Identify leaders
Kocher is not looking for a show of hands when he seeks out leaders to help keep his company moving forward and growing.
“If anybody tells me they have leadership potential, I don’t want them working for me,” Kocher says. “You have to see it. Leaders go to the top. You can see a leader. If you walk into a cafeteria at a sixth-grade school, if you pay attention, you’re going to figure out who the leaders are of that classroom pretty quickly.”
The challenge for you is to create situations where your people can demonstrate their leadership skills. Create situations where you can be out there observing employees in action and seeing who rises to the occasion.
“We’re moving one of our businesses called Lids Team Sports from Madison, Wis., to Indianapolis,” Kocher says. “It’s something that needed to be done to get the synergies out of both businesses. We went to our directors and employees and said, ‘Can you guys take on this project and make it happen?’ It’s basically a project that they took on above and beyond what they were already doing. During this process, we have about a half-dozen employees that have been living in Madison away from their families for about four to six months until this move officially happens to help with the process of moving. So it’s a pretty large move.”
It’s an important move for the company and an important opportunity to see what kind of leadership skills the employees who are seeing it through have.
“We have a long history of taking a store manager and working them through our system to where they play a major management role in our company,” Kocher says. “That’s a lot more inexpensive than going out and finding that person initially. You pass over a lot of people and you lose a lot of culture along the way. We try to teach our people.”
That teaching and gaining of experience is where it’s at when it comes to finding leaders. The Type A personality with the voice everyone can hear is not necessarily your best leader.
“I don’t think the leader is the person who always gets up in front of people to speak and is a good speaker,” Kocher says. “Good speakers don’t make good leaders. A lot of people get confused. They think, ‘Boy, that person can really handle themselves with a mic.’ That doesn’t mean they can be a good leader.”
You’re a leader. You know that it’s the person who gets things done, not necessarily the one with the million-dollar smile, that you want leading the charge in your business.
“It goes back to a leader in our culture is someone who is willing to get down and dirty with the group,” Kocher says. “You let people go out and be leaders and stay out of their way.”
You still ask questions and you still check in and make yourself available to that person for questions and feedback. But you let them do their job and see how they handle it.
“Be involved enough in the process that you can see that they’re going in the right direction,” Kocher says.
