John Limbert likes to think of his 210 employees at National Bank and Trust Co. as a baseball team, albeit a large one.
Limbert, president and CEO, can’t pick up a bat or run the bases for his employees. Instead, he has to stay out of their way and let them succeed.
To do that, he gathers their input before setting goals and then gives them the reins to reach those goals creatively, keeping an eye on their progress and providing support when necessary.
The 40-year banking veteran says he has made it through a career of tough decisions and tasks by relying on the team effort of his employees.
“The most rewarding part about the job is giving people the opportunity to fail and then helping them avoid that,” says Limbert, whose company posted 2007 revenue of $41 million.
Smart Business spoke with Limbert about how to empower your employees to reach their goals and how to follow up on their progress.
Get input on decisions. Early in my career, I used to micromanage everything. When you do that, you diminish the worth of the person that you’re talking to. Once you’ve hired a good staff, you sit down, you formulate a plan and then you get out of their way.
There’s three pieces I normally use when I look at a situation. The first thing you do is sit down with the people that are responsible for that area and you get their perspective on what’s working and what’s not working. The second thing is you put a financial analysis, independent of the operating group, against their observations and against the metrics that you think that group ought to be earning.
Then you sit down with both the finance side and the operating side and walk your way through: If something’s earning 4 percent and we think it should be earning 8 percent, what are the steps? It’s not a one-person decision.
Baseball teams mirror what I believe a successful company is. You’ve got nine players who play the game and a manager who never takes an at-bat. I’m managing things with the input of coaches and players. You build a team, and they all have different strengths, and you’d be a fool not to rely on those
strengths.
Set the goal and let employees go. There shouldn’t be any mistake in any manager’s mind about
what the goal is. Sometimes there are lapses in communicating, but at the end of the day, most of our folks understand what the goal is, at least at the management level. If we haven’t gotten it down to the last person hired, then we probably need to re-examine our communication process.
If everybody understands what the goal is, you can tell them, ‘There it is,’ and let them be creative and figure out what’s the best and the quickest way to get there. When you do that, what you get is people who, A, enjoy what they’re doing and, B, are allowed to be flexible and creative on their own.
I don’t think the buy-in is the hard part; I think creating the opportunity for them to be successful is more difficult. It all gets back to empowering.
What’s worked for me is finding an operating mechanism that allows them to own their book of business. That management person has to be the author, not the reviewer [of their budget]. Then sitting down on a routine basis and mapping their progress to that budget affords you the opportunity to say, ‘You said you were going to operate this department with a $10,000 profit this month, and we only
made ($8,000). What didn’t work? What can we do to help?’ And then sit back and listen.
Agree on the strategy, agree on the targets and then (have) regular communication to find out if it’s working or not. It’s like sailing a ship. You’re always looking at that compass to figure out where you are. If you’re not doing that, you’re going to end up farther away than your port of call. You’ve got to keep
checking.
