Q. How do you develop
a level of respect in
your company?
When we hire somebody, we let them know they
must respect each other, they
must respect our customers,
and they must respect the
management, and the management will respect them back.
First, it comes from the
owner, so the owner or CEO
has to live their life that way. If
something happens or there’s
a mistake, they can’t have an
outburst. An owner’s responsibility is to be even keel; no
matter how bad your day is or
good your day is, you should
be even keel.
Obviously, if it’s really good,
you have a little more bounce
in your step, but even on your
worst days, a true leader does
not show how bad it is. A true
leader provides hope. When
you provide hope, even when
there’s no hope, amazing
things happen.
The second way that it happens is there has to be zero
tolerance. I don’t care how
good one particular employee
is in my company, if they’re
not respectful and they don’t
respect each other, they don’t
have a job here.
A lot of companies will go,
‘You’ve got to let that person
do it, because we can’t replace
them.’ Everybody in the company can be replaced, right
down to me. Bad behavior is
bad behavior, and it’s unacceptable.
If you allow bad behavior in
an organization, it will do
more damage than just about
anything else.
Q. What’s the benefit of
valuing and treating your
employees as individuals?
You love coming to work. I
have 45 people who go home
at night, and depending on
the kind of day they had,
[that] will determine when
they sit down at that dinner
table or talk to their friends,
whether or not they’re going
to have a smile on their face
or they’re going to be
stressed out.
If they go home to a family
and a couple of small children and they’re sitting at
the dinner table worried
about their job, or if they’ve
been yelled at and are preoccupied and wondering do
they get to keep their job,
are they going to have that
energy within them to say to
their child, ‘Hey Tommy, how
was school today? What did
you learn? What are you
doing?’
That child then grows up
and thinks work is bad,
working for somebody is terrible, you get treated poorly,
and that’s what gets portrayed to them. What if that
small child grows up to be
an employer? They learn to
treat people bad.
HOW TO REACH: Business Cards Tomorrow Pompano Beach, (954) 485-9880
or www.bctpompano.com
