As a leader, Noam Lotan knows he isn’t superhuman. As president and CEO of MRV Communications Inc., a network service and
products provider, Lotan accepts that it would be impossible for him to directly manage and lead all 1,500 of the company’s employees.
As such, he has developed a leadership style based in large part on being able to trust his team’s ability to execute. That’s not to say,
however, that he isn’t available when issues arise — Lotan considers facilitating problem-solving and communication his primary
responsibility in providing service to his customers. Smart Business spoke with Lotan — who helped grow MVR’s 2006 revenue to $356
million, up from $284 million in 2005 — about the importance of being accessible to both your customers and your employees.
Encourage the flow of information. As a manager, you want to encourage information
flow, and you want people to feel comfortable to reach out to you. You want to
be accessible. Not everybody takes
advantage of it. Just by having an open
door doesn’t mean people use it.
If it’s not happening by itself, you have
to go and reach out. In general, this is
what they call management by wandering around, or MBWA. You’ve got to be
out and about, whether it’s locally in
your facilities or going on the road and
meeting people.
As a leader, you really have to be everywhere. There is no substitute for seeing
what’s going on in the field with customers and with your own people. All
the e-mails in the world aren’t going to
be able to substitute for talking to people and looking at them in the eye, and
having them see you as a person they
can work with and relate to.
You have to be careful, when you actually have this open-door policy and you
reach out to people at any level in your
organization, not to fall into the trap of
becoming their micromanager. You have
to do a lot of listening but very little
action other than communicating whatever you want to communicate, whether
it’s values or goals. You can’t really solve
problems on the spot; you have to work
with the management.
Maintain harmony with your managers. Clearly
the only agenda for us is that the company succeeds. We live in a competitive
environment.
Every customer problem can be
resolved by multiple vendors. No matter
how you look at it, nobody has a corner
on anything in this world. So when
you’re in a competitive environment
where things change daily, new products
emerge, customer requirements change,
you really have to be totally in tune with
what’s going on outside the company.
The only way for the company to succeed in a competitive environment
where globalization has taken place and
you are basically competing with people from all over the universe on a level playing field, is you really have to get the
best out of your team. Getting the best
out of your team means that you have to
work in harmony with your managers
and have them work in harmony with
each other so that you can really get the
best out of everyone.
The most important thing is to touch
base, not to let a week go by without
speaking with every one of your managers in great detail. That’s critical. You
cannot allow any disconnect, and I’m
talking about people who are across the
Atlantic and wherever. It’s not just
locally.
Keep people engaged. When you have people that are basically great people working for you, you want to make sure that
they’re totally engaged. The only way to
accomplish that is to communicate as
much as possible. There are a million
ways to communicate, either directly
with people when you see them, through
management, through what you do every
day, through internal newsletters.
You have to try to paint the bigger picture. I really try to help our own people
understand where we stand and how we
make a difference and how we, as a company, can make a contribution to our customers and maybe to our industry, as
well. It is very helpful when you are able
to paint that bigger picture, because people can see where the company stands
and where it’s heading.
Foster employee/customer interaction. As
much as you can, you get your people
involved with your customers. You want
them out and about and rubbing shoulders with real customers and understanding the issues in the field and not
just getting information through sales
and marketing people.
We try to encourage that kind of interaction. There’s a lot to be gained on both
sides. When we bring our engineers out,
our customers really appreciate that
because many of our competitors basically hide their engineers. The customer
only gets to see support people and
salespeople. When we bring our engineers out, it is really very positive and
the customer feels like they’re getting
value out of the relationship, and our
engineers get to understand what’s going
on out in the field and what real people
need them to design. It’s a very nice
motivator for them.
Stay a step ahead. What can cause a company to fail is lack of innovation.
Ultimately, you’re only as good as your
last product. So you have to constantly
renew yourself and make sure you’re
constantly evolving with your customers’ needs and keeping one step
ahead of the competition.
The important thing is that you have
smart people working for you, and you
keep them motivated and make sure
they see the results of their efforts.
We celebrate wins to the extent that we
can. We try to propagate good news. Bad
news spreads on its own; you don’t have
to do anything. But with good news, you
have to really try to celebrate and make
people aware of what’s what and how
they can emulate that kind of success.
HOW TO REACH: MRV Communications Inc., (818) 773-0900
or www.mrv.com