Encourage accountability
You need to have all of your employees — particularly at the management level — on board and promoting your vision because you need to be able to hold them accountable for carrying it out.
Holveck calls it “distributed leadership.” Essentially, it means he wants his leaders at every level of the organization to shoulder the burden of accountability for the decisions they make. While Holveck is the author of Endo’s vision for the future, he pushes decisions and action down the ladder.
“We want change that is built on distributed leadership and action orientation,” he says. “We really want to see people take the ownership on decisions. We don’t want them to hide behind organizational hierarchy and flow charts. In doing that, they are accountable for the delivery, not only for their action but for having a backup plan for that action. It’s accepted that not everything is going to work, so everyone needs to have that Plan B in their back pocket and be ready to act on that.”
On an action level, Holveck was trying to break what, he says, is a long-held tradition in many industries — a tradition in which managers tell their subordinates, “Do what I say.”
“We want to break that tradition, and to do it, you need people who have the understanding of what you’re doing, clear transparency on your goals and also making sure that they are empowered to act on the elements that are going to be put in place to achieve that strategy,” he says.
To build a sense of accountability into your organization, you need to go back to the basics of good communication. You need to continually dialogue with the managers to whom you have delegated power. You need to check in on their progress, facilitate discussion with them and ensure that they have the resources to perform at a high level.
“The whole distributed leadership idea is to make it very clear that you’re empowered to do it, but you will be asked to have that next strategy ready to go,” Holveck says. “Like all companies, we have formal reviews, annual and midyear reviews, but what I really try to stress is to use the word ‘conversation’ in the form of regular dialogue. You want people constantly discussing and moving forward but also going through a dynamic review process.”
Holveck’s vision has been coming to fruition over the past several years, with Endo continuing to experience revenue growth. The company generated $1.46 billion in 2009 revenue.
“We’ve been able to stay on track with double-digit growth, top line and bottom line,” he says. “Those basic metrics have been made. The problem is if you only looked at that, you can establish some degree of satisfaction and success. But the thing that really is the measurement is what I see today in terms of the office parking lot being filled early and emptying later because people are more involved. The elements of distributed leadership are taking hold in the sense that the strategic direction was set forth, but we’re now finding new ownership taking hold and new ideas starting to be brought into the fabric of the strategic plan.
“That’s the development of the ‘factor X,’ that is the part where now you’re getting people to own it, believe in it, and now they’re carrying it further than the original game plan. The reward is the excitement that you can feel, where people are starting to say, ‘This is my strategy; this is my company.’”
How to reach: Endo Pharmaceuticals Holdings Inc., (800) 462-3636 or www.endo.com
