SecondCityCEO by Seth Kravitz

This is the first part of a series of posts I will be doing to talk about my experiences with InsuranceAgents.com and watching it grow from a 3 person start-up to the successful 40+ person company it is today.

My style of management is far from ideal. I have certainly made a ton of mistakes and my entire life with this company has been a giant learning experience from day one through now. However, my partner Lev and I can see several critical aspects of how we have managed day to day operations that helped the company succeed.

The first thing that came to mind when I thought about why InsuranceAgents.com has functioned even through the toughest of times, was our ability to always be candid with each other.

InsuranceAgents.com started off in a basement and grew by hiring young aggressive college students who had a desire to be part of the start-up environment. This  translated into a rather atypical business environment where bureaucratic management techniques didn’t exist. You could throw all of your business management books out the window, since none of the principles were in place with us.

What we had instead was an environment where we felt like more of a group of friends that happened to work together. Rather than teams of employees chasing paychecks and hoping for promotions like many companies. The result, to this day, is an environment that blurs the lines between executives, managers, sales, marketing, customer support, full-timers, part-timers, etc… While there is an informal chain of command, people feel comfortable being candid and open with each other without worrying about repercussions.

Beyond this, candid also means being open to all viewpoints. While it can be uncomfortable sometimes, our company culture has always encouraged people to not “candy coat” their opinions and to be frank and honest with how they are feeling. This may sound crazy to many managers or executives out there, but an employee can approach Lev or I and tell us that they are not happy with our job performance and our reaction will simply be to have them explain why they feel that way.

From previous jobs I have had, I would cringe at the thought of how awful it would be to tell one of my bosses what I truly thought of them. Looking back I certainly would have been fired or had my hours cut for doing something like that. However, I feel its critical that employees be able to communicate as honestly as possible with managers.

Being candid must also apply from the top down as well. I think employees deserve to know the state of the company in real world terms, not watered down business jargon. Telling everyone the company is “proceeding along a path of sustained growth with new opportunities on the horizon” is the same thing as saying “the management doesn’t care at all about your opinion, so we are going to give you bland business jargon that contains no useful information for you”. Management must communicate in terms everyone can understand and relate to, so everyone can be on the same page.

Having all the knowledge of the business operations held in the hands of a few while everyone else is kept in the dark is a recipe for disaster. Just look to companies like Amazon or Zappos to see how well open communication works and look to companies like Enron to see what happens when people share nothing with each other, kill dissent and open communication, and management holds all the information solely for themselves.

Candid also means providing useful information. Watering down the numbers or telling the boss that things are on schedule when they are actually behind is not being candid. You aren’t providing honest or useful information in that conversation. To walk away from a meeting or conversation with information you can actually use requires both parties to be open and candid.

At the end of the day, all that really matters in a company is communication. Nothing can get done when people don’t communicate to each other. However, nothing great can be achieved when people aren’t candid when they communicate.