For Matthew Jenusaitis, the best way to motivate employees is to show them results of their work. As president of the neurovascular
division at ev3 Inc., he shows the company’s 1,000 workers how their efforts effect tangible good in others. When ev3 released a new
product to treat arterial-venous malformations, he brought in a 16-year-old professional singer who had benefited from the treatment.
The girl, who previously had experienced hospitalization, partial paralysis and near-death, erupted in song in front of 400 employees,
eliciting tears with her deep, throaty voice. By making these connections between people and product, Jenusaitis has helped push ev3 to
2006 revenue of $202.4 million, a 51 percent increase over the previous year. Smart Business spoke with Jenusaitis about how to
communicate on the right frequency and develop chemistry on your team and why you should celebrate mistakes.
Be receptive to small mistakes. Big companies develop this air of complacency, where
there’s safety in not making any decisions
because you’ll never be criticized. You
become very risk-averse.
When you’re in a small company, you need
to be a little more risk-oriented. It’s OK to
make decisions that are wrong. If you think
in your life, what are the things that have
been the most meaningful and you’ve
learned the most from? Frequently, it’s mistakes that you’ve made.
It’s when you’re not afraid to make a little
mistake that you can really learn a tremendous amount. Create an environment that is
receptive to people making little mistakes so
they can incorporate them into their final
winning formula.
When people make a mistake, I reinforce
the fact that, ‘Hey, it’s good that we learned
about this early. We learned about this today;
it’s going to cost us $10,000. If we learned
about it a year from now, it’s going to cost us
$10 million. You just saved us $9,990,000 by
bringing this up today. That’s a good thing.’
Don’t point fingers at people. Celebrate little mistakes, and take advantage of the fact
that they happened early as opposed to late
in the process. Inevitably, people will feel
much more comfortable surfacing problems
early on, and, in the long term, that ends up
saving you a lot of money.
Communicate on the right frequency.
People are like radios — everybody’s set on
a different frequency. Your success on communicating with each other is going to be
how good you are at recognizing what frequency somebody else is tuned to and
adjusting your own dial so you can cut out
the static.
We just went through personality-profiling
everybody, where you look at people’s personalities and figure out what’s your communication style and how can you be most
effective at communicating with someone
that has a different style.
This stuff is not going to make us parts for
$2 less, and it’s not going to have an immediate impact on the financial statement. What
it does do is get everybody thinking that the
company really cares about their employees
and is really interested in developing the skill
sets of their employees.
Show that you care. At this level, nobody’s
really going hungry. Nobody’s worried about
having enough money to put gas in the car. In
terms of their hierarchy of needs, the satisfaction, the self-actualization and the feeling
like they’re part of a team — that’s a lot more
important than money and benefits.
I want to make sure that they have health
insurance and all that other stuff, but I want
them to feel like we care about them, their
development and their growth. Those are
the things that people change jobs for —
when they feel like they’re not growing, or
the company doesn’t care about them.
Actions speak a lot louder than words.
Listen to what they say, and come back a
week later and say, ‘I remember you were
talking about this.’ The fact that we actually
listened to what people had to say and then
took the time to follow up to demonstrate to
them that we were actually listening — it’s
motivation for them. It’s going to demonstrate to them that they’re part of a team. It
makes them want to work there and want to
be part of a success.
People will stay around if they feel like
you’re committed to them. If people feel like
they are valued and are learning new things,
then they will become very, very connected
with the organization. Part of their soul will
be affiliated with how well the company is
doing, and they’ll want to stay there.
Get the right teammates. The thing that you
really spend your time trying to figure out
during the interview process is: Do they have
the right chemistry? Do they have the ability
to work effectively on the team that we have
together in this organization?
These are all the subtle things that you
don’t pick up on until you spend time having
a meal with somebody or spend a couple of
hours and learn about their family or the
things that motivate them.
Get people that have the right skill sets, get
people that have the right collaborative
skills, and then spend a lot of time with them
creating a vision for what needs to happen.
Help them understand what we want to
accomplish. Help them understand what it is
we’re really trying to do.
Help them understand where you’re trying
to go, and then give them room and let them
do their stuff. Then just get out of their way.
Know when to step in. Give people a lot of
room to argue about things, and give people
a lot of room to discuss them.
I try to be patient with sharing my own
opinion for as long as I possibly can, but a lot
times, people are at an impasse, and they
can’t make a decision.
One thing that is kind of the kiss of death
is if we’re sitting in a meeting and somebody
comes up with the idea of, ‘We should
schedule another meeting.’ I think to myself,
‘We’re having a meeting about that right
now. Why are we scheduling another meeting to do it?’
That’s when you should step in. I like keeping everybody focused: ‘We need to make
decisions. We need to keep going. We need
to keep going forward.’
HOW TO REACH: ev3 Inc., (763) 398-7000 or www.ev3.net