Find strong people
In addition to a solid strategy and benchmarks, Hendrix also needed strong people
to help him transform the company. It
meant bringing in new people, shifting
duties and, for some, letting them go.
“Put the right people on the right seats on
the bus,” he says. “It was probably one of
the toughest things to do. You lose people
along the way that you respect, and they’re
almost part of your family, but you have to
make some of those calls to move the business forward.”
When he looked at his team, he particularly noticed two people that he needed to
utilize more. One was the president of the
Americas division who understood the segmentation concept. The other was a top
modular carpet designer, who also grasped
the concept, so Hendrix relied on him to
develop new products geared toward the
new business segments Interface was
chasing.
While he had to have these and other
“right” people in place, he also had to look
and see who wasn’t a fit and couldn’t help
him get to the next stage.
“Have certain things you’re measuring,” he
says. “You know if it’s a cultural fit and if he
or she is performing to the milestones you’ve
created or the benchmarks you’ve created
for the business. If they’re underperforming in those areas, you pretty much know when someone has reached
Peter Principle.”
When you have to let people go, you then have to bring in new
people who have better skills and better fit with where you’re trying to take the organization.
“You look for someone who’s creative, innovative, somebody
who’s a team player and someone who can bring an organization
and lead it,” Hendrix says.
He says to gauge if job candidates will be a good fit, you have to get
to the heart of how they worked in their previous experiences.
“You’re looking for how they view talent and how they view their
organization they’ve managed before,” he says. “Are they servant
leaders or not? Are they about developing their people and developing the talent of their people? Culturally, are they a fit?”
He says that the key to ensuring that you bring in the right people is how you approach the interview process.
“You spend enough time with them, and you look at what they’ve
done in their previous line of work, and you do some talent assessments,” he says. “We do some talent assessments through Gallup
and so forth, which gives you some empirical data, and then you
make a gut choice at the very end if they’re going to be a fit or not
and if they can move the organization where you’re trying to move
it.”
At Interface, sustainability has been a major focus for nearly 15
years now, so Hendrix really wanted to make sure he got people
that were focused on the environment and how to reduce their
footprint. This not only provided him with something to gauge candidates by, but it also drew people to the organization, despite the
problems Interface was facing.
“It was already incorporated in our DNA,” he says. “It allowed us
to retain and recruit some really good people in that time frame
when the commercial office market was really almost in a depression.”
