When Claudio MuruzÁbal needed to expand Neoris to reach U.S. consumers beyond its Miami headquarters, he started with the most important element: his people.
His biggest challenge was not selling the company’s broad range of IT and business consulting services. Rather, it was his ability to build a team that bought in to his plan on how to do it and then use that team to carry out the plan and grow the business.
“It is always about building the right team,” MuruzÁbal says. “That’s the No. 1 challenge you have. Until you put together the right team, you’re really not responding to the challenge.”
MuruzÁbal needed his 3,000 employees to get out and sell Neoris to new clients and do it with complete credibility.
“You need to be able to put in front of your clients people that have the credibility to describe the offering and that have done it before,” MuruzÁbal says. “Until you have that team, you’re not in business. You’re really trying to promote something you have, but you don’t have an offering that can take you from presale to delivery to execution to being a successful player in the marketplace.”
He had to do more than just allow his team the freedom to go do things. He had to have a team that would be strong enough to bring its own ideas to the dialogue and occasionally challenge the leader’s beliefs.
“It’s having a team that is strong enough to put on your table the ideas that would really help you change your company,” MuruzÁbal says. “It’s empowering them in the other direction. It is your team members really impacting the decisions you have to make as a leader and having the space and latitude to do that. When you reach that point, you are really empowering your organization. Otherwise, it’s just delegation of authority.”
