Mel Payne freely admits that he is the CMM, or chief mistake maker, at Carriage Services Inc. By being honest about the fact that that he
is no closer to perfection than any of his 2,000 employees, Payne believes he fosters a culture in which employees are willing to take
risks, learn from their mistakes and help the provider of funeral and cemetery services grow in the process. Carriage Services posted
2006 revenue of $151.1 million and is estimating growth of 7 percent to 9 percent in the years ahead. Smart Business spoke with Payne
about the importance of making a connection with your employees and why sometimes you just have to dive off the cliff.
Get to know your team. If you can relate to
them on a human level as a person, they
are more likely to connect with you and
the goals of the company. It makes them
feel important as a person. I had a new
assistant here one time. She said, ‘Mr.
Payne, I’ve worked for CEOs and chairmen before, and I need to know how to
manage your calendar and the calls.’
I said, ‘Here’s the deal. Everybody calls
me Mel, and the most important calls I
will get are the managers of our businesses across America. If one of them
calls, you get me no matter where I am,
no matter who I’m talking to. You come
get me.’
They would not be calling me if it wasn’t important. They will call me. I will
call them. They need to be comfortable
that I’m Mel, and I’m a person, and I
want to help them be successful.
Keep chasing excellence. It’s a continuous
thing. You have to get up every day and
work on this little thing, and the next day
work on something else until you get it
right.
We define being the best as not related
to somebody else. It’s more like playing a
golf course. How good can we be, and
what is being the best? How do we
define it culturally? How do we define it
performancewise? We realize we’re
probably in about the second or third
inning. There’s a lot of innings to play,
and we’ll probably never be finished.
If you believe in it, just do it. In late 2003, we
switched from a budget-and-control
model. We just threw it in the trash bin
and invented a new operating model that
was based on standards. It led to a complete transformation of our company in
2006.
It was not easy. You’re headed off down
a path that people just don’t take
because it’s different.
It takes longer than you think, and
being a public company, it led to some
underperformance that didn’t get addressed properly because we didn’t have
the corporate leadership in place to do
that.
We could have been more cautious. We
could have spent a lot more time trying
to do analysis and brought in consultants. We didn’t do any of that. You just
have to dive off the cliff. You just have to
go for it and just drive it every day.
There will be resisters. You have to figure out who they are and sweep them
out of the way. Change and transformation require a lot of energy and energizing and edge. I probably let some people
on the corporate leadership side stay too
long. I gave them more time to make
their adjustments, and they just didn’t.
If you have a vision on something and
you want your company to move from
mediocrity to something more, change and
transformation are absolutely necessary.
Give your employees feedback. Be honest and
straightforward. Use appraisals to help
people do better on their jobs.
If someone is not performing up to our
high standards, they will never know
unless you tell them. If you don’t have a
habit of doing that, you are not being fair
to them, and you are not being fair to the
business.
They can’t read your mind and know
what they should be doing. Tell them
what they should be doing and explain it.
Set clear goals. We publish monthly league
tables, showing the top in the company
to the bottom. That’s where the peer pressure kicks in. Everybody knows
who is the best and who is the worst,
and wants to get off the bottom.
It’s based on the standards. We calculate the standards monthly. It’s very
healthy for the best talent. This takes
someone with a competitive, winning
spirit. If they don’t have that, they can’t
grow this business. For someone with a
competitive, winning spirit, they thrive
on trying to move up the league tables.
Empower your people. Surround yourself
with talent and empower them. Coach
them. Communication skills in a CEO
are critical. I tell them what the goals
are, and then let them go do it.
I spend a lot of time on goals, strategies
and coaching all during the year but
especially at the end of the year. I do
detailed appraisals and sometimes I do
interim appraisals in writing. I give a lot
of data and examples of behavior and
results that are expected, and similarly,
what isn’t expected.
I just have to constantly make sure
there is an alignment of our leadership
with the culture and the mission and the
vision.
Don’t just look at the resume. We try to focus
on what we see as potential weaknesses.
It’s a waste of time to talk about what is
obviously a strength. We want to focus
on what are the potential weaknesses
and what are the potential reasons why
this person won’t be a fit or be successful in this role.
When we do the reference checks, we
ask them about those weaknesses, and
we don’t leave quickly if the answer is
not real specific and acceptable. People
don’t like to say something negative
about a reference. If they won’t talk to
you much about it, we view that as a negative.
Hiring the right people is a very disciplined, patient process. You have to do a
lot of work to get it right or minimize the
chance that you’ll get it wrong.
HOW TO REACH: Carriage Services Inc., (713) 332-8450 or
www.carriageservices.com
