Leaders who fail to delegate responsibilities as their business grows will find it hard to maintain momentum, says
Bob Walters, president of Freight Management Inc.
Walters says he learned this valuable lesson more than 20
years ago when he landed two major customers and began to
wonder how he was going to handle the extra workload.
“I quickly realized I needed good managers to watch this or I
could never leave the office,” Walters says. “I could never go
sell another client because I had to sit here and keep running
these clients and managing the staff.”
So Walters brought in new managers and increased his staff
from 12 in the early days to 68 employees in his Anaheim office
today, with 110 employees across the nation. Revenue rose from
$22.6 million in 2005 to $25.1 million in 2006.
Smart Business spoke with Walters about the importance of
delegating responsibility to allow for continuing growth.
Q: How do you identify leaders in your company?
Leadership entails having em-pathy for others and to not be
fearful of making decisions. If I or the managers of a department are gone and a decision has to be made, we encourage
the people, even at the low level, to make a decision.
They don’t always have to be right, but those who are willing
to do that and take that risk are generally the right kind of people for leadership roles. If they are not a risk-taker and they are
not a decision-maker for even minor things, then there’s no
way they can manage other people.
You can refine it and groom it, but they either have the spark
of leadership or they don’t. As a leader, you’ve got to be able to
motivate people and have the fire in your belly to succeed.
Q: What is an important skill all CEOs must learn?
You have to delegate to your managers under you. If I tried
to manage all 68 people, I would fail. I deal with six managers.
It’s nice to meet and get to see the staff down below but day
to day, I work with the six managers that I supervise.
If you are a strong, aggressive person, you tend not to want
to trust anybody around you. I still suffer from that but I delegate, and then find if I have good follow-up or reporting, I
can tell very quickly if what I delegated is getting done without having to go out and do it.
It was a little hard at first, and even today, I still check in
two or three times a day to see how everything is going. But
I don’t worry beyond that, that things are not functioning and
operating. I do read my e-mails once a day, which allows me
to see if any customer is announcing a serious problem that
is getting out of control.
Q: How does a CEO get a read on his employees?
I still walk throughout the building every day and visit periodically with every employee in the building at least once a
month and inquire how they are doing. Sometimes you can
learn a lot about the health of your business by talking to the
troops rather than the managers.
Sometimes, if there is something not quite operating the
right way, employees are reluctant to tell their immediate
supervisor. Or the immediate supervisor is reluctant to tell
me. It’s the same style we use in working with our clients. We
can’t tell them what to do, but we do work as a team to help
them see the right vision and have the tools to make the right
decisions, and then we implement those decisions.
Q: How do you deal with stress?
Anybody who runs a business, we all tend to be a little
intense and very focused on what we do. So it’s easy for us to
get running down the street too fast and be too focused on one
approach, when, in fact, there could be a fatal flaw in that
approach.
Some managers and presidents get so demoralized when
something fails, they begin to lose their way. They lose their
faith in themselves and their trust in their judgment. That’s
dangerous. That is the beginning of the end for running a business.
Talk it out with your few trusted souls that might be with you
in the business or your wife or somebody you can talk to.
Keep links open. Talk privately and intimately with others to
bounce off your thoughts and your ideas.
You need to talk things out with other people and get yourself
back off the ropes and your spirits back up.
HOW TO REACH: Freight Management Inc., (714) 632-1440 or www.freightmgmtinc.com