Early in his career, Brad Eller was promoted to a position that, by title and job description, he didn’t have enough experience to have, and the new role opened his eyes.
“When that happened, what I realized very quickly is people do not think the same way that I think,” Eller says. “People do not do the same things that I do. People don’t approach problems or issues or conflict the way that I approach those things.”
At the time, he didn’t have the resources to hire a coach to help him, so he immersed himself into reading a variety of professional books to help him learn how to understand different personality types. What he learned still helps him today as president and CEO of LEVEL5 LLC, a construction management services company that has climbed the Inc. 500 list as a result of its growth from $1.5 million in revenue in 2004 to $47.5 million in 2007.
Smart Business spoke with Eller about how to understand personalities and build a strong senior management team.
Develop a strong senior management team. Everyone has to understand the need of a senior management team. One person cannot drive a business. It takes a group of people, and it takes a group of people that have alternative thoughts or different perspectives for a president or CEO to really get a read on any situation or issue or problem or actually to create a vision.
How I developed that is twofold. One, there’s going to be people in the business that you didn’t select — they’re in the business, so you have to understand those people and you have to understand what perspectives they bring to the table and what their talents are. I don’t want to go too far into psychology but kind of what is their personality profile? Where do they stand? How do they view life? You have to understand the perspective of who that person is and what they represent.
You have some of those people and then you have the ability or occasion to bring in other people. You have to bring people into your organization in areas where you’re lacking. Sometimes managers surround themselves with people who think like they do, and that’s a mistake. You have to look at the uniqueness.
Senior leadership, it’s like a stew; my job is to put the right ingredients in the stew — make sure that those ingredients complement one another. I can’t put the same ingredients in, otherwise it wouldn’t be a stew, and I have to make sure the ingredients bring out the flavor of the other ingredients and that it blends. Then I have to occasionally taste it and add ingredients. Sometimes my job is to stir it up a little bit. Then my job is to sometimes put the heat on and sometimes to turn the heat down.
