We have an amazing management team that we’ve been able to build up over the last four years, and that team has helped engender trust and cultural shifts in the organization. We work as a team; we meet weekly. It’s people that other people in the organization have worked with not just for a few weeks but for years. Our CFO used to be our controller, and she had great relationships throughout the organization. She is able to create a change where our former CFO wasn’t. We have 33 countries represented out of 105 people. That’s a lot of cultural difference among folks, so if I have an engineer from China arguing with an engineer from Argentina, there are some interesting results that arrive. The challenge that we have in trying to create cultural change is also to understand the cultural differences among our employees and try to cut through that divide, and that’s not easy. It takes every member of our management team working in alignment to make those changes occur.
It’s really interesting. What we found was [not micromanaging] created a lot of freedom for people who didn’t feel like they had freedom before. One of the things that we emphasize is that we want our people to have freedom to experiment and we don’t penalize our people for failing. If they’ve experimented and it’s a well-thought-out experiment and it happens to fail, so be it. The bottom line is the freedom that they feel now as opposed to what they felt before is dramatic. When we talk to our people, this is something they comment about a lot.
Maheswaran: The thing that I can communicate to the management team at Semtech is that teamwork is really what enables the company to succeed. I grew up in the U.K. I played cricket and soccer. My games that I played, it was all about passing the ball to someone else so they could succeed, and that’s what I tried to teach my management team. The only way we win is if we all have our visions and we play as a team. That culture is what I try to communicate down as well.
Of course, you have to start with integrity. You have to start with people believing in you and trusting you and trusting your management team. If they don’t trust that judgment, if they don’t trust that vision, if they don’t trust the fact that we’re going to reward them if they’re successful, then nothing else really matters, so you start off with trust and integrity, the teamwork flows down. Once they do trust management, they’ll have that passion. … If you give people the opportunity, they will follow, but they have to have that trust. It took awhile. People didn’t believe me. I think you have to walk the walk and talk the talk and do all of that sort of stuff and make sure that you show them.
I’ll give you a very good example. Semtech, for many years, never paid out bonuses. Even if the company did very well, the previous CEOs would always figure out a way to not pay out bonuses. Why? I cannot figure it out myself. I got to Semtech, and we were doing well, and I paid out bonuses and people were surprised and said, ‘We’re actually getting bonuses this year.’ That kind of trust is what you need.
As you tried to solve these issues, when did you finally feel like everything was going to be OK?
Maheswaran: When I joined Semtech, we agreed that I’d be here for five years. Just six months ago, I said to my board, ‘Well, five years is up; where do we go from here?’ and they basically said, ‘Well, I don’t think we need a timeline now anymore.’ I was pleased with that, and it was a message to me that the company is going the right direction and doing the right things. The team is doing well and the company is doing well, so that was a good sign.
We have to look over our shoulders all the time, and you have to ask yourself, ‘Are you the right person all the time?’ It’s one of those things, having done a startup before and having done the big public company thing before, you don’t know whether you’re the right person, as the company grows and scales, to take it to the next level. You have to keep asking yourself that question, but fortunately, that’s how I knew — my board told me.
Kupietzky: I would probably say a year ago. We had an employee who took advantage of the situation he was in and did some things that were pretty bad, and that put us in a very tough situation. It was actually at that point that I recognized that the whole way we’re trying to approach problems, of being more open about them and transparent and saying, ‘We’re going to deal with it,’ — we went out to the marketplace and told people about it — and the fact that all of these employees rallied around the fact that we admitted that there was a problem and that we were acting on it, I thought that was the point at which it felt like we were all recognizing that this is the new way that we’re going to run the business. It’s much more on the front pages of the newspaper, not in the back room. We’ve resolved all the litigation around that, and many people thought we were going to go out of business as a result of that.
Hankin: In my case, I ask this question every day. I don’t think I’ll ever stop asking the question, because I think my business and businesses that we’ve been able to spin out from our organization are constantly evolving and constantly changing. If we don’t change along with them and evolve with them, we’re going to be toast. It’s as simple as that.
How to reach: Semtech Corp., www.semtech.com; Oversee.net, www.oversee.net, Alfred Mann Foundation, www.aemf.org
