Gather your people
Restrepo looks for three things when he’s trying to put a team together: intelligence, energy and ambition.
“I always define ambition as the desire and capacity to learn, not to get to the next level but to learn and be able to operate effectively outside of their comfort zone,” Restrepo says.
You’re looking for people who demonstrated leadership ability. To help in that effort, Restrepo created a talent team whose job is to identify the leaders and prime-time players at State Auto.
The team of seven or eight individuals meets monthly and simply talks about the talent in the company. As a result of that dialogue, the team composed a list of the 50 top performers in the organization.
“We use this as a list of people we think have high potential,” Restrepo says. “We align them with members of the talent team for informal mentoring.”
Each year, the list is revised, meaning it consistently offers a sample of the best of the best.
“We use that pool of people for any special projects that might crop up that we think might be a good development opportunity,” Restrepo says.
Using the talent team and his own observations, Restrepo began to put together teams to look at various aspects of the company. To maintain a spirit of discovery, he looked to put people in positions outside of their comfort zone.
“So we had salespeople looking at IT,” Restrepo says. “We had IT people looking at products. It was an opportunity to not only evaluate the organization, but it was an opportunity to evaluate individuals outside of their comfort zone.”
You’re giving your people an opportunity to stretch their boundaries, and when they respond to it, see how they handle it. Each person feels a sense of camaraderie at trying something new.
“It’s putting together a diverse team of people who trust one another and are willing to collaborate and who are credible,” Restrepo says. “People in the organization say, ‘I trust that person. That person wants to do the right thing and is not political. They are going to do the right thing for the organization.’”
Restrepo also put together teams to challenge the teams and vet their ideas to make sure they fit in with the overall company goal.
“I didn’t want a process that imposed change from the top down,” Restrepo says. “I wanted to engage the whole organization in developing innovative new ideas.”
