Günther Braun calls “vision” an artificial word.
The president and CEO of ROFIN-SINAR Technologies Inc.
says companies often fall into the trap of creating long-range
visions that state an overall objective but don’t give employees
any idea of how they are going to get from here to there.
Braun says visions that state a grand five-year goal but are rooted in nothing more than ambition are visions that your work
force will have a hard time latching onto. You might want to
accomplish something major in the next five years, but he says
the best picture to paint for your employees is one of manageable goals that can be accomplished in the short term.
Your job is to look at the big picture. But while you might want
to give your employees a general idea of where you want to take
the company, you have to give them the smaller picture first.
“The problem with a vision is that you have certain targets,”
Braun says. “You can have it as a hard target or a soft target. A
hard target can be financial, to go to the next step, to grow into
a bigger company. The soft target can be creating a better reputation, serve the customer base in the right way, be more
responsive. So I can’t really go out there and say what is the
vision, and we have to be there in five years. I have learned
that even if you do five-year plans, they do not always come
true.”
ROFIN-SINAR is a $480 million laser systems manufacturer
founded in Germany more than 30 years ago, but through
acquisitions it has become a worldwide company based in
Plymouth, Mich. With a wide base of employees in 30 business
units throughout the world, Braun says he has learned that
short-term planning and narrowly focused objectives are the
best way to keep everyone on the same page and driving
toward the company’s mission and goals. This is how he does
it.
Build relationships
If you have operations in many countries around the world,
you might dictate the policies by which each branch is governed, but you are going to have a hard time being the face of
the company to every employee in every location.
That’s why Braun says you need to build strong relationships
with the leaders in each of your markets, and those leaders
need to have strong ties back to you and your management
team.
“You have to have those relationships with your leaders in
those countries,” he says. “You have to have a broad organization with the right people. On my side, I have an open-door and
open-phone policy. I’m reachable whenever there are challenges, but we also talk with the communities in those countries. So it’s kind of a floating communication we have
throughout the world.”
Having an open-door policy and keeping the lines of communication open with your leaders in the field is a good initial
step, but passively awaiting communication from your managers is not enough. Braun expects his leaders to get their feet
on the ground, in the offices and on the plant floor in every one of ROFIN-SINAR’s markets — a practice which he leads by
example.
Braun travels approximately 200 times a year to meetings, exhibitions and presentations, attempting to foster a team approach
to leadership wherever he goes.
“When you go out to your locations, people start to see that,
‘Our CEO, he wants to talk to me, he wants to see what is going
on and address me on the special things we are doing,’” he
says. “When you have a special topic you need to address, it’s
good to take that as a chance to get out and talk to your people. When you get out, you get a flavor for what is going on in
the working environment and so forth, what people are dealing with in various places.”
As you get out among your workers and begin to develop
relationships with the people in each of your locations, Braun
says you will begin to identify skill sets within your work
force, and the people who possess leadership potential will
begin to emerge.
With nearly 20 years of experience at ROFIN-SINAR, Braun
has had an opportunity to get to know many of the company’s
managers over time. He says there is no substitute for the
experience you get from repeatedly interacting with your people over the span of years.
“People have grown with the company, so over the years, you
get to know them,” Braun says. “Having a longstanding presence in your industry also helps you develop a reputation
among the competition.
“When you are looking for new people, you tend to go looking into your industry, who is great, who is good, who could
you look to when you have an open chair. You look through the
network. In our case, on one hand, we have a good reputation
within the industry, so people want to work for us. On the
other side, there is a competition around the industry for the
best people, so that’s how we try to find the right people.
Sometimes you are successful, and sometimes you are not.”
Innovate with goals in mind
Along with “vision,” Braun is wary of another business buzzword: innovation. Braun says innovation is a word that is overused
in many companies.
While Braun does say that innovation is an important part of
his business, innovation means nothing if it doesn’t help the
business in some definite way. That’s why when he encourages
employees to develop new ideas, he also encourages that they
do it in line with practical goals that can be accomplished in
the foreseeable future.
“Innovation is important, but it’s also important that the innovations become new products,” he says. “It’s important that
your innovations fall in line with what you can sell and what
you can grow in your business. Just innovating does not help
your performance. Sometimes, you need to develop a department that can truly think about just technology. We benefit a
lot from our relationships with institutes and universities,
where a lot of the groundwork for innovation is done.”
Braun tries to avoid ambiguity when defining innovation, a
word that can mean many things to many people. Finding a
sharp focus to define innovation can be a challenge.
“Innovation is a nice word, but it’s a stressed word,” he says.
“Not everything is an innovation, but it can still be beneficial to
the company. My thinking is, what is innovation? Is it when you
change a little bit or when you develop a completely new technology?
“Innovation to me is when you create and develop something
very new, something that was not done before, and it really opens
up a new business opportunity.”
Braun says companies that innovate in a vacuum, apart from
their customers’ wants and needs, are companies that will lose
out to competitors who take their innovative abilities and
apply them to serving customers.
“You can be innovative, but you can be a loser on one side
because you cannot commercialize your innovations. The key
is to have innovations, which you can translate into your normal business.”
Leverage talent
Whether your plans for your company are long term or short
term, Braun says you won’t be able to realize those goals if the
right people are not in the right positions.
If you value innovation as part of your company’s culture, he
says you need to learn to identify innovative people, then put
them in places where you can best leverage their creative abilities.
“You can see innovators with the people you have,” he says.
“Of course, you can learn how to innovate a little bit, but there
are always people who have new ideas — sometimes great,
sometimes not great. It’s a type of human being you find, and I
think experience teaches you that. You see how they react and
behave, you might have people who are really sales-oriented or
marketing guys always thinking of ways to change products or
make it better. So you see them, then use those people in the
right way.”
You need the involvement of your managers to put employees
in the positions that will best help drive your company forward. At ROFIN-SINAR, Braun relies on his front-line managers to match talent to position.
“You have to talk to your managers and see if it might make
sense to switch someone,” he says. “The worst thing is if you
don’t address such questions, so the managers have to see the
talents of the people and understand them, then come up with
proposals to switch or whatever else could be done.
“You just have to see the potential in your people. You have
to see where their passion is, what is driving them.”
Braun says what drives workers at ROFIN-SINAR is less
about individual glory and more about making a mark in the
laser solutions industry. While Braun says fair compensation
and bonuses are important motivational tools, he doesn’t place
a high emphasis on individual awards.
“We aren’t McDonald’s with an employee of the month
award,” Braun says. “Our workers want a competitive base
salary and the chance to earn additional money through successfully reaching targets, be they individual or for the company. If you give them an opportunity to share in operating profits or some kind of additional pay, then they are happy.
“I don’t believe in the employee of the month idea because
how would you select such a person? What is the criteria?
Because someone worked 20 hours more than another?
Because they did better quality work? That’s the question.
That’s why, at the end of the day, we are team players. We have
individual incentives where if someone does something outstanding, maybe they get a one-time bonus, but we really
emphasize the need to be part of the team before anything individual.”
HOW TO REACH: ROFIN-SINAR Technologies Inc., www.rofin.com