When Bill Lhota was approached in 2004 to take over the Central Ohio Transit Authority, the organization was in bad financial
shape and needed an ethical overhaul. Lhota says the organization’s former president had experienced “ethical lapses and
resigned in a cloud.” The business community turned to Lhota, a retired 37-year veteran of American Electric Power, who was
teaching ethics and doing labor relations work, to rebuild COTA’s reputation among its customers and its 600-plus employees.
And after Lhota spent two years re-establishing open and honest business relationships, COTA secured additional tax funding
through a ballot initiative in November 2006. That same year, it reported $84 million in revenue. Smart Business spoke with Lhota
about managing with integrity.
Make inclusion a priority. I firmly believe that
everybody in an organization has to be part
of the success of the organization. I abhor
silos; I’ve learned that from experience
over the years.
In siloed organizations, the silos become
insular and you get conflict. One employee
tries to blame the other, and nobody takes
ownership. I want everybody to be part of
the team.
I believe in communication, communication, communication. I do a lot of walking
around and talking to employees from the
bottom to the top. In addition to staff meetings, we have a weekly COTA update. We
limit it to two pages and the most important things so that people will take the time
to read it.
Nurture your employees. Any CEO has a
responsibility to develop future talent at all
levels so that there’s good talent to grow
the organization and provide for retirements and attrition. We focus very heavily
on training and development.
Even in the midst of our severe financial
problems, we created a training and development position because success is really
dependent upon having a highly trained
work force.
Find your vision. A leader’s got to be able to
see the future and paint a picture of what
he wants his organization to be two, three
and five years in the future, and then work
with the employees. No one person can do
it all to achieve that vision and to accomplish it. Vision is something that you want
to achieve down the line, and there are a lot
of tactical programs that need to be instituted.
Ask for advice. We developed a comprehensive ethics policy that went way beyond
anything that anybody else did and way
beyond what is required by Ohio law. We
went to the private business community
and asked for their help in lending us
experts to come in and look at everything
we did.
We got 22 quality business leaders to come into our organization for several
months and work with us to look at everything we did. We had over 100 recommendations, and I’m pleased to say we’ve
implemented most of those recommendations. We did everything in the public
domain so the community knew what we
were doing.
Be a role model. Any initiative involving
ethics has to start at the top and work
down. You’ve got to walk the talk. People
are watching how the CEO and the senior
leadership are conducting themselves from
an ethical standpoint.
You need a good ethics policy and a comprehensive ethics program so that people
in the organization know what’s expected
of them and what the consequences are if
they don’t follow the ethics policy.
Another key part of an ethics program is
a mechanism where employees can anonymously report ethical violations. We have
an 800 ethics hotline, conducted by a third-party source, which any employee can call
and register concerns over ethical issues.
They know that it will be treated anonymously, and there will be feedback provided to their concerns.
Share your message. Every employee is provided with a copy of our ethics policy.
When we kicked it off, we had ethics training for all of our employees, and every year,
every employee and our board of directors
have to undergo ethics training. It’s a continuous program; you can’t just do it once.
No question, there’s a cost to ethics training, but there is a much larger cost to damaging your reputation with ethical lapses.
The training dollars on ethics are well
worth the investment.
Focus on customer service. If you don’t have a
customer, you don’t have a business. Like
ethics, you have to make it a priority. The
way we do it, you’ll see our report card to
the community on our Web page. We have
a quarterly update of that report card, and
customer service is one of five items we
measure: on-time delivery, customer service, reliability, safety and finances.
It’s out there where everybody can see it
and can see that we have placed a priority
on it. It’s not only transparent to the customer, but it’s also transparent to the
employees. Employees see that there is an
emphasis on it, and, like inclusion, each
employee plays an important part in making that happen.
Don’t take yourself too seriously. You alone
cannot accomplish a whole lot. You need
people to be successful. I’ve always firmly
believed that you win with people. You
need to treat people in a firm, fair and consistent way, but don’t think that success is
totally yours, nor is failure totally yours.
Give people authority, but hold them accountable. You’ve got to clearly articulate what
the company’s objectives are, what an
employee’s sphere of responsibility is, and
hold him or her accountable for producing.
I don’t mean you just do it on an annual
basis; it’s got to be continuous. When your
employees are doing a good job, you tell
them, and when they are not doing a good
job, you tell them also. When you give them
the latitude to accomplish what needs to
be done, you get a successful company.
HOW TO REACH: Central Ohio Transit Authority, (614) 275-5800 or www.cota.com
