Room to run
Lee contends that giving his managers and department heads lots of room to run has been instrumental in keeping the creative energy high, even if it isn’t always flowing in the same direction. And while everyone might not be running in the same direction at all times, there is clarity of purpose, Lee says, that guides the entire organization.
“We always kept a pretty highly autonomous management structure in place, so I think that’s been very, very important,” Lee says. “Secondly, our individual department managers function with a great deal of autonomy, mostly to our benefit but certainly not always. There are as many views, if you sit a group of R.J. Lee people down, probably as many views of the organization as there are people, and they’re all pretty strongly held.
“What they all would agree on is that their fundamental mission is taking ideas and turning them into something for problem-solving. They would all agree that we should continuously develop new things, new technology. They just never agree on which technology.”
To break through that barrier, Lee spends a lot of hands-on time in the business, walking the halls and talking to everyone, acting as a catalyst to bring ideas and people together. But the process isn’t designed to simply allow people and ideas to run off in a million unchecked directions without any design or purpose. His purpose, Lee says, is to clear the bottlenecks and help people do their jobs.
“It isn’t just letting people be creative, but it’s helping people focus their creativity,” Harmon says. “It isn’t just that they have ideas and they run around and play with their ideas all the time. The ideas filter up and the direction filters down.”
Says Lee: “What I think makes the difference with people is when you, as a manager or as president or anything else, is when you, on a day-to-day basis, are reaching out, touching them, saying, ‘What are you doing?’ giving them a suggestion or saying, ‘Hey, you know so-and-so down the hall, you two ought to be getting together and doing this.’”
Lee sees ongoing reconfiguration of his company’s organizational structure not as a disruption or distraction but as a way to keep it nimble and ready to respond to both the opportunities that arise out of its own pursuits and the challenges that its clients’ problems pose.
“We keep structuring and restructuring,” says Lee. “We don’t want to lose that ability to turn on a dime.”
HOW TO REACH: R.J. Lee Group, www.rjleegroup.com
