacture our personality but maintain the personality we started
with.”
New employees learn about your leadership style through the
way you talk to them. In so doing, they also learn about your
company and what their job responsibilities will be.
“Emphasize what the job is,” Brown says. “We lay out quarterly goals and very high-level goals of the company and then
try to break those down into various departments and teams.
Everybody is very clear about what we’re trying to do at any
given moment and what our mission is and they don’t lose
sight of the work.”
The communication about job duties and expectations does
not end when an employee is hired.
“The sort of information and expectations that you lay out
when they go through their orientation process needs to continue after they come on board,” Brown says. “Make sure that
your messages are reinforced at every step along the way by
their managers and by the sorts of communication the company puts out.”
