Accounting and Consulting

The American way

By Brian Horn

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Craig J. Snyder
president, America Group Retirement Strategy Centers

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Craig J. Snyder wants his employees to know that they are more than just people working for him at America Group Retirement Strategy Centers. For example, if he hears an employee has a son playing in an all-star baseball game, he’ll write it down to remind himself to ask the employee about it.

“I think that helps build more loyalty and more credibility of them liking where they are because they aren’t just a worker bee, but they are part of something,” says the president of the financial services group, which posted 2007 revenue of about $9 million.

Smart Business spoke with Snyder about how to create an honest and open work environment where your employees will want to stay.

Q. How do you show employees you are honest?

It’s what you do. I don’t know if there is a process. I think it’s just in your everyday actions — how you handle yourself and how you handle and work with others. People will pick up whether they think you have those qualities or not.

I think as in any relationship, not just business relationships, you have to have open lines of communication because it isn’t always 100 percent perceived by some people that you are being that. I think if that perception presented itself, that it is essential as a leader that you sit that person down and you have a conversation as to why they may perceive that something is different than what it really is.

Q. How do you know if someone perceives you in the wrong way?

You’ll pick up on a tenseness or an attitude. I just had that happen last week. Someone’s not smiling, someone is dropping their eyes, someone’s walking down the hallway without communicating or saying ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ at night, which is out of their normal, hopefully happy, routine because hopefully people you are around enjoy being around you.

I think it’s up to you to go up to them and say, ‘What’s going on?’ and talk it out. It’s no different in any relationship. I don’t care if you’re talking about marriage or a business relationship, an employee relationship, there will always be times when something gets frayed from an emotional perspective or a lack of perception.

If you don’t talk it out — and I would say it’s very true in marriage, but it’s particularly true in business — then what happens is that the festering starts to become more of a problem. Then it starts getting blown out of proportion and then it starts getting into a lunch conversation, and now you’ve tainted two or three or four people on an issue that wasn’t correct, that was a misperception.