T. Scott Law likens his leadership style to that of college
basketball coaching legend Bob
Knight. Well, sort of.
You probably won’t see Law
throwing a chair or having
words with a referee, but if you
were to attend one of Law’s
meetings at Zotec Partners LLC,
you would see a leader who
challenges his employees to
perform better and tries to
leverage their talents to have
the best possible impact on his
business.
“I try to get the most out of
people,” says the founder, president and CEO of the 500-employee technology solutions
company. “Every job I ask people to do, I’ve tried to do or
have done myself.”
To get the most out of your
employees, you must leverage
their talents effectively and
support them by keeping the
lines of communication free
from static.
Smart Business spoke with
Law about how to use motivation and communication to get
the best out of your employees.
Learn what drives your employees. Management goes awry
when they don’t put the right
people in the jobs that they
have a passion about. So it’s
important that we have the
ability to identify that passion and make sure that passion is appropriately focused
on what we need to have
done.
For the most part, you can
see it in their eyes, what they
enjoy doing. It’s seeing them
go the extra mile, asking questions, seeing the areas where
they’re like a sponge and want
to take in knowledge. It’s
always said that if you love
what you do, you’ll never work
another day in your life. That’s
what you try and find, the people who love doing the tasks
we’re doing.
We’ve also taken several scientific approaches to it, for
example, indexing personality
traits and matching those to
the jobs. So if someone likes
to have a very stable repeat
task they can do, we put them
in their jobs within their comfort zone. If someone likes to
be a wheeler-dealer and do
something different every day,
they go into those jobs.
You have to make it based
on your assessment of where
their skills sets are. When
you meet someone, you have
to really get to know what
their hot buttons are. You
have to ask the questions
and do a lot of listening.
