Bill Adams has found that one of the best ways to determine whether a risk is worth taking is to figure out the worst thing that could
happen if things don’t go as planned. If the worst-case scenario is deemed manageable, the risk is probably worth considering.
That philosophy, along with a culture of communication and collaboration, has helped take Trussway Ltd., a manufacturer of
structural building products, to $194 million in sales in 2006 and an expected $222 million in 2007 with more than 1,300
employees. Smart Business spoke with the president and CEO about how to use everyone’s strengths to help grow your company.
Check your ego. You want to be a good CEO?
Get the heck out of your people’s way and
let them do their jobs. I have a respect for
the people doing the job that they know
more about their job than I do because
they do it every day.
A production manager on a floor knows
10 times as much about what a production
manager on that floor should be doing than
I do. Why would I go in and interfere with
him?
It’s my job to make sure all the managers
in our company are good managers. It’s not
my job to get in the way of them doing a
good job.
Be patient. People like me are very impatient.
We have to have the discipline of patience
that, once you set objectives and goals, and
you agree upon them, you allow the management to accomplish what they are setting out to do. To me, that is leadership.
If you look at surveys about job satisfaction today, usually the biggest problem is
not pay. The biggest problem is nobody will
let me do my job, and I don’t know what
my job is. I don’t know what my responsibilities are. Those kinds of negative trends
kill morale in a company.
If people don’t know what’s expected of
them, it’s going to have a negative impact
all around.
Encourage collaboration. We benchmark
(managers) against each other. We have
meetings several times a year looking at
these benchmarks. We have classes where
the good performing managers are educating the poorer performing managers in one
particular area or another as to how they
can do better.
Usually you’ll have one guy doing well in
one area of responsibility and another doing
well in another area of responsibility, and
they can help each other out. It’s our job to
provide the forum to make sure that whoever is doing the best job around the country
in any given area has the opportunity to
share how he is doing it with his comrades.
Listen to your customer. We stay very close to
our customers and listen very hard when
our customers have a complaint about anything. If we stay close to him, we’ll never be too far from doing the right thing.
At our national sales meeting we have
each year, we have three or four customers
come and speak to us about what they
expect from our company.
Have personal relationships with the customer.
Look at business through the eyes of the
customer and determine what’s important
to him. What’s important to him may not be
what’s important to us all the time. We look
to learn as much as we can about what he
wants and what his needs are, and we try
and fill those needs.
To me, the customer is always right, even
though he may be unreasonable at times.
He’s paying you your paycheck. He’s buying
a product from us at a price we agreed to.
If he wants to complain, we’re going to
listen. Usually, if we pay attention to him,
we’ll be better as a company because we’re
doing things our customers want us to do.
Accept all opinions. I don’t necessarily want
people to see things the way I do. We have
a variety of opinions, and everybody
expresses them. Our CFO is our main risk
assessor, and he always takes a company-liability view of everything. That’s his job to
do that.
It goes back to the empowerment. We
empower people to say what they think.
We want them to give us their opinion. We
don’t want people saying, ‘Yeah, this is
what Bill wants, so I guess this is what
we’re going to do.’
That’s the last thing I want to have happen. I want people that are going to speak
their minds. They’re not going to worry
about somebody not liking what they say.
They know they are not going to be criticized if they are critical.
Seek out input. Human nature being what it
is, people would much rather be in charge
of their own destiny than to have somebody else dictating to them as to what
they’re going to do.
The only thing in our company that is dictated from the top down is that we will
have an excellent safety program. The safety program itself is built up by the lower-level production people.
They form their own safety committees
in the plant. They get to put the safety program in place, evaluate it, manage it and
distribute safety bonuses to their employees. It’s all done through empowerment to
the lower-level production management.
There’s nobody up top that’s dictating
what the safety program will be. You could
find some situations where you would
have a top-down approach to safety where
there would be a meeting of very top-level
people and they would dictate what a safety program would be all the way down to
the lower-level people. Then it wouldn’t be
their program at the lower levels, and it
wouldn’t be implemented that way at the
lower levels.
It does give them ownership.
Don’t fear mistakes. We make mistakes and
fail all the time. You just get up and get
going again. My mantra is, just don’t make
the same mistake twice.
I don’t pound my people, or myself even,
for making a mistake. If you’re not making
mistakes, you’re not trying to improve. But
at the same time, you don’t want to be
dumb and continue to make the same mistakes over and over. That’s definitely the
wrong thing to be doing.
That’s the way I communicate it to our
people. Don’t worry about making a mistake. Don’t look over your shoulder. Let’s
learn from our mistakes when we make
them. Let’s not make the same one twice.
HOW TO REACH: Trussway Ltd., www.trussway.com or (866)
999-8787