Beverly Bethge believes
that a good business
leader shares one important trait with a tightrope
walker.
She says that both need to
have a finely tuned sense of
balance — which comes in
handy when a leader is deciding when to be hands-on and
when to be hands-off with your
employees.
“If you never dive in and really
help them solve some problems,
they’ll never see you as being
able to do that or understanding
their world,” says Bethge,
founder, partner and chief creative officer of Ologie. “At the
same time, you can’t get stuck
in that. You have to rise up and
always be able to paint that big
picture for them. The key to
leadership is walking that
tightrope.”
Bethge has maintained that
balance well at Ologie, a
55-employee branding agency
that posted revenue growth of
118 percent from 2004 to 2006.
Smart Business spoke with
Bethge about why creating a
great culture isn’t as simple as
taking the troops out for happy
hour once a month.
Q. How do you attract quality
employees?
You have to create value for
them. Value comes from having
really high standards. As a
leader, if you don’t believe in
quality, they’re going to see that.
They’re going to sense it and
sort of sniff it out. So quality has
to come from the top.
Quality and high standards
doesn’t mean being huge. It
means being significant. Whether
you’re big or small, be significant.
Q. How do you achieve significance and value?
Value is doing great work.
Great work is innovation, accuracy, and, in our case, great
work is based around creativity.
When you’re doing great
work, you get a more significant client base. Then that
leads to a career path for people. If you’ve got the huge
desire to do great work, other
things follow. Money follows,
great clients follow and opportunities for people follow.
For us, the huge part of
having great employees
and getting them is creating a great culture.
Q. How do you create
a strong company
culture?
People think that’s
about dropping some
happy hour on people
once a month. Wow,
that’s great culture. You
can do that — and we do
— but that’s the icing on
the cake. That’s not
where it starts. You walk
into your company, and
how does it feel? What
does a day feel like in
your company? What’s
the mojo in the building?
A negative work environment
can alienate people who don’t
want to be part of that. Are
they learning something every
day? Can people grow there?
Those are the things you have
to create for people to want to
be there.
If you sell that when you’re
recruiting people, you have to
deliver it. You can’t just say that.
Q. How does creating a
strong culture help you attract
good employees?
I believe a company is like a
person. When you start a company from the beginning, you
kind of protect it like a person.
We’re in our 20th year now.
The company has a personality,
it has a voice, and it has a point
of view. That’s like a vision and
mission on steroids, if you really think about what the company is all about.
If you can clearly articulate
those things, then you have a
huge foundation for making
decisions about anything.
To articulate it, you usually need something very tangible
that people can hold on to and
say, ‘This is what our company
stands for.’ Sometimes people
do that in a paragraph-form mission, vision, and I think it’s
important to have those things
in place, but there’s no human
voice to that. It’s very important that you put together the
document; it’s almost like a
mini manifesto that people can
get their arms around.
If you communicate those
things really clearly, you’re
going to attract certain people,
and you’re going to repel certain people. Certain people will
just go running away from you
when you really clearly articulate your company vision.
That’s a good thing because
you can’t be all things to all
people. There’s a certain kind
of person who fits in our company, and we’re OK with that. If
you have good alignment like
that, you’ll have great retention.
Q. How do you create that
alignment?
For starters, in order to have a
good culture, you have to spend
the time on it. You have to make
it a value. You have to talk
about it as a company.
It also has to come from the
top. One of my partners is very
much about the HR function.
It’s a big part of who we are.
Our culture permeates through
our entire environment. We call
it propaganda, but it’s all over
the place. The things we believe
in are loud and clear in our
space.
We do that for our clients, too.
We call it environmental branding. It lets your clients know
what you believe in, but it lets
your employees know what you
believe in, too. Then, they can
live by that every day — even
more if it’s really in your face
every day.
HOW TO REACH: Ologie, (614) 221-1107 or www.ologie.com