When your kids bring home papers from school, you proudly display them on the fridge. That’s the idea at Hobsons EMT, where Managing Director Sasha Peterson sends letters to high-achieving employees.
As the company grows, he keeps it personal with his 180 employees.
“The key is trying to have as close a pulse as you can, which I’ll readily admit will become harder and harder as we get bigger,” Peterson says. “That’s not easy, but it’s possible to make sure you talk to everybody during the course of the year.”
In 2007, Peterson took over the Enrollment Management Technology division, which accounts for about $45 million of Hobsons’ revenue by providing customized database management packages to help universities manage retention. He’s already had to adapt to the growth.
“If people believe in what you’re trying to do more broadly, then hopefully — as long as they know why you’re making those decisions along the way — change shouldn’t be a scary thing,” he says.
Smart Business spoke to Peterson about staying in touch with your employees.
Communicate goals. The critical job of any leader is to convey broad directionality and make sure that the themes that you’re trying to focus on are understood very thoroughly and deeply by everybody that’s working for you. It’s a constant refinement. It’s trying to distill a very broad vision into a couple of immediately actionable goals.
As far as how I distill that, the biggest challenge I’ve given myself is to be as transparent as possible. On a weekly basis, whatever office I’m in, I have a small lunch with people. I open up with just five minutes of stuff that I’m thinking about and working on and then the rest of it is pretty open. Sometimes it’s work-related; sometimes it’s very personal — but either way it’s a win. If it’s work related, it’s a lot easier to ask questions in a small group. And if it’s personal, it just helps build that rapport where people will feel more comfortable to come ask you questions along the way.
On a monthly basis, I do a companywide lunch meeting we’ve creatively named Snacking with Sasha because on the West Coast it’s breakfast. Continue to have that rolling dialogue with people, you know, ‘Here’s what we’re hoping to do next month,’ and then, ‘Here’s how we did on that.’ Continually keep people updated and continually trickle down that information.
Then on a semiannual basis I have a companywide in-person meeting with everybody that outlines the broader objectives. So the monthly ones are pretty operational; the semiannual ones are a little bit more aspirational. Tons of communication and as much transparency as possible are the key drivers of making sure that people are aligned to the same goals.
