Chad Silverstein built trust in his company through daily rituals: morning walks through the office, handwritten letters sent to employees' families in April, and regular one-on-ones. He reads body language, invests in leadership development, and creates traditions that emotionally connect people to the work.
Questions this video answers
About a half hour every morning.
April.
Chapters
So I had a lot of disciplines and I had a lot of daily habits that I used to do as I grew my company. One of them was I used to walk around my office every single morning and say good morning to everybody. It was a discipline that I started early on. I was the first one in my office. When people come in, I'd already be working and I would get up and we'd take a walk around my office. And as we grew the office, this got to be hard and it took a lot of time. Towards the end of my time with my company that I sold, I was probably spending about a half hour every morning walking around saying good morning to everybody. I wasn't connecting deeply with people. Occasionally I'd stop in with one person if they stop me or if I stop. It was just my daily touch to make sure that everybody knew that I knew you were there. And I don't know, I just. I always thought it was important and I never realized how much of an impact it was making until I would hear people talk about it years later where they always would say how big of a deal it was. And to me, it was just my daily discipline. I would just do it. But it made an impact on people. And I had lots of those kind of things. One of my favorite ones was in the month of April. I had asked a bunch of my employees who the most important person in their life is. And I wrote a letter, handwritten to that person, sharing how much my employee meant to me and how much they meant to the company. And I sent it to their loved one. And again, it was those little nuances, it was those little disciplines, the things that really helped build trust, showed them that I cared. You know, you just, you can't fake that. You either do that as a leader, you either make those disciplines and habits part of your, you know, your being of a leader, or you don't. And if you don't, you're busy and you're non stop and you're looking at numbers all day and you're constantly trying to grow your company, focus on the business. And I can say that's wrong, but it's hard to emotionally connect with the team and get your culture to be what you want to become, which will increase the performance by not connecting with people. So I had lots of disciplines, whether it was handwritten notes, whether it was, you know, having one on ones with people checking in. Especially when I saw something, maybe I'd read someone's body language, I could tell something was wrong. They'd start closing their doors more. I would check in and I would connect with people. That was a lot of my habits and disciplines were around connecting and building relationships with people. I also heavily invested in everybody and in myself with, you know, leadership development opportunities, and I would include them. So whenever I learned new things, I would always share that with whoever wanted to listen. And, you know, I think not everybody wanted to listen to it. So I didn't share it with everybody. But the ones who came in and asked questions, they gave me a green light to share. So I really built into people a lot. I sat with people when they first came in and shared, you know, the history about our company. I connected people to our traditions. All these things are all nuances that I think leaders will benefit from kind of building into their their way of being a leader and trying to build culture at their company.
