Denise Christy has a special formula for building a sense of
teamwork among her senior managers. It’s centered on two main
ingredients that form the backbone of her weekly interaction
with her direct reports: eggs and coffee.
Each Friday morning, Christy and her seven-member managerial team at Humana Michigan meet at an area restaurant for
breakfast. The team talks about in-house items of business, customer matters and trends in the local economy that might affect
the $332 million Michigan branch of nationwide health insurer
Humana Inc.
Christy, the president of Humana Michigan since 2003, says the
breakfasts started as an attempt to stop a growing negative trend
in her business. Her managers were becoming so wrapped up in
running the business, they weren’t finding opportunities to connect with one another.
“I found I wasn’t getting enough downtime to speak with my
direct reports, so we started to have breakfast with each other
every Friday morning at 7:30,” Christy says. “We go to a little café,
and it’s not a staff meeting, it’s just a cup of coffee and some eggs.
We’ll tell each other what is going on in the marketplace; what are
you hearing on the streets, what is going on with your customers?
It’s an opportunity for the whole team to have a chance to dialogue
about the business.”
Those breakfasts, she says, have done more for developing
unity and camaraderie than any formal meeting she could ever
hold.
There is still a time and place for formal meetings with an agenda, but Christy says any good business leader will never underestimate the power of casual banter over coffee and food. It is
one of the most effective ways to not only allow employees to
share ideas with each other but to also strengthen the personal
relationships that will allow them to comfortably work together.
At Humana Michigan, Christy tries to make everyone feel like
they are a contributing member of the team. She says a team-oriented environment isn’t something you can control from the
head office. You must cultivate teamwork by getting out among
your employees and setting the example.
Encourage collaboration
If you try to do too much by yourself, Christy says you’ll quickly learn the importance of a group approach in business. She
learned that lesson the hard way when she once tried to shoulder an entire project on her own.
“I had one of the hardest, most humbling experiences when I
tried to do this huge project on my own,” she says. “It clearly wasn’t the success it could have been had I brought my colleagues and
others in the organization on board earlier and made them a part
of the process.”
It gave Christy a new perspective on the old phrase, “No person is an island.” After that experience, she made it a point to
place an emphasis on collaboration. The only way to emphasize
collaboration is to communicate the need to collaborate to
everyone in the company, and do it repeatedly.
Christy says the key to getting employees to buy in to a collaborative environment is to show each person that his or her contribution makes a difference to the entire company. That means you need to be able to take the wide-scope goals of the organization
and drive them down to the individual level.
“You need to be able to personalize it,” she says. “Make sure people understand how important they are to accomplishing our goals
and that you see what they’re bringing to the table personally.”
Though it’s time-consuming, Christy drives her message of team
unity down to the lowest levels of the company with in-person
engagement of her employees. If you put people first, chances are
your employees will put people first.
Christy meets with her management team once a week over
breakfast, and while that’s an important aspect to her weekly casual communication, it’s only the beginning. She says you can’t just
stop with your direct reports; everyone else in the company needs
to see you and interact with you on some level.
Christy has quarterly all-company meetings in which she brings
together virtually the entire Michigan wing of Humana and makes
herself open to questions. But she says some of the most effective
engagement can happen on a much smaller scale.
“There are regular staff meetings and ongoing chain-of-command
communication,” Christy says. “But then there are more simple
forms of engagement, like gathering around someone’s birthday
cake. It’s that personal inclusion and being a part of a team that is so
important, and everybody sees that and is supporting each other. A
lot of fun and camaraderie happens in that type of communication,
and that’s important.”
Putting aside the persistent waves of e-mails and paperwork in
order to speak with employees requires discipline on your part,
but she says it comes back to setting the right example.
“Sometimes, you just have to put it aside,” she says. “People
might walk into my office, and I can tell that they want to talk. I
might be responding to something, but when I sense they need to
talk, I shut down the e-mail, turn around, sit down and grab a cup
of coffee.
“As a leader, you have to be tuned in to that. The most important
thing as a leader is to be about not your agenda but your team’s
agenda. Ultimately, that’s the real work that needs to get done.
