You don’t want to be the smartest person in your company.
Really, you don’t.
In fact, John Grierson says it’s your duty to find people who are
smarter than you are and put them in positions where you can best
leverage their talents and skills.
“The greatest thing I can do is surround myself with people who
are more talented than I am, who have better ideas than I do and
are willing to express those ideas,” says Grierson, president of
Pulte Homes Delaware Valley Division. “Through that, we’ll take a
path that others haven’t taken.”
Grierson says that stagnation and a constant adherence to doing
things the way you’ve always done them is a recipe for failure in
business. The only way you’ll keep your business on its toes is to
hire people with the foresight to look down the road, listen to customers and develop an accurate picture of where the markets you
serve are heading.
At Pulte Homes Delaware Valley Division — a $300 million wing of
homebuilder Pulte Homes Inc. that serves parts of Pennsylvania, New
Jersey, Maryland and Delaware — building for the future means looking at new housing development concepts, such as Applecross
Country Club, a master-planned golf community situated on about
1,000 acres in suburban Downingtown, Pa.
It is one of the largest projects Pulte Homes has undertaken in
the Mid-Atlantic region. Once it is built out, sometime between
2015 and 2017, the community will feature more than 1,000 homes.
“In order to bring that job to the marketplace, it took an extraordinary amount of teamwork,” Grierson says. “We needed a much
broader team than we usually use on our projects; we had to find
skills sets that we hadn’t had before. Then we also had to introduce
a master-planned community to the Philadelphia marketplace. There
just isn’t that type of community (in the Philadelphia area) yet.”
Without a vision and a willingness to stick your neck out, Grierson
says it is difficult to grow your company in a meaningful way. You
might not think about shouldering a project as expansive as
Applecross Country Club in your own business, but Grierson says
the need to rise to the challenge is the same regardless of what business you are in. Your team will perform the labor, but you have to set
the tone.
Getting through major projects requires communicating your
vision to employees, relying on cross-functional teams and leading by
example.
Communicating the vision
A company vision might be a long-term set of goals that looks years
down the road, and that’s fine for you and your senior management
team. But for those farther down the corporate ladder, you have to
root the message far more in the day-to-day activities of the company. Grierson says your employees have to know how their daily tasks
contribute to the bigger, long-term picture.
He doesn’t try to wow his 200 employees with grand statements
about the future of Pulte Homes. Instead, he maintains consistent
communication with his team members on the ground level, keeping
them focused on a number of basic core values.
He says communicating a vision comes down to one word in the
end: discipline.
“Really what the discipline is, is a focus to communicate,” Grierson
says. “Our operating team works very hard on our strategic plan. We spend a lot of time setting that up and reviewing it. From that, we really gain our vision. We then incorporate that vision into everyday life.
We talk about it in our meetings, we communicate it to the entire
team.”
Keeping messages consistent and frequent helps ensure that your
employees understand what is expected of them.
“Keeping those vision-oriented messages front and center defines
their attitude every day of what they are going to focus on,” Grierson
says. “The other thing is, they’re faced with decisions all day long, and
when they have a set of core values, a belief and a vision, it’s much
easier to make the right decision. Then, at the end of the day, they
know (management) will support them in those decisions because it
clearly was the right thing to do.”
Grierson uses many different types of communication to get his
messages across, from meetings to electronic means to simply walking around. It’s a time-consuming task, especially when your staff
spends most of its time spread out among various job sites.
Electronic communication has its place, but there is no substitute for
face-to-face communication. If it’s important to you, you have to find a
way to make it a priority, even if it means placing other tasks on the
back burner.
“Getting out in the field is probably the thing I’m most passionate
about,” he says. “As a former Navy guy who ran a division on ship, this
is a field-focused business, and you need to be in the field to help run
the business. I try to spend 50 percent of my time out in the field, with
the operating team once a week, and then with the individual members of that team throughout the rest of the week.”
Grierson says the best part of getting out in the field is the opportunity to learn firsthand how things are being done. He looks upon it as
an opportunity to gather best practices from multiple sites and share
them with people working on other projects, which, in turn, helps
keep the entire company focused and working together toward the
same goals.
