Human Resources
Opening the door
How to create a culture that employees can buy in to
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Philadelphia | August 2008
Page 1 of 2
Lisa Spector
Founder, president and CEO, Staffing Plus Inc.
Lisa Spector says good
leaders are those who
can get employees to buy in to their mission.
“To me, a leader is someone that can get the buy-in
from a team — whether it’s
management or the company — to want to reach the
same goal and develop a
culture and an excitement
to all work together toward
that goal,” says the founder,
president and CEO of
Staffing Plus Inc. “Somebody
that can do that is a great
leader.”
Spector strives to achieve
that goal at Staffing Plus
Inc., where she has led the
90-plus-employee staffing
solution company to a
growth rate of 40 percent
during the past two years.
Smart Business spoke to
Spector about how to get
buy-in for the company’s
mission and how an open-door policy can help you
communicate that mission.
Q. How do you get employees to buy in to your mission?
Our company is very much
built on a warm and fuzzy
culture. We do a lot of things
internally to have everybody
really be excited and happy
to work with the people that
they work with.
No. 1, we hire for attitude
and aptitude. I am part of the
interview process for a large
amount of the people that
work here. Recruiters, directors, salespeople, management, certainly, I am involved
in that process.
It’s putting a backbone in a
skeleton as to the culture
and the integrity of what you want your company to be
and represent. Once you’ve
got that, once you’ve got the
platform of who you are, and
what you are and how you
brand yourself, then interview with those skill sets in
mind.
If you keep on hiring people with great attitude and
great aptitude, then you
develop that culture, and
then they want to join you
because of that culture, and
that’s part of how you
get them to buy in.
Even though it’s a lot
of people, if you instill
and motivate and get
the directors of the different divisions to be
able to be part of that,
then they kind of instill
and motivate within
their teams. So, I don’t
think it’s difficult to
grow a huge organization with those things
in line as long as you
have enough people
believing in it.
Q. What advice
would you give a
leader who wants to
create that warm,
fuzzy environment?
Lead by example. If that’s
not there, start doing something that will percolate that
being there. If it’s a very
stringent environment and
you want to make it warmer,
invite different teams to go
out after work for hors
d’oeuvres and just to get
together.
Just for people to get in a
social setting with each
other whereby it’s fun ... it’s
not just going to work, nose
to the grindstone and leaving.