What you need to find out is what they need from you so they can
do their work more effectively. Sometimes, it’s just 20 minutes
with you to get you up to speed, share a problem or get your
thoughts on something. The most important thing a leader can do
is be present for that person, really listen to them and give them
what support you can.”
Explain the big picture
Companies from coast to coast have spent untold gallons of ink
printing company newsletters in which executives wax poetic
about the virtues of teamwork and unity.
Newsletters and companywide e-mails are a great way to disseminate information to many people in a short amount of time.
But Christy says there is no substitute for the example that a few
well-placed people can set. If you can get even a few people to buy
in to the message you are trying to communicate, it increases the
odds that others will buy in, as well.
Once again, it goes back to the example you set. If you demonstrate and ask for the right things from your employees, she says
they will usually give you what you are looking for in return.
At Humana, Christy wants her team members to always consider
the broader picture of the state of health care in Michigan when
making big-picture decisions. To gain that perspective, she asks
that her managers serve on area nonprofit boards.
“I have a different approach from a leadership perspective,” she
says. “I don’t think it’s about just coming to work every day. I think
we have to be connected to the community.
“My giving policy is that if there is a nonprofit that needs financial support, I don’t necessarily give that underwriting support
unless someone on my team is involved in that organization. The
money has to go with the talent and the people so there is a deeper connection. I want my associates to be connected to the community, to understand the broader issues in Michigan, not just
what is happening within our industry.”
Putting your employees in a position to gain a new perspective
on how their work affects the larger picture in both the company
and the community is a great enabler. Christy says it not only fosters a collaborative mindset, it also allows many employees to feel
empowered to start team-based initiatives of their own. When you
have people who feel enabled to take charge, they will find other
people who have the same teamwork values, and a positive snowball effect can begin in your company.
“Many people spend so much time focusing on their day-to-day
activities, they don’t see how it relates to the community at
large,” she says. “With putting that policy in place, that emboldens them because they actually go to nonprofits, they get positions on boards, and they have their company’s support behind
them. It really widens their eyes, and they start to hire talent and
find resources that connect with similar values.”
Be persistent
If you have the communication culture and people to support a
team-oriented environment, your job still isn’t done. You need to
keep hammering away at the same messages and demonstrate the
same accessibility that got you to where you are.
Christy says slacking off on your message once you’ve had a
measure of success is possibly the worst thing you can do as a
leader. Not only will weeds grow under your best-laid plans for
teamwork, your employees will lose confidence in your ability to
follow through on your messages.
She says it’s especially important when you are introducing
new ideas or procedures to your team or if you are new to the
job.
“You’re not going to go in and win the business fast,” Christy says.
“It’s not a quick hit. Persistence is everything. It’s about everybody
being consistent on their messages and staying true to their journey. Ultimately, long-term success is nothing more than building
on previous successes and learning from failures you might have
had. If you can keep everyone on the same page and learning from
their mistakes, you become a better company.”
Getting a culture of collaboration to take root is a process of
repeated teaching and learning every year. The best employees will
open themselves to learn from their mistakes and will realize that
just because they might have had some success, it doesn’t mean
they have all the answers. Christy says underlying it all is a constant focus on the core values of your company.
“The success comes from the fact that the employees who will
make you successful have learned from that journey, that they
have understood that underlying it all is our mission, our journey, and as long as I stay true to that course of action, I can get
creative, be innovative and allow us to have a long-term impact
in the marketplace,” she says.
“One of my favorite customers is a Japanese-owned company.
Through them, I’ve learned so much about this notion of Kaizen,
the idea of learning from our mistakes, using them as that teachable moment — to be able to gain insight from it. If a mistake happens once, that is a learning opportunity. If it is repeated, there
might be a deeper problem that we need to change. But the first
place you go is to learn from the opportunity. That is a principle
that serves every company well if they adopt it, and it starts with
you sharing mistakes openly, being humble and learning. If you can
do that, it takes the fear away.”
HOW TO REACH: Humana Michigan, www.humana.com
