Joseph S. Tempio has a bias toward
action, but he says moving too soon in
business can be a pitfall.
“Make sure you do your homework,
make sure you understand what is going
on and what makes the machine work
before you start to tinker with the
machine,” says the chairman, president
and CEO of Tunnell Consulting, a 75-employee, $38 million consulting firm
focused in the life sciences industry.
Smart Business spoke with Tempio
about how to open the lines of communication with your employees and how to
face challenges.
Q: What are the keys to being a
good leader?
Confidence. You have to believe in
yourself, believe you have the ability to share your vision and passion
with other folks, and be able to let
them set an agenda for what you
are trying to do.
In addition, it’s important you
have a plan, work the plan, expect
there will be obstacles, try to anticipate them, and remain confident
and energetic in terms of engaging
those problems as they occur.
Q: How do you face obstacles?
Step back and take a deep
breath. One of the things I’ve
learned is nothing is really as bad
as it seems on first blush. It’s
important to look at things in a
holistic fashion and look at all
the aspects. Hopefully, it’s either
something you anticipated, have
seen before or had some experience with that was close enough
that you can define what the
next action is going to be.
Q: How do you show employees you have
that confidence?
I walk around and talk to people quite a
bit. I try to keep in touch with people, and
I have a fairly good reputation for being
open, honest and fairly direct.
Being in touch with what is going on, talking to people about what they are doing, having an understanding about what they
are doing and what is going on in the industry helps to establish that we have control.
Q: How do you know if employees are getting your message?
We try to keep the lines of communication with our employees open. We are an
employee-owned company, so people don’t
feel reluctant to send in questions or ask
anyone on the management team or CEO
what is going on. We are generally an informal company. We try to be attentive to
what is going on with our employees.
Q: How do you open the lines of communication?
We ask. We are not reluctant to ask people to ask us questions. We will send our
head of HR out to sites to interview folks
and solicit feedback. An element we
instituted about three years ago is everybody on the management team will be
interviewed by a member of the board, and information will be compiled to give
the CEO another checkpoint on how we
are doing.
We have done some surveys in the past. If
you do ask questions and do surveys, you
need to be open about what is asked, what
you get, and you need to respond to it, even
if it is to say you don’t agree. The worst
thing you can do is ask people for their
opinion and then ignore it.
Q: How do you retain employees?
I read some time ago that one of the things
that prompts people to leave their firm is
when they have lost confidence in their
leadership or lost confidence in the
ability of their company to accomplish what they have set out to
accomplish. We try to make it clear to
people what we are trying to do.
We think that is one thing that
keeps people working. We are
advantaged by the fact we are an
employee-owned company, so people feel that if they do good work for
the company, then they are able to
share into that.
We are also a company that encourages creativity and encourages people
to have empowerment and demonstrate initiative. Our folks are generally experienced and highly educated
and smart, so you give them opportunities or put them in positions where
they can be successful and exercise
their abilities. That autonomy, in and of
itself, helps in terms of giving people
job satisfaction
Q: How do employees know the company is heading in the right direction?
We let them know what is going on. We
are very frank about the things that are
going right and the things that aren’t
going as well as we would like them to go.
We feel that we have a responsibility,
because of the employee ownership, to be
forthright about almost everything going
on in the company. We are pretty open
about what we are doing, within the limits
of confidentiality, in terms of the clients.
HOW TO REACH: Tunnell Consulting, (610) 337-0820 or
www.tunnellconsulting.com