“I learn so much being in the field, and I can bring it back and take
what I have learned and translate it to 30 other operations or communities, and really help share best practices quicker with the team,”
he says.
“I think being out in the field really reinforces the things we do well.
At the same time, it opens up the door for communication with folks
so they feel very comfortable to ask a question. It creates an interactive, very inclusive environment, getting out there.”
Cross-functional teams
Getting out and talking with his employees is great for building
rapport and focusing everyone on a single vision and set of core values, but Grierson likes to go even deeper.
If you are going to work at Pulte Homes Delaware Valley Division,
you are going to learn what your co-workers do for a living.
Grierson started by setting the example himself when he first
moved to the Philadelphia area. Upon accepting his post as head of
the division, he decided to spend a year working in the field, covering every department, learning a wide range of jobs.
“I spent four months selling homes, I spent four months building
homes, I spent several months in customer relations,” he says. “Until
you do that, you won’t have an appreciation of what the person on
the other end of the phone is struggling with.”
It was such an eye-opening experience for Grierson that he
decided to make it a companywide policy. Now, cross-functional training teams are the norm; homebuilders learn about dealing with customers, salespeople learn about accounting, and
accountants learn how a home is constructed.
Grierson also uses the training sessions as his own excuse to
get involved.
“We do exercises,” he says. “Some are about customers or
processes. I try to attend all the training sessions for at least part
of it. One, to reinforce the vision. Two, to offer myself up to any
questions about things going on. Three, to listen to the feedback
they have as they go through these exercises.
“When they go through these exercises, what I want them to
take away from these sessions is, ‘Gosh, I didn’t know what
these folks did.’ Then, when they’re picking up the phone and
calling to ask someone a question, they have a much better
understanding of who that other person is on the other end of
the line.”
Cross-functional teams also help build a team approach to
problem-solving. Once those in a company get to know each
other and each other’s jobs, they can begin to put their heads
together on projects, bringing different perspectives to the table.
“If you have a diverse voice, people from different backgrounds and job descriptions, you’re going to get a whole bunch
of different ideas on how to approach a certain situation,”
Grierson says. “It’s that collective, diverse thought that makes a
company a lot stronger.”
Keeping it real
Throughout all of his communications, all of the meetings and
cross-functional training sessions, Grierson says there is one universal truth that never changes: Your actions must follow your
words.
“Credibility is the most important thing you can have as a
leader, the trust of your employees,” Grierson says. “If you don’t
walk the talk, you lose some of that credibility. That’s something
important about leadership qualities — to be consistent, to be
continuous in doing the things you say you’re going to do and
continuing to live by the vision.”
Grierson frequently monitors feedback, including employee
surveys and question-and-answer sessions, to gauge whether the
messages he is trying to convey are the messages that are reaching his employees’ ears.
Grierson also places an emphasis on setting the right example.
With a stated goal of satisfying every customer, he wants his team
to quickly address any customer complaint, something he does
personally when needed.
“If there is a dissatisfied customer, I will go talk to them,” he
says. “I encourage our operating team to deal with it first, but if
the customer is still not satisfied with the house when they close,
I want to know so we can get better at managing those expectations.”
Youalsobuildcredibilitybyallowingemployeestogetinvolvedin
formingthefutureofthecompany.Griersonsaysit’saformofbuilding trust, and a big part of that is letting your employees take ownership of their ideas.
“That’s really where a culture is bred, when a mass of people
feel that comfort in sharing their ideas and feeling that their input
is valued in the company,” he says.
Even if you don’t end up using an idea or suggestion, considering the idea and giving it legitimacy in front of the rest of the company is a powerful tool for enabling and motivating your employees and, in turn, getting them to believe in your vision and values.
“It’s really important because I don’t have the idea,” Grierson
says. “They’re coming from the folks who are in the field every
day, that are seeing what is happening. They are the ones who are
going to have the great ideas, and you need people like that who
are passionate and want to be the best.
“Once that passion is unleashed by getting those ideas on the
table, they become engaged, they become part of the team, then
they become a leader on the team. It goes a long way from an
employee standpoint to feel part of the team. There is not much
more satisfying than that.”
HOW TO REACH: Pulte Homes Delaware Valley Division, www.pulte.com