Q. How does your background as a police officer help you as a C.E.O.?

A. When you’re a police officer and you walk into a situation, you’re in charge.  If you’re not in charge, you’re not going to live, or somebody’s going to get hurt, or something is going to happen. You have to take control. You have to manage the situation instantly.

You’ve got to assess the situation and make the right determination quickly. You learn how to read people instantly, figure out how to manage every aspect of the situation and prioritize. That’s the best M.B.A. I think anybody could ever get. 

I’ve done some undercover work, too, and I’ve done raids. The people going in with you need to trust you, and I need to trust them. That’s one of the first things I learned. Who can you trust, and why can you trust them? Who’s got my back? They don’t have to like you, but if you’re the person going through the door, that person needs to do what you say. They’re going to respect you, because you don’t have trust without respect. I would never exchange that life lesson for anything.

Q. After attending law school, you transitioned into business. Tell me about your leadership approach now.

A. I firmly believe that the No. 1 job I have is to set the culture of the company.  That’s going to drive success. That’s going to drive integrity. That’s going to drive everything about the company. Early on, I started trying to think, how could I create that trust? I’ve got offices in 32 states, and I’m spread from Hawaii to Arkansas to Texas to Maine.  Our all-employee calls are great, but I’m just a voice on a call.

Then a couple of things happened. One was I bought a motorcycle. It wasn’t a midlife crisis. I have a brother who’s three years older than me. Over a period of about three years, he had seven heart attacks. I walked into his hospital room after he was recovering from one of them and said, “What do you want out of life?” 

I came back the next day and he said: “I thought about that all night long. I want to get a motorcycle and ride Route 66.” I said, “Done.” I bought the biggest one I could, a Harley Ultra Classic, law enforcement blue. 

Around that time, we were organizing a big company conference with all of our general managers. So I had 200 employees in Oklahoma City for a marketing conference and I thought, I’ve got this brand new motorcycle. It’s about a six-hour drive from our headquarters near Kansas City. I decided to ride the motorcycle to the conference.

So I pull up and I’ve got all my leathers on. I walk in carrying my helmet and everybody’s dumbfounded. I became the buzz of the conference. The next thing I know, everybody’s out looking at my bike. I had so many fingerprints on it because the employees were just swarming this bike. They thought it was the coolest thing. 

I started riding it to our offices in different states. I’d take everyone to dinner, and they would ask me why I bought the motorcycle, and then we would start talking casually about the company. I thought, “Wow, this is a very comfortable, easy setting.” I started getting phone calls from my general managers in different cities, saying:  “We want you to come visit us on the motorcycle. The employees think this is really cool.” 

So I came up with this concept of “Ask the C.E.O.” I would show up and tell the employees, “Ask me anything you want to ask me.” They were asking me all sorts of personal questions, and it kind of got everybody’s guard down, so they felt more comfortable.

I had expected people to ask me about our five-year strategy. But I started getting questions like: “Where did you go to school?” “Why did you get into law enforcement?” “Why did you leave law enforcement?” “How many kids do you have?” I’m on Facebook a lot, too. So people would say: “I see that you like to wear pink shirts when you play golf. Why?”

I would say, especially early on, 80 percent of the questions were personal and 20 percent were about business.

Q. Why do you think that is?

A. They want to trust the leadership. They want to trust that you’re making the right decisions. And it’s not so much whether you’re making the right decisions as far as strategy. It’s more, can they trust you to come up with the strategy, and to make the right decisions when issues come before you? They want to know the person. They want to trust the person. That was interesting. That really did change my entire perspective. 

Q. What is it about the motorcycle?

A. They know I’m coming from corporate and I’m there to answer questions. When I show up on a motorcycle, a lot of it becomes about the trip, and there’s just something about a motorcycle. There is a rebel aspect. And they can also track me because I have a GPS device on my bike. They know I’m riding to them. 

So they see me in a different light. They see me as human — and not trying to be one of them, and not trying to be something I’m not. That is where I think most managers and leaders struggle. How do you get to the point where they perceive you as human? They want to understand how you think, how you tick. It goes back to the trust thing. 

The one thing I tell C.E.O.s when I meet them is, how do you know your employees trust you? Your employees have to trust you. I never ask them, “Do they trust you?” I’ll say,  “How do you know?” Because if you don’t, you won’t be successful.  More times than not, they say, “I don’t know.” It makes them think.

If you want your employees to follow you, if you want the team to go the right way, they want to trust you’re making the right decisions. But why do they trust you? Because of these visits on my motorcycle, I started to understand what was really going on. They want to understand my thought process, and they want to understand basically the core of who I am. That’s why most of the questions are about my family and about my history.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/business/harry-herington-of-nic-on-building-trust-in-leaders.html?partner=rss&emc=rss