Although CEOs tend to
overuse the phrase “building a team” to explain
their stance on collaboration,
Bill Shreffler takes the analogy
to a new level as president and
CEO of Broadstripe. In an effort
to foster healthy competition
and keep Broadstripe’s vision
and culture alive and visible,
Shreffler has organized a sort of
organizationwide customer satisfaction fantasy football league.
The system, which uses football
terminology and is based on
key performance indicators, has
been successful for Shreffler in
other organizations, and he
says the results have been no
less positive at Broadstripe,
which posted 2006 revenue of
about $100 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Shreffler about concentrating
on the basics and why a good
coach supports every member
of the team.
Maintain a positive culture. People in this company know
that they have a right to fail. We
have a phrase that we call ‘bias
for action.’ We would rather
have somebody do something
than not do something.
We are also aware that we’re
going to make some mistakes,
and the people that I work with
know this. If you are truly trying
to stretch and do something
good for the company and you
fall a little short, that’s fine.
We’ll meet, talk about it and
figure out how to do it better
the next time. The overall goal is
that we grow the company.
As I was coming up through my
career, I always thought, ‘If I ever
get the chance someday to lead
an organization, I want to make
it a place where people love to
come to work.’ They have not
only just an enjoyment of their
job but an enjoyment of the enriching experience in their career.
It’s extremely important to
maintain that. A culture is a living, breathing thing. You can
actually touch culture. Culture
is sustainable, but it takes a
large amount of ownership and
care and feeding from the
leader of an organization to
maintain. As the CEO of this
company, if I start to veer off
course, the implication to the
culture is significant.
Build a team … literally. We created a fictional football team.
Each of our regions created
their own subteam, and we’ve
created what we call key performance indicators, the key
things in our business that move
the needle in customer growth.
We use those key performance indicators to scrimmage
the regions, and whoever has
the best KPI wins the scrimmage for the month. When we
built the KPI, we built them as a customer advocate. We looked at
it from the eyes of the customer.
It’s so easy in business to measure things that you think are important, but at the end of the day,
we need to measure things that
are important to the customer.
We use football analogies
about scoring points, getting in
the red zone and scoring touch-downs, making passes and completions. We talk about where
we are, what our field position
looks like, how we scored, how
the team’s holding up, how special teams is doing. …
There are many times during
the quarter that we will send out
updates using the football theme,
talking about how we are on field
position, how we’re moving the
ball, what are some great plays
we just ran. These are the ways
we continue to keep the vision and culture in front of folks.
You can use this concept anywhere, anyhow, and it works. It
takes an engaged senior management team that believes in
the concept and is willing to
takes some risks. We wear jerseys at our corporate, off-site
meetings. We wear jerseys at
our board meetings. We’re not
afraid to walk through lobbies
of hotels in our jerseys, with our
names on the back and
‘Champions’ on the front.
When we first did this, there
was this hokey factor that people worried about, but forget the
hokey. People love it. People
embrace it. They think it’s great
because who doesn’t want to
belong to a team?
Master the fundamentals. When
you boil it all down, it comes down to blocking and tackling.
Using the football example,
you can run the trick plays all
day long, but no matter how
fancy you are, it’s how you’re
blocking at the line that really
matters whether you’re going
to move the ball.
A lot of companies get lost in
the details. You’ve got to block
and tackle. You’ve got to do the
very simple things right every single time. Once you get that blocking and tackling down, then you
can go on and build those trick
plays and do the fun things, but
without blocking and tackling,
you’ve built a house on sand.
Support your team members. I like
to flip the organizational chart
upside-down, and I put myself
at the very bottom. My job is to
support everybody in my organization all the way up to the very
top, which is the customer. I have
got to walk that talk every single
day and not vary from that at all.
I like to think of myself as someone who lifts people up or helps
people become the best they can
possibly be. I enjoy seeing people
reach far above what they think
they can achieve, and then watch
them achieve those great efforts.
Everybody wears a badge, and
that badge says, ‘Make me feel
important.’ If you take the time
to not just make the employees
important for the sake of doing
it but truly take the time to get
to know people and help them
become the best they can and
make them feel like they’re an
important part of the organization, it moves the needle in a big
way, helps your organization
and helps everybody.
HOW TO REACH: Broadstripe, (636) 534-7400 or www.broadstripe.com