When Elaine Roberts was
offered her first job at an airport, she accepted it but told
her boss she wasn’t sure she
wanted to stay in that field for
her career.
Twenty-five years and three
airports later, Roberts is president and CEO of Columbus
Regional Airport Authority, an
independent, governmental
entity responsible for operating
three Central Ohio airports: Port
Columbus International Airport,
Rickenbacker International
Airport and Bolton Field.
With 2007 operating revenue of
$75.4 million and 390 employees,
Roberts runs her organization like
a private business with a public
purpose. Several years ago, the
airport authority was experiencing
growing pains, so Roberts and
her managers solicited input from
employees to create a five-year
strategic plan to manage growth.
They also hired an outside
consultant to study the efficiency
of the three airports’ IT division,
and the employees were so
pleased with the results that
Roberts expanded the study to
make her organization’s other
operating units as effective.
Smart Business spoke with
Roberts about how she makes
sure her employees are heard
and how she motivates them to
do their best.
Be collaborative and accessible.
Where it’s practical, I like to
get consensus and buy-in to
decision-making. When we
don’t have that luxury of time
and decisions need to be made
quickly, I certainly can do that.
I have regular staff meetings
every other week with my management team. I try to engage
conversation with that group
before making a change. I’ll
make sure everybody has an
opportunity to be heard, and if
there is disagreement, we’ll see
if we can look at all the options
before we make a decision.
My style is fairly open; I want
to be accessible to all employees. I’m a pretty hands-on
leader. I try not to micromanage, but I do keep pretty
informed about what’s going
on across the organization.
When we’re going to discuss
a change in direction in the
way we’ve been doing things,
I’ll try to engage conversation
with my executive direct
reports and our senior team
before making the change. I’ll
make sure everybody has an
opportunity to be heard, and if
there is disagreement, we’ll see
if we can look at all the options
before we make a decision.
Aim for alignment and accountability.
Alignment helps keep focus
on what’s really important. If
you’re not aligned properly and
you’ve got too many cooks in
the kitchen trying to manage
problems, it’s not nearly as efficient. It can also be stressful
because you have people in the
ranks saying, ‘Who’s doing this?
Who’s got responsibility?’
The biggest issue is accountability. Who do you hold accountable if something doesn’t get
done? Do you have to ask two
or three or four people how
much of this project are they involved with? Employees generally don’t want to see their
peers getting away with not
being held accountable.
Alignment and accountability
are ways to communicate to the
entire work force: ‘Here’s what
we’re focused on. Here’s who’s
going to have lead responsibility,
and they’re going to need support and help from the other
divisions.’
Motivate your staff. A couple
years ago, we created the
President’s Award of Excellence.
Throughout the year, you can
nominate another employee, or
a supervisor can nominate
somebody, and we’re looking
for things like how this employee exemplified our core values.
Twice a year, we go through a
selection process with a committee of managers and senior
leaders. We have a recognition
luncheon and let those employees invite their families. We give
each person a check, and we do
a communication piece with their
picture and why they were a
recipient of the award, and that’s
distributed to all the employees.
Does that motivate people to
perform? I would hope it does.
It’s really more about the recognition in front of their peers and
their family that motivates people to want to do well.
If you don’t recognize when
employees are performing well,
they’ll lose potential motivation
to do a good job, and they’ll
think that their boss doesn’t
care one way or the other. If you
don’t recognize employees, it
also allows the company to become more complacent and
satisfied with the way things are.
It’s important to reward
exceptional performance when
an employee goes above and
beyond. This is the kind of
behavior, performance and customer service that we want our
other employees to model. We
want to be known as exceeding
our customers’ expectations.
Stay grounded. Don’t get too big
for your britches, and don’t
forget where you came from.
There are a lot of people that
helped make you successful
personally as well as the team
and the organization.
There’s always a place for
recognizing personal performance and holding people
accountable for their responsibilities, but it also takes a lot of people to run any successful organization, and you need
to identify it, show appreciation and not lose sight of that.
I’ve had the fortune of some
excellent mentors and people
who opened doors for me, and
I’ve always greatly appreciated
that.
I had one of these strange
ambitions growing up of wanting to work in everybody’s job
at least a day so I could relate
to those individuals and appreciate what they go through. …
So I had a lot of part-time jobs
and summer jobs before I
went away to college.
All of that ties back into my
history: I can only be successful if I have successful people
around me, and the whole
team is successful.
HOW TO REACH: Columbus Regional Airport Authority, (614) 239-4000 or www.columbusairports.com