If you're a CEO, in addition to answering to a board and investors and representing the face and voice of your organization, your biggest job is to frame your company culture. It starts with you.
No pressure there, right?
Actually, it's a tremendous amount of pressure, and the best CEOs work very hard at framing a positive corporate culture. For the past 20+ years I've worked for businesses of all sizes, and during that time, I've talked to countless people up and down the corporate org chart about company culture. In my purely informal research, I've seen one consistent theme among successful CEOs and the companies they lead.
Successful CEOs trust their team.
I've worked for a wide variety of CEOs, and they all have unique strengths and "areas of opportunity" (can we just say weaknesses already?). One of my favorite CEOs was widely charismatic and led our company through a period of tremendous growth and prosperity. If you passed him in the hallway and he appeared in a rush to the next meeting, he would stop, look you in the eye, and thank you for your contributions. If he had the time, he would ask you for suggestions and feedback. That leadership style trickled down, and made for a great work culture.
Another one of my favorite CEOs made a point to meet regularly with everyone on the staff, even when the company grew to a place where that made regular meetings a challenge. To be fair, he didn't and couldn't act on all feedback, but he took the time to care, and above all, he delegated tasks extremely well and made it clear that he trusted his team to get things done. He listened more than he spoke, and he was open to criticism, even if it was a bit harsh. He pushed back and made you feel accountable for your own contributions. As a result, he earned the respect and trust of his team.
It was during that time that I began to make a mental note of how successful and respected CEOs might benefit from a list of questions to refer to here and there to make sure that they were staying true to the elements of their leadership style that helped them become a CEO in the first place. To create and maintain a positive corporate culture, a CEO should stop and take stock of what they're creating.
The list would be something like this:
- Do I trust the team? Do they know that I trust them to make the right decisions for our company to lead us to our goals?
- Do my employees trust me? How accessible am I when an employee wants to offer up a new idea or make a suggestion? How open am I to not only hearing what they have to say, but helping implement the suggestions that make sense to us, even if they will take work?
- Do I speak more than listen?
- Am I accessible to everyone in some form or fashion?
- Do I engage (or even lead) in office gossip, or do I choose to lead by handling constructive criticism with my team members directly?
- Do I take time to understand why employees leave? Do we have a clear career path and do we work to ensure people are in the right fit position-wise?
- Am I clear about our end game? If people in all departments aren't clear on our end game, am I willing to make it a priority so that we're focused on a common goal?
Obviously, the larger the company, the more challenging it is for the CEO to spend time hearing everyone's feedback. If that's the case, the CEO should be willing to invest in processes that open the lines of communication online or in smaller huddles where the most important ideas are shared across departments. By making trust a priority, company culture follows.
I once worked at a company where we had a leadership change at the top, and when the executive started their first week, they immediately asked to have the glass in their office frosted, citing privacy needs. Interestingly, the frosted glass ended up acting as a metaphor for the perception that the team members had for that executive's leadership style. It didn't feel transparent, and needless to say, the executive didn't stick around very long. That, or he got hired at a glass frosting company where he was a terrific fit.
CEOs, we know you are busy. You want your business to thrive, and you want your company to have the best ratings on Glassdoor. You want others to speak of your leadership style with glowing remarks. The starting point is trust, and it's never too late to make that your first priority.
The success will follow.
This originally appeared on LinkedIn.