Robert D. Kerscher has seen
the way that bad leadership can kill a company.
Years ago, Kerscher was part
of a start-up that he loved. But
when the company was sold to
a venture capital group, things
went from people first to profit
first.
“That’s the first time that I
had experienced working for
someone that really didn’t care
a whole lot about our customers or our employees but
was focused more on their personal net worth,” he says.
So Kerscher and a few others
broke away and founded Lexi-Comp Inc. in 1978. They decided then that the focus would be
on culture first to push people
to better results. Today, the
130-employee provider of medical information and clinical
content solutions is focused on
employees’ needs and concerns
every day — including during
the recent transition in which
Kerscher turned the CEO chair
over to his son, Steven, while
staying on as chairman.
Smart Business spoke with
Kerscher about how to use
communication to keep up your
company’s culture and why it’s
important to have a smooth
succession plan in place.
Make a smooth handoff to the next
generation of leaders. What we
did is we announced that the
next five-year plan was going
to include a strategy that
would basically provide for a
younger management team to
come in and be properly
trained and be in a position to
run the next generation.
So when you say how do you
train successors, in this particular case, the training was
really through the exposure
and experience that my son
had working in the business.
I gave him various assignments to head up this group,
head up that group and ultimately become part of the
management team. So the
exposure to the strategic planning and all the activities associated with running the business was something he’s been
exposed to for a total of seven
years.
And what I chose to do is not
totally bow out but take a
backseat role and just try to be
there to support the business.
In the fourth year, I stopped
running the management
meetings and basically began
that transition so that the
beginning of the sixth year,
everything was kind of operating, and there was never an
abrupt date that things dramatically shifted.
Remember the big hype that
took place when we were
going into the year 2000? The
anticipation of this whole
thing, then all of the sudden it
came, and there was really
never a dramatic end — the
clocks continued to work, and
everything continued to go.
Well, certainly, this was not on
that scale, but there was an
anticipation that something
was going to take place.
But in truth, the transition
took place very smoothly in
that we were already operating in the new structure for
basically the last year.
Use several avenues to reinforce
communication. We create a
vision, we try to communicate
that vision and constantly reinforce it. We have monthly
company meetings, we have a
company newsletter, and we
are really focused on providing
great communication around
the building so as decisions
are made, even though they’re
difficult, we try not to do anything overnight.
As you grow from a handful
of people to more than 100
people, it becomes more of a
challenge. Even when you
have company meetings, you
know that there may be 15 to 20 people in the business that
are not there and that are not
capable of hearing the latest
message.
That’s why these things must
be reinforced, because if you
are not at the company meeting, then you’re certainly going
to read about it in the company newsletter.
What we encourage our
management team to do is
communicate (the vision) to
their group. I encourage
myself, and now my son, to sit
in on departmental meetings
on a quarterly basis.
The real thing here is we’re
still a small company, and the
people that work want to feel
like they can walk in and have
dialogue on any topic they
would like, and certainly, that’s encouraged when we show up for these meetings.
