In part 2 of our interview with Colony Bank and its CEO Heath Fountain we explore intentional leadership practices that effectively communicate strategic priorities to a dispersed workforce. With 40+ offices across the state, Colony Bank implements these practices daily.
Implementing Intentional Leadership Across a Dispersed Workforce
I feel like it’s important to be able to describe our culture down to a single page. We have a document we call the Colony Manifesto. It walks a team member, a customer, or a prospective team member through what we’re about at Colony, why we’re here, what we’re trying to achieve as an organization, how we behave collectively, what our culture is all about.
We also communicate our financial goals through that document. We communicate our strategic priorities each quarter. What are the three most important things for the quarter? And then we follow up next quarter. How did we do on those three strategic priorities? And what are our big three for the following quarter?
It’s really an important part of our culture, our communication, to talk to our team about what we’re doing and who we are as a company.
On that document, we also talk about how we support the communities that we serve. We talk about why financial literacy is important, how we give employment opportunities through our associate program, through our internship program. We talk about Colony Leadership Academy and the giving of our financial resources.
The Colony Manifesto is a thorough one-page front and back of who we are at Colony. I found that to be really useful to try to give somebody a head start on how we do things at Colony.
On daily basis, we implement cascading communication throughout the organization. It’s really important to us. You must be really focused on it and really think about your constituents and think about how you spread information across the company. You’ve got to do it in multiple ways. I’m known to say that…
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