Scott Dennis recognizes that most businesses can’t be total democracies. Sooner or later, someone has to make the decisions or the business will not grow and progress toward its goals.
But that fact doesn’t eradicate the need for a strong sense of collaboration among team members. At D&K Engineering Inc. — a developer and manufacturer of electromechanical products that generated $35 million in U.S. revenue last year — Dennis and the rest of the leadership team have worked at creating a culture of collaboration and communication among the company’s employees.
Smart Business spoke with Dennis, the company’s co-founder and CEO, about how you can build a collaborative mindset into your company.
How do you begin to promote collaboration?
My leadership style — and the one that probably pervades our organization — is a collaborative style. While we work hard on making sure goals and vision are very set and clear to everyone, we try to accomplish our goals in a collaborative way whenever possible. We do recognize that someone ultimately has to make the call. It’s not management by consensus, but we do try to collaborate together because we are an innovation company here.
How do you foster a collaborative mindset with employees?
One, that starts with the kind of people you try to hire. We hire people who are very passionate about what they do. If we’re trying to do a new product development endeavor, and we have a group of engineers sitting together, once you have an environment where everyone’s input and valued and it all contributes to solutions, it kind of snowballs from there.
The other piece is to set an environment where you’re not afraid to confront the brutal facts about whatever the situation is. It may mean facing difficulties in a project or you’re behind schedule or you’re not meeting some other goal or specification. So you need to be honest about where you are, working through difficulties together as a team, and then celebrate the successes on the other side. If you do that over and over as a team, over time you turn around and find that you have quite a collaborative environment.
