Everything was fine with a product line
at AddisonMcKee Inc. until Joe Eramo
decided to add more bells and whistles to it to make it more high-tech.
“It was the absolute wrong decision,” says
Eramo, president and COO of the company’s North American operations.
Eramo knew he had to own up to the mistake, and then quickly get people back on
track. He visited with customers and looked
at what the competition was doing,
and then he updated employees.
“I had to motivate by the fact that
this is where the marketplace is
going, and if we don’t move fast, we
are going to lose market share,” he
says.
The company, which designs, manufactures and supplies technologies
for automotive, aviation, truck and
shipbuilding requirements, posted
North American revenue of about
$30 million in 2006.
Smart Business spoke with
Eramo about how to communicate
with employees.
Q: How did you establish your
company’s culture?
We relocated a year ago, and
during that relocation, I started a
lunch with the president [program], where I would meet and
have lunch every two weeks with
a group of five to 10 employees. It
started with the relocation, but
then we would get into other
business topics.
We’ve resurrected those meetings, and every other month, I’m meeting
with a group of five to 10 employees, discussing any topic they want to talk about. I’ll
give them an update of what is going on
from my perspective, but I want to know
what’s important to them and what they
think I need to know.
In the months I’m not doing it, one of the
VPs of the company is meeting with a group
of five to eight employees and is trying to do
the same thing.
We do casual days on Friday. We do have
people who work from remote locations. It’s
something we wouldn’t have done five years
ago, but now we accept we have to be more
flexible.
Q: How do you get employees to let their
guard down?
I’m on the floor almost every day. I’ve
changed my leadership style from maybe
being hands-on to being close to the action.
When I was hands-on, I was probably too
involved in running the business and not
involved enough in improving or growing
the business.
I need to be close to the action, and I
need to know what is important with our
customers and employees and know what
is going on in the marketplace, but I can’t
be so hands-on that I’m not spending my
time improving and growing the business.
Because I am close to the action, they know
me. I stop and ask questions and encourage
it’s OK to say we are doing something wrong
and to face up to certain things. I tell them
there isn’t a single question they can’t ask.
Q: How did you learn to be less hands-on?
It was a change of mindset. We all recognize that’s the problem, and it’s something
we may have risen to where we are today
because we were good at running the business, and it’s hard to let go. By bringing in
good people, those good people are only
going to stick around if you empower them
to run the business. I certainly recognize
that. If you need me to make a decision,
then I don’t need you.
Q: How do you find good employees?
We set it as a goal three or four
years ago that we wanted the dream
team in our industry. We felt if we
had the best players, then we would
win the game. We set out to find the
dream team, some of which was
industry-related people with industry
experience.
Then we went outside the industry.
We wanted people who didn’t know
anything about us. For example, our
global marketing director did not
come from this industry, and that was
a specific goal. We wanted somebody
to market this company completely
different than this industry has ever
seen.
There are certain positions in here
where we want the best from this
industry, and there are certain positions in this business where we specifically wanted someone without any
industry knowledge and with a clear,
fresh, new look on how we market ourselves.
Q: How do you know if a potential
employee will fit with your company?
That gets into the skill set of reading that
person. Have we been fooled before? Sure.
Everybody goes through that and has been
fooled.
We have a number of rounds and a number people involved in the interview
process and are looking for different
things, but sometimes asking the same
questions. Do we get the same sort of
responses, and is it consistent? Is this person true to what they are saying across the
board?
HOW TO REACH: AddisonMckee Inc., (513) 228-7000 or
www.addisonmckee.com