Develop talent
A plane’s pilot relies on the talent at both his level — the co-pilot — and below him — the flight crew — in different ways, and the more talented the team, the more enjoyable the flight. While you may be the pilot of your organization now, at one point you were probably the co-pilot. In the same way that someone above you groomed you, you too have to build up a talented team around and below you.
To get the right people, you can either hire from within or bring people in from the outside.
While there are times you hire from outside your company, Sturm notes that, in many cases, it’s beneficial to hire from within.
“It’s better and perhaps wiser to hire from within for a number of reasons,” he says. “First of all, it shows that there is a path within the company for advancement, and, secondly, as people have worked in lower positions and moved up the ladder, they’ve had the opportunity to prove themselves.”
He says that hiring from within is safer and more rewarding for the company. For Professional Travel, it’s also important to develop talent internally because the business is so specialized that it’s difficult to find people with the knowledge and skills to be successful.
The key to hiring people from within is to spend time looking for the right people and develop their skills.
“You have to look for people who have the kind of character traits that we as a company want to have collectively, that we have people who are honest and have integrity and are loyal and dedicated, that have shown that they can be not only loyal but that they can persevere at whatever the job that is set before them,” Sturm says.
To identify those who have potential for advancement, look at how they’re currently performing.
“Some are obvious — the old ‘cream rises to the top,’” he says. “Really, we have to identify that through the evaluation processes by their department heads.”
Beyond just evaluations, Sturm also relies on his managers to recognize outstanding performance through its Spirit Coin program. If a manager or department head sees or hears of someone who went above and beyond for one of the clients, then the employee is awarded a spirit coin. The spirit coin entitles the recipient to a half day off, in addition to his or her current number of vacation and personal days. If an employee earns several of these spirit coins, that’s one way that a manager identifies someone who will go above and beyond and could potentially advance in the organization.
When standouts are identified, then you have to work to develop their talent to prepare them for the next level.
“We try to encourage them and pick people within the company that they can emulate,” he says. “If they’re moving into an area where they haven’t had particular expertise … we’d send them to seminars for further training along those lines.”
For example, if someone was moving into a role in human resources, he would set that person up in the appropriate seminars and workshops to help the employee garner the skills he or she would need moving forward.
It’s important that you always work to develop the talent below you in your organization.
“We like to be training the No. 2 person in every department,” Sturm says. “We encourage every department head to train their next subordinate as fully as possible. In an ideal situation, every one of our department heads knows everything or could train everyone in their department to take over for them should the need arise.”
And Sturm doesn’t allow himself to be excluded. He’s been grooming his No. 2 man, who started as a salesperson years ago, and he’s now prepared to take over the company should he need to.
“If you can train all the people that work for you to become better than you are, you’ll become better in the process, and your entire unit or department will be way better,” he says. “My No. 2 guy in the company, I believe, is now better than I am, and he started off just as a salesperson. I taught him everything that I knew, and I think he’s teaching me a few things, and that’s a good thing.”
Oftentimes, as leaders, it’s hard to let go of the “It’s my company,” mentality, but if you truly want your business to succeed, this is something you have to do.
“Sometimes that becomes a challenge, but I think that if you as the CEO are really caring about your company and your employees, you’ll keep those things that you have to be responsible for and do those things, but you’ll be free to delegate out the rest of them to the capable and confident leaders that you’ve chosen and have proven themselves to be worthy of running the company,” Sturm says.
It all goes back to having strong communication between yourself and your team members. Sturm chooses to delegate everything he possibly can, but he maintains an overview of it all by requiring that his team report back to him about how those jobs are getting done.
“It’ll give you a lot more peace of mind, and it’ll give you a lot more time to look over the bigger picture, exactly where the company is going, where it should be going, and as long as you don’t tie yourself up with minutia and try to micro-manage every department of your company, you’ll have the freedom to be innovative and the look-ahead type [of] person that the CEO should be,” he says.
It’s this focus on the future that is needed if you ultimately want to grow your business.
“In my mind, the CEO is responsible for all of the functions of the company, but he doesn’t have to do them all,” Sturm says. “Almost as important or maybe more important is the ability to look forward, to look ahead and to plan to get the company to where it should be as opposed to where it is today. If you involve yourself in all the minutia of micromanagement, you never have time to be a visionary and look at the bigger picture.”
HOW TO REACH: Professional Travel Inc., (440) 734-8800 or www.protrav.com
