Create proactive processes
It sounds pretty basic, but it’s true: If you want your people to adjust on the fly, you better have people who have the ability to do so. Figure out what trait you need the most in your business and figure out what it means to you.
Don’t assume you know now. As Drake’s management style has changed over the years, one thing she noticed was she constantly interviewed almost everyone she met. In doing so, she started to think about the traits that made her people successful and how she was subconsciously looking for those in others.
Take a second and think about your best employees. What do they have in common that makes them adaptable to your business? At DSC, Drake sat down with her senior leaders and had this conversation, and they realized her most successful people are extremely flexible and have high integrity. Once you figure out something like that, Drake says you should put it on paper.
“We have actually formalized a process called ODR — it stands for organizational development review, which includes creating strategic criteria around which we hire and promote people,” she says. “And that includes flexibility and integrity so that we have a formalized written understanding and then we practice what we preach by using that criteria as part of our job evaluation for promotions or our evaluation of candidates.”
In all, Drake and her team came up with 12 criteria, then broke each down into workable definitions that could be explained to a layman. Flexibility, for example, needs to be not just something people practice in their project thinking but also in relationships with others. Now, every hire and promotion in the company is done by a cross section of people who work with the person and can individually judge those characteristics and talk about whether that person makes the cut.
“So we get some good cross-thinking because at times you can behave really well in front of your boss, but you go out there and don’t behave the same way, so it gives us good data on people’s behaviors, which is really what this is all about, and that’s how we decide on the actual promotion of people,” she says.
Using that process in everything is important. It’s one thing for you to hire and promote based on your criteria, but it’s far more important that it gets rolled out companywide.
“You have to always walk the talk, but that’s not enough,” she says.
“I always worry about people that say all you have to do is be a role model — you have to do a whole lot more than that. But if you walk the talk and are selecting people who meet these capabilities, then you’ve got a well-honed team that can act this way, which is what you need.”
And don’t think that once you’ve gone through this process that you’re done for good. You need to periodically look at the traits you value to see if they still fit your business.
“It’s a very flexible structure and yet it’s ‘planful,’” Drake says. “We think through what we’re going to need for the next year based on what our best guesses are so we’re not constantly reacting. You don’t want that, you want to do a better job thinking and feeling what’s happening.”
It can be slow going at first, but Drake notes that at DSC she sees the effect.
“Every now and then, I’ll take a snapshot and look back a couple of years and think, ‘Oh my gosh, these folks are really using their flexibility correctly; these folks understand what we mean by integrity,’” she says. “But you can’t just leave it completely up to culture and chance, you’ve got to have a process and formalization.”
