When Jay Flatley had to choose between average, consistent growth or going for the big win, he chose the big “W.” A few years in to one of his previous start-ups, his company had captured 80 percent of a $60 million market and couldn’t grow at the rate he wanted. So he changed course and developed products to compete in larger markets. During that difficult path to success, he became a better leader, and those lessons stay with him today as president and CEO of Illumina Inc. The company, which creates treatments for diseases by studying variations of human genetics, posted $73.5 million in revenue last year and expects to hit $160 million for 2006. Smart Business spoke with Flatley about how he leads growth and motivates more than 500 employees.
Engage employees.
Many companies have ‘Mahogany Row.’ In those environments, employees become reluctant to interact with the management of the company, and that does a real disservice to the performance of any organization.
If the management is constantly in meetings and behind closed doors, that’s not very conducive to good communication and interaction. Being involved with employees and having open forums with employees is a key ingredient to success.
If employees see you’re engaged in and active in the business, they’ll do the same.
It’s important that the management of companies work hard, stay engaged and lead by example. I know a lot of CEOs who paint the vision and then go away and let other people execute it. The highest chance of success comes when the management team is fully engaged in executing the vision as well as painting the vision.
The worst thing is to have a CEO paint that vision and then spend 40 percent of the time in the office and the other 60 percent of the time on the golf course, letting everybody else make it happen. It’s critical that the CEO be engaged on a day-to-day basis and continue to evangelize what’s going to happen when we achieve success.
Hire good cultural fits.
We don’t compromise on our criteria for bringing new people into the company. One of the key tests for any new employee is, ‘Are they a good cultural fit?’ It’s critical, as we grow, that (the company’s) culture be maintained.
If you begin to compromise the process and begin to hire ‘B’ players, then the ‘B’ players will begin to hire ‘C’ players, and pretty soon you’ll find you regressed to the mean. ‘A’ players need to hire other ‘A’ players in order to keep us ahead of the competition and in order to have an aggregate work force that is significantly more skilled than our competitors in the industry.
Have a team involved in hiring.
While (the hiring manager) sort of makes the final call, they have to get input from many other people, and we do that in an interactive, open environment.
When people just send in a few notes about what happened in their interview, it’s very easy for a hiring manager to discard flags that may have come up in an effort to get a person in quickly. When you get those people together interactively, if someone brings up a flag about a person, then someone else may jump in and say, ‘I detected that, too, and I was a little concerned about that, now that you mentioned it.’
It’s a great way to have checks and balances on the hiring process. It certainly works on the negative side, but it also works to overcome flags. If somebody says, ‘Well, this flag came up for me,’ another person may jump in and say, ‘I saw that, too, but when I drilled into it, it was obvious why that wasn’t an issue.’
That controls the process and puts the power of group thinking into the hiring.
It’s cross-functional, and it’s typically at different levels. Anybody coming into the company, we would have a number of people at the next level interviewing them, but we also have peers — people they would be working with — interview them. In the case of managers, we actually have some of the people they would be managing (present during) the interview process.
There’s a recent book out called ‘The Wisdom of Crowds,’ and it speaks to the notion that people come to a process or task with very different sets of assumptions, goals and insights. The kind of thing a person the level above is thinking about may be very different than what a peer may be thinking about.
Having that diversity of viewpoint improves the value of the overall position.
Don’t depend on one person.
As a young start-up company you’re very dependent on particular people and personalities for success, but in developing a larger, more successful company, you need to have an infrastructure that is less — or not dependent at all — on individuals but is more self-sustaining.
One of the metrics of success as a company grows has to be, ‘Is the company sustainable?’ One measure of the sustainability of the company is that if any given person in that company wins the lottery or changes their mind about working every day, that the company can go forward with the plans that are consistent with the organization.
To get to that sustainability level, you have to create a structure that is increasingly independent of any given person. That doesn’t mean that individuals aren’t making phenomenal contributions because clearly they are, but what it does mean is you have ways of backstopping those individuals should the organization change in either planned or unplanned ways.
Have metrics.
They create focus, so it’s important that everybody understands what it is we’re trying tying to achieve. Once they know what the goal is, they can think about what’s the best way to get there.
Those goals are often aggressive, so it creates some out-of-the-box thinking. If you set a goal that’s simply step and repeat, say ‘Get 10 percent better at X,’ then people just think, ‘How can I just nudge something in one direction or another to make it 10 percent better?’ as opposed to setting aggressive goals that may be two or three better.
Then they have to stand back and think much more broadly about, ‘Is there a new way to approach the problem?’
HOW TO REACH: Illumina Inc., www.illumina.com