Health & Medical
Leading with passion
How to effectively communicate with your employees
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Tampa Bay | March 2008
Craig Drablos
CEO, Humana Inc.
Craig Drablos wishes it were
as easy as sitting down and talking to someone, but finding
people with passion goes
beyond a simple discussion.
Drablos says he learned this lesson after years of conversations
with potential hires who demonstrated passion and drive but
didn’t live up to expectations.
And if he had continued to base
his hiring decisions solely on
candidate interviews, Drablos
says, he would have made several more wrong hires as southeast commercial operations CEO
at Humana Inc., a $24.6 billion
health insurance company based
in Louisville, Ky.
The key to hiring the right person is talking to others who
know the potential employee in
the real world. That doesn’t necessarily mean his or her references, but people in your business, says Drablos, who oversees more than 200 employees.
People can become proficient
at interviewing, so you have to
use several touch points to
understand an individual,
Drablos says.
Smart Business spoke with
Drablos about how to show your
employees that you’re passionate about the business and how
to communicate your vision.
Show your passion. You’ve got to
have a passion about what you
do. If you don’t, people will
not follow you.
Just try to be yourself. If you
can’t be yourself and demonstrate that passion, employees
are smart; they’re going to realize it is fake. You’ve got to have
a drive for results, a drive for
accountability; you show it
through your actions every single day. Employees see what
you do, and they also see what
you don’t do.
You’re constantly watched.
Just realize that. You’re on stage,
and you’ve got to show it every
day.
Any company that doesn’t
have a passion will be satisfied
with the status quo; they will
not want change. In any environment, whether it’s our
industry or other industries,
there’s change, constant
change, and you need passionate people to kind of take you
to that next level.
Otherwise, you’ll be stuck in
your existing stage. If you
think about it, over time, companies that stay stuck in one
existing stage typically go out
of business if they’re not
changing.
Communicate your vision clearly. You’ve got to have a clear
vision so people know where
you want to go and set themselves up to literally understand where to go and how to
track that.
If you look at communication and the vision, there is
communication overall that
takes clear, concise, specific
and periodic communication.
It’s got to be reinforced multiple times for it to take hold.
It’s got to be reinforced on
many different levels. You’ve
got to be very concise.
This is something that can’t
change and waver. So, if you
are saying something today
and I come out tomorrow and
say something different ... and
in three weeks come out and
say something different, I am
going to have a confused
team. So, I’ve got to make
sure I am clear and consistent
and kind of repetitive over
time with that vision. That’s
something that should not
change dramatically over a
long period of time.
Encourage open dialogue. Really
appreciate that fact that people express themselves and if
they have concerns about the
change or concerns about the
direction we’re going. It puts
the onus on me to justify and
explain it or our team to justify and explain why we’re going
in a certain direction.
At some point, you just have
a difference of an opinion or a
difference of philosophy. Depending on the project, you
may need to part ways. You
have to have one way you’re
running, and if somebody does-n’t agree that’s the best way to
run, that can lend confusion to
the rest of the team or to the
part of the team they are leading or to the marketplace itself,
which is not good for the
brand.
In my mind, you get better
results, better answers. Everybody comes into a meeting
with an area of expertise, an
area of their own experiences.
If you have open dialogue and
you can draw on ... your background or whatever it might
be, you can really lay out all
the various facets and understand the underlying issues.
Whether it’s a problem, a plan
or whatever it might be, I think
you come to a better solution
that way.
If, for example, I just went
into a meeting and said we’re
going to do it this way, we can
talk about it, but, at the end of
the night, we are just going to
do it this way, period, well,
that’s strictly my way, drawing
strictly on my experiences,
drawing strictly on what I
know, which is probably going
to be wrong.
Listen to all sides of a story.There’s personnel situations
where I had somebody tell me
a story, a very compelling story, and I reacted saying
that’s 100 percent of all the
facts and made a poor decision later to find out these
pieces of information were
missing, put some justification
around it, and then had to go
back and apologize.
We learn from our mistakes.
As long as we learn from
them, it’s a good thing.
If I am hearing somebody
saying one thing and somebody saying something else, I’ll
say, ‘Let’s bring them both in
the room.’ Or if they are saying
something about somebody
who is across the country, let’s
get them on the phone, let’s
talk about it. It’s amazing when
you do that you find out what
is really accurate and what has
been embellished.>
HOW TO REACH: Humana Inc., (813) 286-8829 or www.humana.com
