Great expectations

Here are some practices leaders take from their experience in Heritage Leadership Behaviors, behaviors they strive to model in their everyday work, behaviors that you can expect of them and even follow yourself.

BUILD RELATIONSHIPS.

Building relationships based on mutual trust makes everything else possible. Two key elements of strong relationships are trust and vulnerability.

We use the word trust every day at THG — mutual trust is part of our company values. Vulnerability is less common, but vulnerability in relationships is necessary when building trust. It creates a safe environment and allows people to bring their authentic selves to work.

Peter Lux, President, Heritage Interactive Services: I am by nature open, trusting and willing to be vulnerable. I hid vulnerability in professional settings for a long time. With the help of THG’s leadership behaviors work, I’ve learned to be more vulnerable in my career and it’s freeing

Trust is so important in building relationships that the leadership team at Monument Chemical focused their 2022 leadership development efforts on trust as a leader attribute.

Paul Raymond, CEO, Monument Chemical: We found that improving trust allowed us to also improve our ability to give and receive feedback, while also achieving better alignment on key business issues as a team.

SHARE HELPFUL FEEDBACK.

When you’ve built trust with peers, leaders or even friends, it’s easier to share helpful in-the-moment feedback. When you know someone has your best interest at heart, you hear feedback — both positive and negative — with a different perspective. Using that feedback, you recognize how your actions impact others and learn to express yourself in ways that achieve better outcomes.

Kit Peregrine, QC/QA Manager, AMI Operations: Giving constructive negative feedback was very uncomfortable for me, but the techniques I learned in HLB worked very well in practice. Sharing feedback actually strengthened my relationship with the person receiving the feedback.

GET ALIGNED.

With trusting relationships established and feedback as a comfortable way of moving forward, we have a healthy environment for collaboration, alignment and resolving conflict. Bringing conflict about business issues into the open enables us to do our best work, solve problems faster and move forward together. Instead of avoiding the issues and letting tensions rise, we can tackle them in real-time.

Karen Montgomery, Director of HR, East Region, Heritage Environmental Services: Using what I learned in my HLB sessions and knowing what Heritage expects of its leaders, I’ve been able to step outside my comfort zone even with my superiors, speaking up rather than keeping my thoughts to myself. It’s led to good conversations, resolution of issues and greater respect.