Leverage your talent
When putting together a management team to steer a project,
department or your entire company, Hoffecker has some words to
live by: “One and one equals three.”
In other words, your team should be greater than the sum of its
parts. A secret formula for building such a team and having it succeed doesn’t exist, but it starts with knowing where you want to
go as a company, then finding people who mesh with your goals,
both with regard to personality and skill sets.
“Business is very much about the ideas, thoughts and capabilities
you can bring into a situation,” Hoffecker says. “We are teaming people together to work around the globe very seamlessly. When I go out
to a client to perform a project, it’s not just me alone or me with a
two-person team serving that client. Because we leverage each other
so well, I can pull five other people onto a project. One might be in
Asia, three might be in Europe, one is in South America, and they’re
all adding significant content and intellectual capital to the team to
serve a customer that might be in Detroit, Michigan.”
If you’ve set up an effective global communication strategy and
infrastructure, distance should not be a barrier to assembling the
right talent on your leadership teams. Leveraging the best talent
from around the globe, regardless of where each person is based,
will also help you cross-pollinate your company’s best practices
instead of having each division or each shop in every country performing the same procedure in different ways.
“The whole idea of networking is beneficial to a business
because clients get a better answer, they don’t get people reinventing the wheel,” Hoffecker says. “If someone has done a similar project in a different industry, and it’s relevant, we’re able to
do projects much faster because we can quickly take what they
have learned and apply it somewhere else. When that happens,
you get higher results.”
He says that as the head of the company, your job is to leverage
the talent and knowledge of your employees by taking their various backgrounds, talents and skill sets, and forming them to the
same creative template, harnessing their abilities to find solutions for your customers.
You want to draw from many different intellectual sources
when forming a team designed to help lead your company and
serve your customers, but all that brain power has to work on the
same wavelength, or you won’t be able to constructively use it.
Hoffecker says that’s where strong communication and refined
people skills are a must for a leader.
“Point one is we have an overall view of what we want the firm
to be,” he says. “There is a set of core values and beliefs that we
believe are critical. The set of key priorities, key objectives, what
we have overall as a firm, that’s what we start at.
“The reality in business is that, once you have the right people in
the door, you secondly have to integrate them into the culture and
the teaming. In our case, many of the organizations our team members have come from don’t have the same type of discipline around
the business, in teaming across organizations and geographies. It’s
in getting them to understand how that power can help you in serving clients that you’re able to continue to grow.”
HOW TO REACH: AlixPartners LLC, www.alixpartners.com