Q. How do you help employees
develop the ability to execute?
You have to pick and
choose where you want to
get engaged and where you
don’t want to. I get the guys
to call me in. It all goes into
how you pick your leadership. It’s not just one guy.
It’s people who share the
vision that I have come up
with and have the same
shared values on how to
drive it and are able to make
decisions and have the comfort level to come to me on
issues rather than me telling
them what to do.
Between me and my managers, we have a punch list of what needs to get done.
The fixes I address in person
privately. The broad lessons,
good news and other perspective, I address in a
broader audience.
I make sure the company is
not a hierarchal company. It’s
a very flat organization. I’m
going to reach two levels
below you and take them out
to lunch. If I can have two levels below me aligned with me,
we’re going to be in pretty
good shape.
Q. What can you do to keep
everything on track?
Sometimes, management is
probably thinking you can
get away with not being
transparent. With employees,
you make a commitment of
certain things. Be open
enough to be straight with
them. People are willing to
accept reality and work to
make it happen with you.
Growing a company is like
raising a child. You are going
to have various stages. Crawl,
walk, run — it’s going to
have issues. Through it all,
the broader footprint is kids
get to school and to college,
and they graduate. That’s a
broader goal.
You’ve got to be flexible
enough to accept failure and
encourage risk. People are
going to make bad calls. How
do you take the lessons out
of it and you make sure you
apply the lessons so they
never happen again?
Make sure the lesson is a
lesson for life. Make sure the
failure is brought out and
you come up with shared lessons out of it and learn from
it. It’s about having the
courage to acknowledge
what it is and then apply the
knowledge and learn from
the lesson.
HOW TO REACH: SGT Inc., (713) 979-3970 or www.sgtglobal.com
