Focus on employees
If you want to be successful on the people side of the business, you have to start by looking at your hiring process.
“You’ve got to hire correctly,” Sinisgalli says. “When you’re out going on campus or hiring people for midlevel roles, you have to do it with a profile in mind that’s consistent with your culture.”
Sinisgalli looks for someone who’s not only talented but also customer-focused, and he asks a lot of questions to see if candidates have both traits.
“If it’s a college student, it’s a little harder,” he says. “It’s somebody who’s not had work experience before, but then you can ask them questions about what they do in their spare time, how they spend their summer breaks, how engaged they are in outside educational activities, to get a sense for how they prioritize, how they spend their energy.”
If someone has work experience already, it’s a little easier to drive down into his or her core.
“Ask them about what things they were successful at, what wasn’t successful, and then penetrate those areas, and it will come across pretty quickly if they’re focused on customer success or focused on something else,” he says.
Sinisgalli says it’s also crucial to discover whether someone is more focused on personal success or company success.
“Most people are pretty polished and sophisticated,” Sinisgalli says. “It would not come across blatantly. You’d have to ferret that out. … It’s hard to fake more than five or six questions. You penetrate any one line of questioning, and you ultimately get to the core of any person you’re speaking with.”
Lastly, he typically does at least three to five interviews each time he’s hiring someone and also mixes up the location.
“Find more opportunities for the person to behave as they would normally behave,” he says. “Do an office interview, perhaps a lunch interview, a dinner interview, a sporting event. Go to a baseball game or play a round of golf. It’s a good opportunity to better penetrate someone’s true culture.”
Once you have the right people on board, then you have to focus on them.
“Having the right development programs in place is critically important,” he says.
Manhattan has technical training and general manager training, but it also has more elite programs to really hone the cream of the crop. Through the Manhattan Academy, the best of the best spend a week with Sinisgalli and other senior executives in a mini MBA program.
With about 2,200 employees though, it can be hard to figure out whom to invest time and money into, so Sinisgalli relies on his direct reports to help him. Through the semiannual review process, leaders identify team members that have exceptional potential.
“We define that as the ability to do their current job extremely well and the ability to move at least two levels further than where they are today,” he says. “Identify those folks that have exceptional capacity.”
To objectively identify people, he has a matrix with four quadrants on it. One axis is the ability to execute in the current role and the other axis is potential. Ideally, employees want to be in the upper right quadrant. If someone falls into that golden quadrant, then Sinisgalli puts more efforts toward training and developing him or her and ensures his or her compensation plan is strong to keep that person interested in growing with Manhattan.
Lastly, you have to make sure you stay attuned to your employees’ needs and desires.
“Keep an eye out to what’s important to the employees,” Sinisgalli says. “If you’re doing the things that make the employees feel good about working in your company, they’ll do great work.”
For example, if employees are interested in working in China, India, France or another Manhattan location abroad, Sinisgalli makes it happen. If people are interested in working in another department, he gives them the opportunity to try it, and if it doesn’t work out, they can go back to their former role.
“We prioritize that by the top, top folks get the first crack at those transfers, but we try to make that available to anyone who’s in our business,” he says. “It’s one way to expand their knowledge but also keep them excited about working here.”
If you really want to know how your employees feel and what they need though, you have to make them comfortable speaking to you.
For example, about twice a month, Sinisgalli has breakfast with 10 randomly selected associates. He provides doughnuts, juice and coffee and talks for about 15 minutes about the status of the company, and then he opens it up for questions and dialogue. He learns a lot about where he needs to focus his efforts just by listening to their thoughts and ideas.
Another way he connects with employees is by having casual events. During football season, they had a barbecue in the parking deck and encouraged employees to wear their favorite college gear. Sinisgalli sported his Cornell University apparel while grilling burgers and hot dogs and enjoying conversations with employees.
“Create that open environment, and talk to the folks in a relaxed way that will make them comfortable raising ideas and concerns,” he says.
The combination of doing all of these things helps create a strong company culture that encourages your employees to grow with you.
By combining his every employee efforts with his every customer efforts, Sinisgalli has succeeded in taking what was already a good company at $196.8 million when he arrived and growing it to $337 million the past two years. But despite the company’s success, he’ll continue his every customer, every employee, every day approach to ensure Manhattan continues to thrive.
“By making incremental progress on driving up customer satisfaction and making this a better place for employees to work, I believe it will continue to allow us to become an even better company than we are today,” he says.
How to reach: Manhattan Associates Inc., (770) 955-7070 or www.manh.com
