Banking & Finance
Return on investment
How to create a culture that helps retain employees
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Chicago | December 2008
Page 1 of 2
Jim Lynch
founder, president and CEO, Leaders Bank
Jim Lynch is passionate
about having a culture
that empowers employees and says that is a key to
retaining people and maintaining a solid company.
“If internally, we are constantly adding people and losing people, that the culture is
such that folks don’t think that
they are valued and their contribution is valued ... then
you’ve always got stops and
starts, and you’re not going to
have any level of continuity,”
says the founder, president
and CEO of Leaders Bank,
which posted 2007 revenue of
about $30.5 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Lynch about how to create a
positive culture that makes
employees want to stay.
Q. How do you create a
culture that helps you
retain employees?
First thing is that we hire,
first and foremost, for fit. I’ve
had an opportunity, probably a
half dozen times, to hire people that I think would have
been terrific new business
developers for us but wouldn’t
fit. They might run roughshod
over the administrative folks,
and I’ve never hired one of
those folks.
It’s important we hire for fit.
In the hiring process, I speak
with everybody that is potentially going to join us and talk
to them about how passionate
we are about culture, how we
treat each other, how we treat
our customers.
I suppose it’s not too strong
to use this word — I warn
them if they’re not passionate
about that, that’s OK, but then
they shouldn’t work here because we talk about culture
a lot, and we work on it a lot.
If you’re not passionate about
it, you’re going to be rolling
your eyes and you’re going to
say, ‘Oh, there they go again
talking about culture.’
Well, it’s important to us. As I
said, we do work on it. So, we
make sure, first and foremost,
that we hire for fit.
Then we do a number of
things to make sure that we
work hard on the culture.
As an example, everybody
knows here that the rules are,
use your head and think, and
then do what you think
is right for the culture. I
reserve the right to go
back to our people after
the fact if I disagree
with a decision they
made, just so I can
understand it.
We’re open eight-plus
years, and I’ve never had
that conversation with
any of our people
because our experience
tells us when you hire
adults and you treat
them as adults, they act
like adults.
Q. What advice would
you have for someone
who wanted to implement a similar culture?
In my experience, I’ve
worked for people who are ...
very accusatory, and they like
to point fingers and shift the
blame to somebody else —
‘That wasn’t me.’
Well, that doesn’t foster a
really good team environment.
It has the opposite effect of
what you are trying to accomplish. That is ... you are trying
to allow people to use their
head and make proper decisions, when, in fact, you scold them publicly for making a
mistake, which, of course,
everybody makes.
You make them more reti-cent to making decisions
down the road, and that will
ultimately cripple the organization because you don’t
want one person or just a
handful of people making
decisions. That’s fine if you
want to be a five-employee
organization, but if you want
to grow, you have to empower people to use their head
and make decisions. There’s
no other way to do it.
If somebody chooses to
point fingers and to publicly
rebuke folks for making mistakes, that’s a toxic culture. I doubt that person could
change. The only way to
change that culture is to get
rid of the people that think
that way.
