Mike Pruitt has translated his success as a Cleveland Browns running back to success as the owner, president and CEO of Mike Pruitt Honda.
Pruitt says he learned the basics of business — and how to interact with employees — by watching former Browns coach
Sam Rutigliano interact with his players on the sidelines.
“He had a personal relationship with just about all the players on the team,” he says. “Players could come to him if they had a personal problem.”
Pruitt now emulates his former coach as he interacts with his staff of 75 at his dealership, encouraging open communication by making himself visible and approachable.
Football also taught Pruitt how to set the table for the team’s success.
“You also have to have a game plan at work, what you’re going to do for the month and how you’re going to get there,” Pruitt says.
To do that, he invites strategic ideas from employees and measures progress by meeting frequently with managers at the dealership, which posted 2007 revenue of $42 million.
Smart Business spoke with Pruitt about how to gather input from your employees.
Set a game plan with managers. One of the keys to being a good leader is to make sure that you’re on top of everything that’s going on in all the departments. Every month, we take forecasts of where we
need to be for that month.
I get a weekly report on how we’re trending [during] managers’ meetings. Managers tell me what’s going on in their department, what’s going on with their employees and some of the things they’re
doing to increase sales.
Managers should have meetings with their people at least once a week to let (employees) know where we’re tracking so they can be a part of that, as well.
During our managers’ meeting, I’ll ask them if there’s anything that came out of those meetings that we should go over. Most of them will say, ‘Yes, so-and-so had a good idea. We’re going to try this.’ We’ll try
their idea, and they’ll get recognition for that (on our) Good Idea board. The Good Idea of the Month will be one of the employees’ [ideas], like we have an Employee of the Month.
Check the progress. The CEO always has to inspect what he expects of his managers to make sure that they have the best interest of the company at heart. You give them opportunities to make decisions or to implement ideas, but you always follow up to make sure that those ideas are working or you’re getting the kind of result that you had anticipated.
If they’re not, then you’ve got to go back to the drawing board and make some new decisions. We monitor where we are on a weekly basis, if we’re trending toward the forecast that we were supposed to hit.
Make yourself accessible to employees. We take a person from each department to sit on a committee. That committee gets to (say) what’s going on in their departments. They get to go over it with me and not with their manager, so we can put down anything that they feel is a hindrance to their department, including the manager.
It gives them the opportunity to open up, whereas before they wouldn’t have opened up because they don’t want to offend anybody.
It all boils down to communication. You’ve got to have communication with your managers and the people in the different departments. You have to have an open-door policy. The process is to, if there’s a real concern, go to your manager first and see if he’s handled it. If not, they can go to the general manager. If that’s not (enough), then they can come to me.
