No FEAR

Smart Business Broward/Palm Beach, Apr 2008 by Scott, Mark

Steve Klingel had no idea just how much buzz he could create in his company simply by wearing a pair of jeans to the office. While casual Friday had been around for nearly two years, Klingel, the president and CEO, had never actually joined in the ritual carried out by many of his employees at NCCI Holdings Inc.

"I got to work and 20 minutes later, my New York office head calls me and says, 'Hey, I heard,' and I said, 'What?' He said, It's all abuzz up here. You're wearing jeans today.' It's amazing how the behavior and the way a CEO presents himself gets around, for good or bad."

Fortunately for Klingel, his influence on the operations at NCCI and the 1,000 employees he leads stretches beyond fashion.

As the nation's oldest and largest provider of statistics and employee injury data for workers' compensation insurance, NCCI handles about 4.2 million unit statistical reports and 2.6 million policies each year.

The sheer volume of data that is processed could easily lead to a fear of mistakes. So Klingel decided the best way to ease such fears was to purposely put himself front and center, this time as an employee who has been far from perfect in his professional career.

It was at a meeting with about 175 company managers held at a local hotel. "I dragged a stool up on stage, and I sat down, and I started talking about my views on leadership, and I also talked about my own personal evolution in management," Klingel says. "I made a point of listing three to five significant errors I made as a manager and what I learned from that. My point was No. 1, CEOs make mistakes, too, and No. 2, you can learn from them. We're not running an organization where it's an absolute failure to make a mistake."

Just as he inadvertently got people talking by wearing jeans, Klingel made a clear impression by admitting that he has made mistakes in his career.

"Good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from poor judgment," Klingel says. "You have to have room to make mistakes if you're ever going to learn how to do things best. That was my point to the employees: Hey, I've made my share of blunders, some of them big and some of them small, but I learned from them. We have to have an organization where we allow people to try things and to stretch themselves and to make an error and learn from it."

Klingel says a big reason why the $140 million company has succeeded is its ability to maintain a culture in which employees feel that their work truly matters and that their voices will be heard by the company's leadership.

Here's how he did it.

Give them the chance

Delegation is critical to getting employees both engaged in your plan and active in its execution.

"If I can truly give people the responsibility and authority - whatever that particular assignment is - to truly own it, they will buy in to the culture and the mission and the direction of the company," Klingel says.

"It's the difference of giving someone an assignment and saying, 'I want you to do this, and here are the 37 steps you need to go through exactly to do it right,' or giving them the assignment and saying, 'Here it is. Figure out what you think is the best way to get this done and feel free to come to me anytime if you're wrestling with it or struggling with it.' Giving them the chance to figure it out is as much a key to getting them to buy in to the vision of the company as anything I can think of."

If you expect your employees to feel empowered and driven to succeed, you must support their development by being open to fielding their questions rather than only issuing directives or being secretive.

"I have always been direct in answering a question," Klingel says. "Sometimes, it's a great question, but it's not appropriate for me to give you an answer on who I'm thinking about for the next senior staff promotion. I tell them I can't tell them and I tell them why.

"It's going back to that cultural aspect of how I behave. Do I discuss things openly with employees? Do they ever have a reason to feel that something is going on and I am not conveying to them what's going on or that I'm hiding something? That's dangerous."

You must also be willing to accept, within certain boundaries, the way the person you delegate chooses to complete the task if they are to truly grow in your organization.

"Most of us became managers the first time because we tended to be great individual contributors," Klingel says. "We got our work done so well, and we're known as being really good at it, and suddenly, we're a manager. Now, the job isn't about getting my own work done anymore or doing it myself. Now, it's all about motivating others to get the work done. That is the essence of delegation.

"I know this particular task, and if I did it myself, I could do it faster and better. But the job of a manager is to coach others to build those skills and to accept their work as long as it is adequately done. The job isn't to make sure all the output from your department is as good as it possibly could be if you did it all yourself. True delegation is being willing to appropriately accept the performance of others instead of thinking, 'How does it match up to myself?"'