Chad Silverstein advises leaders to prioritize positive reinforcement and cultural traditions to build trust and retain employees. Key recommendations include using a 6-to-1 ratio of positive-to-negative feedback, creating recurring traditions (e.g., March internal competitions held for two decades; annual "Penny Wars" fundraising) and publicly storytelling to connect new hires to company history. He emphasizes timely, specific recognition (citing a Gallup finding that people feel unrecognized if not praised within seven days) and that leaders must actively build and repeat these practices to sustain culture.
Chapters
You want to get your ratios right with people that you work with. Six to one, six good things to one bad thing. People don't want to hear from you. Every time you have something bad to hit them over the head with, every time you come up, they're, what now? What did I do now? Build in the discipline to catch people doing things that you want to perpetuate more of in your culture. And then when you have to hit them with something, you know, it's not the only time they've ever heard from you. They're more open to it. They trust you. You know, they value hearing what you have to say because they've heard from you before. And it's not always so negative. Getting your ratios right helps build some of the trust that your team's gonna need to find some chemistry, to find some of that flow. And it also creates traditions. It helps you honor the past, celebrating the wins. Make a big deal out of it. Being able to have some fun with your team. We had something that we did every March, and it was the only month of the year that we were allowed to compete with each other internally. We used to make brackets, and we put people up against each other. We do it for sales, we do it for numbers. We do it for all types of different performance, and we give away cash and just have some fun. And it just went side by side with March Madness. It became a tradition. We did it for two decades, and we had something we did for our community service work, something called Penny Wars. And every team had a big jug and they put pennies in. How much money can you raise? And they got real creative with it. For any silver coins or any dollars that you put in someone else's bucket, it becomes a negative number for them. People were trying to fill up other people's buckets with silver coins, and they were trying to fill up theirs with all the pennies. We raised thousands of dollars for this, and it became an annual tradition. As a leader, it's important that you connect people to your past and become a storyteller so that people can understand what they're part of. You can't expect your company to grow and have all these new people come on and just jump on board and know and assume that they are going to love the company like you love it, or like all your veterans love it. Connect people by telling them stories about where you came from. Share experiences and things that you have encountered with some of the veterans, giving them the, you know, the accolade that they deserve. And some of the Appreciation publicly by telling people their story about what you've seen from them and how they've overcome things. Use them as an example so that other new people can look up to those people and they can build relationships and forge efforts to be able to do more of what you want in your company to be successful. And it's important that you, as a leader, takes responsibility to build that legacy within your company and not get too caught up in your day to day grind. Because you have a day to day grind. You've got problems. If you're a visionary, you're looking out of where we're going. You've got to pivot and you got to see what's going on in your industry with your competitors. It could seem counterproductive to be looking backwards, but you have to remember where you came from and you have to connect people to that. That's how you build traditions. That's how you build a culture. That's how you get people to love your company. You know, you savor those stories. You make sure that you include and engage other people to tell them so that you're not the only one. And you make sure that you find creative ways to celebrate the wins. We used to high five people in our office at the end of our month where we would highlight people for exhibiting the core values that our company had stamped on the walls. And we wanted to perpetuate those core values by recognizing and rewarding people for it. We'd give away bonuses and time off and we'd high five them. We'd come up, we'd give them a plaque. We did all kinds of cool things and we found ways to get people excited about being recognized. Because they say that if you don't recognize people within a seven day period, they feel like they have not been recognized. Which I saw that on a Gallup poll study. And I just can't believe that people feel like they have to be praised every seven days. But that's the reality we live in and that's what you have right now going on in your company. And so whether you have hundreds and thousands of employees or you have a small group of 10, it does not matter. Either you or your managers, your leaders are either praising people and acknowledging legitimate, authentic, specific examples of things that they can highlight, or they're not. And if they're not, people feel undervalued. And if they feel undervalued, guess why they are quietly quitting and they're going to find a place that will value them. That's the world we live in right now. People have less patience today than they've ever had. They have a sense of entitlement like they've never had before. And people have high expectations, just like you have expectations of the people that work for you. So it's important to make sure that you highlight people and praise them for doing good things. More of what you want. Celebrating the wins along the way, honoring your past by creating traditions and telling stories about how you got there. That's what makes a great leader great is they have the ability to rinse and repeat what they do, constantly knowing that sometimes you gotta say things 10,000 times before it sinks in. And a lot of times on the 10,000th time, when it sunk in, you had a new employee just start, and it's their first time, so get used to it.
