Set high expectations
With a thinner, leaner management team in place, Kelly needed to get more from the management team he kept around.
They would be able to make decisions quicker, which would
help the company’s agility, but more pressure would be on
fewer people.
“I do have very high expectations,” he says. “I try to put people in place who I think are great people who can do great
things.”
Kelly’s great expectations are both a reflection of the faith
and pride he has in his team as well as a world-class motivational tool.
“Any individual performs best when they know people are relying on them and people expect them to perform well,” he says. “I
think that’s true in anything.
“People tend to live up or live down to the expectations you
have for them.
“I’d prefer to have very high expectations, because it’s a lot
more enjoyable to live up to high expectations than to live
down to lower ones.”
Some people could crack under the weight of such high expectations, but Kelly has faith in the team he’s assembled, so he
empowers the team members by listening to them and showing
them trust.
“That means you have to make sure that they know that when
they’re not with me and they’re off making a decision that I will
back them up, and that if the decision is a tough one, that
they’ve got my support,” he says.
“If the decision ends up going awry somehow, they won’t feel
that they’ve been thrown under the bus. Let them know that
they are in this together with us to build this value.”
Part of becoming agile again means pushing decision-making
down as low as possible, and that requires teamwork to get the
best decisions.
“I encourage my team to work with each other — I try to discourage that stovepipe kind of thinking where somebody sees
an issue and it goes directly to me,” Kelly says. “There are
times when that is appropriate, but more often than not, it is
appropriate for those executives to work with each other to
make these decisions first and bring their different views of the
world to me.
“If you are not able to accomplish that, you’ve got a lot of bad
things that come out of that. You have a team that’s not working effectively together.”
In the end, it all comes back to communication.
“What’s important is that we listen — do we listen to one
another?” Kelly says. “We need to vigorously debate and challenge one another. Then, we must demonstrate through our
actions that we are, in fact, applying the same requirements of
ourselves that we would ask anyone else in the company.”
HOW TO REACH: Epicor Software Corp., (949) 585-4000 or www.epicor.com
