A Healthy Company

Having a “healthy” company matters a great deal. By healthy, we mean our organizational culture radiates enthusiasm, positive energy, loyalty, collaboration, great teamwork, and a desire to only improve. Our people are our teammates, not employees. 

To have a healthy company we must focus on our people, our team members, and not be consumed with profits, revenues and expense control. 

The principles that happy employees do better work and that happy employees lead to happy clients are true. 

A healthy company is a winning team! And results will reflect that. 

We will consistently have favorable financial results.

We need highly effective leadership at all levels, i.e., our middle and regional managers right up to the very top, the C suite executives. We must have clarity of what highly effective leadership looks like.

Let’s strive to be a healthy company; well, a very healthy company, by:

• Encouraging our people to contribute their ideas. Want something improved? Ask the people who are actually doing that work
• Asking our people “How are you doing?” “What are you learning from our clients?” “What do you need to do your best work?” “What advice to you have for us?”
• Listening!  Attentive listening is our most important skill in business and in leadership 
• Being responsive to our people, getting back ASAP to emails and calls
• Addressing problems on a timely basis, including a difficult person who is hurting teamwork and morale, causing undue stress – learning the art of having the difficult conversations
• Giving away authority, trusting and empowering our people
• Requesting and offering timely feedback, appreciative as well as constructive. Feedback is a path to continuous improvement
• Modeling good leadership and sharing with clarity what we expect from managers throughout our company
• Celebrating our successes, including small wins, and applauding our people

Our people have to know that they are genuinely appreciated and valued and that we want to know their ideas.

This is a company-wide journey, not simply top down. Everyone contributes to making us a great place to work. It’s our career, not simply a job. 

Respect and encouragement abound. People genuinely like one another. We all have humility, no personal agendas. Humility is the foundation of growth and we are all working together, helping to streamline our work, save ourselves time, improve productivity, and contributing ideas to make good things happen – for our clients and for us.

We do this by conversations, one-on-one conversations, which are the work of a leader.

If we are too busy to have regular conversations with our people, then we have to change that. We have to model highly effective leadership by walking the halls to be with the people doing the work of our company.

Being in a healthy company is a blast. The best ideas are bottom up ideas. Great teamwork is fun. Enthusiasm and positive energy are contagious.