In this podcast, Kevin Hancock speaks with Keep It Local Maine hosts Kimberly and Todd Regoulinsky about his shared leadership philosophy and creating an employee-centric business model for Hancock Lumber. He shares the journey that brought him to this understanding and how important he feels investing in your employees is for the business and for the employee. He has created a culture where the leadership responsibilities are shared among everyone, meaning that solutions are coming from the people working inside the situations and not just upper management. Kevin can see the confidence that it helps build when everyone’s voice is respected, heard, and valued.
Click here to listen to the full podcast.
Here are a few highlights from the podcast (click here for the full transcription):
- But essentially what happened was I had to quite quickly come up with a new approach to leading that involved not talking very much. And that led me down a simple trail at that point. If you’re not going to talk a lot, you’re going to listen a lot. And so I really ended up kind of flipping my approach leadership, from talking to listening, and from being on that stage, to sharing the stage. (04:06-04:40)
- It’s about leaders or managers actually doing less, not more. And really focusing more on the culture of the organization. And creating a platform for a truth that authenticity to surface. Because you know, you think about it. In any organization, if people feel safe, safe to just be their authentic selves, say what they think, be who they are, be at peace as they are, just think about how transformational that one template can be. It really changes everything. (07:02-07:46)
- Like our performance as a company has improved pretty dramatically in the year following this approach. But that’s, to me, the outcome of something bigger and more important. Which is really just celebrating – I mean, I don’t want to overdo it – but humanity. The sacredness of each person honoring everybody as they are. It’s actually kind of getting back to a simpler approach. And when you just honor everybody as they are and don’t feel like you have to fix, control, change, regulate, direct everybody, think about how much easier life gets. (11:27-12:14)
