Jacob Lipa has a pretty great
view from the 44th floor of Psomas’ headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, but that vantage point doesn’t necessarily
lead to the best perspective.
So to increase his decision-making savvy, the president of
the consulting engineering firm
routinely exchanges information
with his 800 employees through
frequent office visits and open-ended dialogues.
“I keep telling my people here
all the time, I really don’t expect
them to behave responsibly
without information,” Lipa says.
“With information, we cannot
but behave responsibly.”
The philosophy has been paying dividends at the consulting
engineering firm, which specializes in the land development,
water and transportation markets and posted 2007 revenue
of $130 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Lipa about how to share information with your employees
while putting things in perspective by stressing the bigger
picture.
Divulge information. Give them
as much information, other than
personal information, about the
business as they can take.
When I think that somebody
is really not trained enough to
understand the information,
then I stop and will try and
train them to understand the
information better. I was going
over our entire income statement with the company. I
went, ‘Here’s our net revenue.
Does anybody know what net
revenues are?’
First of all, there are no surprises. Secondly, everybody
becomes part of the solution.
It’s not only that I feel the
responsibility to solve, but now
I have 800 people that want to
help me solve it. You get a lot
of ideas, and one or two of
them are better than yours.
Ask for information. We have regular dialogue meetings. We call
them dialogues. In those meetings, I come with no agenda
whatsoever. This is my opportunity to listen to them tell me
what’s going on in their world.
It’s really an ongoing dialogue
where they provide me with
information so that I can make
better decisions.
We try to go at least on a
monthly basis to each of these
offices. When I do dialogues, it’s
usually for five to 10 people.
Whenever we visit an office just
for other reasons — we don’t
necessarily go to the office just
for that — we just call the office
manager and say, ‘How about a
dialogue? Would you ask if anybody wants to meet with us for
an hour to talk?’
It’s not the formal process,
but we try not to miss any
opportunity.
What you really hear is what
your people really care about.
Then you really can do some
great stuff because now you
know what the people really
care about.
