Dennis Barnes Jr. is never
short of ideas — something that helps him in his job as president of
Marketing Direct Inc.
But he’s learned that just
because an idea seems good to
the person who came up with it
doesn’t mean that it will work.
“Before you just roll out a
vision, it’s important to do a little sanity check and have people poke holes in some of your
thinking,” he says.
Barnes bounces ideas off
his management team at his
$12 million, 45-employee, direct-marketing company, and if the
team validates those ideas, it’s
time to move forward on
them. And if his ideas aren’t
validated, then it’s back to the
drawing board.
Smart Business spoke with
Barnes about why collaborative leadership beats holing up
in your office and how to get
everyone involved in the
process.
Q. How do you develop a
vision for your organization?
By surrounding myself with
great people and collaborating, we have immediate buyin when there is a vision that
comes out of it. That buy-in
of the leadership ultimately
trickles down through the
organization.
So instead of holing up in a
room myself and trying to
decide where we should go, I
pull together the leadership
team — people over the various disciplines of the company
— and say, ‘Let’s talk about
what we’ve achieved in the
last several years and [what]
we want to achieve in the five
years ahead.’
Q. Why is it important to get
input from different areas of
the company?
Everyone has an opportunity
to speak. There is a big difference between a day in the life
of somebody who is doing
sequel programming and
somebody who is on the front
lines as a customer service representative dealing with clients
or somebody who is heads
down on a Macintosh designing a mail piece or a TV spot.
When we have all those people in the room together
talking about what their
priorities are, it brings
everybody together, and
they realize what the various roles are and how
they are interdependent.
While they do very different functions, they are all
ultimately focused on the
same outcome for our
customer.