To Mike Tierney, success is satisfying one customer at a time, and
that can only be done by your employees.
The president and CEO of PSB Group
Inc., a holding company for
People’s State Bank, says that if
employees don’t believe in your
message, then they won’t be fully
committed to it, which ultimately
affects customer relations.
“Think about anyplace where
you’ve interacted with an employee and it’s been an unsatisfactory
experience for you,” he says.
“How do you feel about that company? The corporate culture is
important, and you have to have
an organization that values good
people and creates opportunities
for them, so they can grow and
stay with you.”
With more than 150 employees
and about $45 million in 2006
revenue, Tierney is continuing
to grow the company to provide
employees with future opportunities.
Smart Business spoke with
Tierney about how he shows
employees he is listening and
how to mold a culture.
Q: How do employees know you
are listening to them?
We have a program called ‘Got Ideas?’
The committee comes in for the management meeting every couple of weeks,
they tell us what the ideas are, and we go
over them. One person said, ‘We don’t
have screens that are big enough to be
effective for what we do. We print
screens, then switch to another screen,
then print that, and we end up working
off a lot of pieces of paper.’
The next day, the guy who is in charge
of our operations put in a 19-inch screen
and had somebody test it. They could get
four panels up at a time and see all the
things that they needed. It was something like 200 pages they didn’t print that
day. Two days later, we had a 19-inch
monitor in front of everyone in that
office, and the productivity improvement was huge.
It’s doing those kinds of things. It
demonstrates to your employees that,
‘We do listen, and we will move really
fast if there is something there that we
think works.’
Q: How do you mold your corporate culture?
We try to do a pretty good job of communicating our success and failures. When
someone has a good week on the sales
side, we have them talk on our weekly
sales meeting call and talk about what it
was that made them successful. Likewise,
when we run into a situation when we
were not successful, we try to learn from
that. We do a lot of little things to make
people feel good about working here.
Our company directory has a picture of
every one of us on it. It has your birthday
there, and I personally send a birthday card
to each employee on his or her birthday.
We just try to do things to recognize people
and let them know they are important and
a big part of our success.
Q: How do you retain employees?
We do have mechanisms we use to
determine employee morale. We do surveys from time to time. We’re just going
through a talent management process to
look at what are the skills sets we
have in each of the individuals in
the company, what are their career
aspirations and where they want to
get to?
If they want to become something
they don’t have all the background
for now, then we need to get a
development plan in place with
them. ‘Here are the steps you have
to take in your career to get yourself
to where you qualify for the position
you are looking for.’ We have tuition
reimbursement plans, and we
encourage our employees to continue their education.
If someone’s capabilities and
demands are higher than the opportunities presented in the company, you
don’t keep them. You have to be able
to create opportunities. Likewise, if
you put someone at a job and they
don’t have all the training, that doesn’t
work, either.
Q: What is a pitfall to avoid in
business?
Never think that you have all the
answers. I can see that it’s pretty easy
at the top to think you have all the
answers, but you don’t. You need good,
strong people who will attack issues in a
different way than you will. It’s that diversity of thought. I know what my strengths
and weaknesses are, and I have to have
people who work as a part of our team
who have a different skill set than I have.
I only need to have a 90 percent solution,
and I want some people who work with
me that want 100 percent of the facts
before they are ready to make a decision.
That way, I am pushing them to go faster,
and they are holding me back, saying, ‘You
have to do a little more studying.’ Getting
that balance is really important to having
a good organization over the long run.
HOW TO REACH: PSB Group Inc., (248) 548-2900 or
www.psbnetbank.com