Chad Silverstein builds company culture on trust by hiring for rawness, not polish, and enforcing concrete practices: seven minutes to know colleagues, meetings that end with a curious question, leaders answering anything transparently. He says owning mistakes and closing mixed messages is how you reduce fear.
Chapters
My entire career at my company was trying to build a really cool company culture, a place that I'd want to work in, a place that I'd want my kids to work in. That was always the litmus test. And the only way I knew how to do that based on learning it and build. To lead is to build trust, is to knock down those barriers of fear that every employee has that they come in with from other unhealthy cultures that they've worked at. And I can't tell you how many times I heard people say things like, chad, you don't understand. You don't understand what it's like to work at a place that does X, Y and Z. And I'd always say, I don't really care because that's not what this place is. And if we haven't proven that to you yet, then you shouldn't be here. And it took a long time to have people unlearn what they've learned. That's why we didn't like hiring people with a lot of experience, didn't like hiring people that had corporate experience. I like small private companies and people who could be real and raw and kind of get into the thick of things with you and feel free to fight for performance, not to prove a point. And one of the things that we did is we created lots of disciplines to build the trust we practiced. Hands down. That was the number one thing that we did. We spent time with people, got to know them, played seven good minutes, and got to know people at a deeper level than just what you did on the surface. So again, it was more transformational relationships and not as much as a transactional tit for tat relationship. So one of the disciplines we did was at the end of all of our meetings, we would not end the meeting until people would ask a curious question. And when you do that and you build the discipline, eventually you get some really hard questions. A lot of leaders won't want to kind of stand up there and have the firing squad kind of shoot you because it requires you to be transparent and be real. Because that could backfire if you're not. But I will tell you that if you have the strength and the courage to stand up and answer any question from anyone on your team about anything that you guys are doing, you will earn and command respect because you'll be one of the few that they've ever seen do something like that. And it just became so normal, you know, like, we would just end practice and then our month end meetings, you know, three curious questions. And like we just sat there until people asked curious questions about anything they heard or curious about whether it was part of the meeting or whether it wasn't any. And little by little, we were building trust. We built trust. And it got to the point where, you know, you could come into our meetings, you wouldn't know who the leaders are. And that was powerful. So again, you gotta, you gotta figure out ways individually and collectively to build trust and to open up those lines of communication by being a bit transparent, maybe a little vulnerable, lead first and be the example of what you expect everyone else to do and make sure that you, you kind of close those gaps with any mixed messages or times where, you know, you mess up your communication and you got to own your, your, your mistakes because you're going to make them if you're a leader.
