Street Smarts: What Your Employees Think of You
You think you know, but you don't. Here's how to find out.
Published August 2006
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEIf you're CEO of a business that has more than one employee, I have some unsettling news for you. There's a conversation going on in your company, and you're not part of it. What's more, the conversation is about you. Like it or not, your employees are analyzing your decisions, your actions, and your statements. They're speculating about your motives. And you have no idea what they're saying. From time to time, you probably tell your employees what you think of them, but they have no obligation--and perhaps no opportunity--to tell you what they think of you, and so you operate in the dark unless you happen to get lucky. I got lucky recently.
Every year I speak at a conference in St. Louis called the Gathering of Games. It's for practitioners of open-book management and is hosted by my friend Jack Stack, the CEO of SRC Holdings. This past year, I decided that the attendees would be more interested in hearing from my employees than from me. At previous Gatherings, I had talked about the importance of putting employees first, and I'd described the various things we've done at my records storage company, CitiStorage, in our efforts to make it a great place to work and to reward employees for all they do to make the business successful. I figured that the attendees might be curious to find out how it looked from the employees' point of view. Had our programs made a difference? I certainly thought so. I believed there had been a fundamental change in the company's culture since we'd begun implementing them. (See "The One Thing You Can't Delegate," April 2006.) But did our employees agree?
My wife, Elaine, our vice president of human resources, agreed to organize a panel of three employees who had worked for us long enough to remember when our culture was not as warm and fuzzy as it is today. My only responsibility was to show up, listen, and keep my mouth shut until the very end. I had no idea what they planned to do. But as the conference drew closer, it occurred to me that my presence might create problems for the employees on the panel. Not that I thought they would fear retribution, but I was afraid that they might not feel free to be candid. So before the session was to begin, I took them aside and told them I was giving them complete amnesty. They could say whatever they wanted, and nothing would be held against them. We'd brought them to St. Louis, I explained, to give the attendees a different perspective. I told the panelists that I didn't want them to hold back.
In fact, the presentations they had prepared did not contain many surprises for me. All of the panelists recounted their experiences in the company, with emphasis on the programs that they had been involved with or that had touched them directly. Sherry James, who started in customer service and is now an accounting manager, discussed our tuition-refund program, whereby we cover the cost of any course an employee takes as long as she or he gets a grade of B or above. She said the program made a big impression on her 11-year-old son. When he saw that his mother was getting straight A's while working full-time and raising a family, he decided that he should be getting good grades, too.
Mike Harper explained the games we have that award bonuses based on the number of boxes put away. He also talked about our policy of promoting from within. He had started out doing special projects off-site and then transferred to the warehouse, which I was overseeing at the time. He said people had warned him about the perils of making such a move. "Man, you don't want to be around Stormin' Norman," they said. "He's the Terminator." Somehow Mike survived and is now our account services manager.
Then there was Bruce Howard, who had started in an off-site warehouse, left the company, and later returned. He talked about the introduction of the drug-testing program and how it had forced him to make a critical decision that had turned his life around. (See "Just Say Yes," November 2004.) Among other things, it had allowed him to move up and take on new responsibilities. Today he is our file operations manager.
Mike Harper had been warned when he joined the company: "Man, you don't want to be around Stormin' Norman. He's the Terminator."
What they said was often quite moving. But it was during the question-and-answer period that they really opened up, and I learned for the first time about the impact of some of the more controversial decisions we've made. Especially revealing were the answers to one question: When did they come to believe that the culture was really changing and that Elaine and I and the other top managers really meant what we said?
