If your leaders are not on board with your vision of creating a great workplace built on trust and respect, it is time to clean house.
Because the qualities of trust and respect are foundational elements of a great workplace, your leaders must adopt and model these qualities.
The initial reaction for many CEO’s will be to retain leaders with excellent technical skills who may or may not possess positive people skills. This is a very bad idea for effective culture formation. It is good to give these supervisors a chance to change and buy-in to your leadership model. However, a timeline and company assistance should be attached to your people skills expectation.
As the CEO of your organization, you are responsible for leaders treating employees well. Supervisors with high technical/low people skills will either need to be given a chance to adopt the trust and respect model or be moved to a non-supervisory role. If the non-supervisory role does not work, you should kindly and respectfully part ways with the supervisor.
Speaking of parting ways, be sure to treat the supervisor well during their departure. Employees will be watching to see how departing employees are treated by your company. Roughing-up your departing supervisor is not a positive company’s practice.
