Coach your company

Ron Whitley
president, Ranger Steel Services LP

To Ron Whitley, president of Ranger
Steel Services LP, a company is kind of
like a football team. During the season,
the captains of the offense and defense
might not go to the movies or to restaurants together, but when the time comes
to strap on their helmets and play, they
all have to realize they’re part of a team.
Each has a job to do if the team is to
find the win column.

Though your office might seem light
years away from the gridiron, Whitley
says the basic principles of teamwork
and communication remain the same —
and that includes you in the role of head
coach.

Whitley says a good coach doesn’t just
bark orders. He enables his team to
learn by figuring things out for themselves. You need to be able to communicate, and perhaps the most important
part of communicating is listening
before you speak.

“Sometimes, I don’t have all the
answers,” he says. “I don’t pretend to be
the brightest leader here, but I think I do
quite a respectable job of it. If I don’t
know about something, I ask people
what they think we should do and listen
to what they have to say.

“Listening is a very important part of
being a leader. You have to lead by
example, and if you say you’re going to
do something, again, you’d better follow
through and do it.”

A coach has to keep dozens of players
and assistant coaches on the same page,
in much the same way you have to keep
employees in different departments and
locations focused on the company’s
overarching goals. That means your
communication must be frequent and
consistent.

“Any information that needs to go
lower down than management, such as
market information, customer information or anything that would affect sales
is immediately passed down through the
company, whether it be in formal meetings or e-mails,” Whitley says.
“Everybody here is well informed,
because the days of telling people things
on a need-to-know basis are long gone.”

Keeping employees who might not regularly interact with each other focused on
common goals is one of your biggest challenges as a leader. But it can also be one
of your greatest accomplishments when
you see your people achieve their goals.

“[The people at a company] have to
work together and jell together,” he
says. “They might not all go out to dinner or lunch with each other, but at
work, they need to develop into a true
team.”