Like most leaders, Jim Ziglar
has two trusted philosophers whose wisdom he relies
on in tough times: his wife and
his uncle.
Of course, it helps that his
uncle is noted business author
and speaker Zig Ziglar. But the
point is that as the president
and CEO of Cross Match
Technologies Inc., he has been
growing his entire career by
being willing to adapt and listening to solid advice from
every kind of teacher in his life.
As a result, he’s learned he has
to do a better job of delegating
and figured out what it takes to
motivate his 330 employees
every day. Those strategies are
helping him guide Cross Match
to new heights: The $90 million
supplier of biometric identity
technologies has created five
industry-first technologies since
2005.
Smart Business spoke with
Ziglar about why it’s OK to let
people do things in a way that
you never would and why you
might be a lot better off if you
get rid of your selfish superstar.
Stop trying to do everything yourself. I believe in delegation. If
you hire somebody to do a
job, they should be given the
flexibility and the ability to
do that job. When I start
doing other people’s jobs for
them, it’s a pretty good indication that they are not going
to be with us for very long.
Earlier in my career, when I
didn’t understand that, I
almost killed myself. You just
can’t do it all, and if you try to
do it all, you’re not going to
do any of it very well. So if
you don’t delegate, you’re setting yourself and the company
or organization up for failure.
My wife, who is a tremendous manager, has, over the
years, pointed out to me that
I didn’t have to do everything, and I was killing
myself. And then I realized
that when you ask someone
else to do it, just because
they don’t do it exactly the
way you would doesn’t mean
that it’s wrong, they just do it
differently.
Once I realized that it didn’t
have to be done my way every
time, and that it would work
doing it somebody else’s way,
that’s when I was liberated
from the need to do it all.
Part of motivating people is
to gain their trust as well as
to trust them. I think it has
enormous positive impact
that the CEO knows you
exist, knows what you do
and makes a point of saying,
‘Hey, I know you are doing a
great job, and I trust you to
keep on doing it.’
Raise your standards to engage
employees. Create high expectations for people. High performers expect to be pressed,
and if they’re not pressed to
deliver at a high level, then they are probably not going
to be with you long. There is
a difference between creating stress and beating people
up and creating high expectations.
We have the most talented
pool of people in our industry, and while no company is
immune from losing people
from time to time, I can tell
you that we don’t lose many.
It actually comes the other
way; we attract talent with
our standards.
We don’t have to push hard
to get them when they recognize that this is a place where
they will be surrounded by
people who are at that same
level they are, surrounded by
people who are creative, that they can share these creative
ideas with and really generate these exciting products
and systems.
Point toward your competitors as a
motivational tool. It’s a competitive business, and it gets
more and more competitive.
My job is to point out what
the competition is doing and
to urge us along and to create an environment where
those creative juices continue to work among our very
smart people.
Competition is a wonderful
thing. I know a lot of people
think, ‘Gosh, I’d really be
happy if I didn’t have any
competitors.’ I’d be miserable if we didn’t have competitors. Competition is what makes us better, and it keeps
pushing our people to higher
and higher plateaus.
Sacrifice the selfish superstar to
improve your team. Sometimes
you have people that don’t
know how to play as a team
player and don’t want to
change, and even though you
talk to them about it, they
simply can’t get there. In
those cases, I’ve had to take
some more radical action
and find someone to replace
them.
I spent many years on Wall
Street, and I often saw people who thought they were
masters of the universe. And
they were quite good at what
they did, but their failure or inability to be cooperative or
work as a team while they
were productive brought
down the productivity significantly of a lot of other people. I came to the conclusion
a long time ago that no one
is irreplaceable, even me.
When one person, no matter how good they are, gets
in the way of the entire
organization moving forward
as it should, that person
should not be allowed to do
that. And it’s painful sometimes when you’ve got somebody that’s really good, but
they’re unwilling. I always
believe you should council
with people like that but, at
some point, the good of the
whole has to take precedence over one person. <<
HOW TO REACH: Cross Match Technologies Inc. (866) 725-3926 or www.crossmatch.com