Shape the future

Drayton McLane
CEO, Houston Astros

Leaders are teachers. Without an ability
to teach, Houston Astros Chairman and
CEO Drayton McLane Jr. says you will
never get your people to see eye to eye
with you, understand your vision for the
company and feel the passion you feel for
the business.

For McLane, teaching starts with getting his employees involved in shaping
the company’s future by posing problems and letting them come up with
their own solutions.

“You have to give them free rein,” he
says. “This is what enterprise and
entrepreneurship is all about — people
with new, fresh ideas. Let them feel a
part of that, but also let them feel a
pride in not just creating it but achieving it.”

But McLane says involvement in shaping the company’s future should also
come with a sense of responsibility and
accountability. Growth on a personal
and companywide level doesn’t generally occur when you arbitrarily throw
stuff against a wall to see what sticks,
so employees given the opportunity to
create must be given parameters and
then held accountable for staying within those parameters.

The parameters should fall in line
with what you want to accomplish as a
business.

“In a large business where you have a
number of people working for you, you
have to identify what your objective is and
what you want to accomplish,” he says. “Is
it products; is it services? You have to identify the objective, what it is you want to do
and what it is you want to produce. Then
you have to sell people on the goal, what it
is you want to achieve. Then the last part is
the toughest word in the English language,
and that’s ‘accountability.’”