Communicate
When Varel started one of his offices, the guy he hired had a
bigger vision that required more people and money than Varel
envisioned. Despite reservations, he agreed to let him have the
resources to do the job his way.
“As soon as I said yes, I knew I made the wrong decision,” he
says. “And then I never communicated it for three or four
months.”
Now he has a budget in that office twice as large as it should
be, and he realized that if he had just communicated the problem upfront, he could have avoided the issue altogether.
“Wherever I have failed in a simple act of trying to achieve
success within a company or business, I can take it back to I
wasn’t clear upfront what I expected from that individual,” he
says.
The lesson is, if you want to grow your organization, you
must learn to communicate.
“First, it starts with the leader of the company,” Varel says. “I
don’t mean manager of the company. I mean leader. There are
plenty of effective managers in the world, but none of them
will be leaders. A leader … is someone who would crawl across
cut glass to get the goal that they need done. I have to have in
my execution of being the CEO a very clear, simple, direct
vision that I am passionate about and that I communicate that
consistently and regularly and repetitively.”
For example, if he says his vision could be that he wants
FusionStorm to be a $1 billion company by 2010. He says it’s an
easy vision — there isn’t a word in there that somebody would-n’t understand. The problem comes with helping people see
how they fit in to it. If someone runs just a $20 million division,
he or she may worry that he or she can’t contribute to $1 billion. Varel says his role is to make people realize that even a
$40,000 contribution gets the team closer to $1 billion than
nothing at all.
“The simpler you make it, the better off you are,” he says.
Start planning early and involve people. He and his team have
a financial planning session in August or September every year
for the following year.
“The first thing I lay out is, ‘What would have to be true for us
to keep our exponential growth continuing?’” he says.
Sometimes people will say that they don’t think the company
can continue at the current rate, but he reiterates that that’s
not the question.
“I don’t want to hear the word ‘can’t,’” he says. “I said, ‘What
would have to be true for us to keep that kind of growth
going?’ It takes the people out of the mindset of being an incremental gain manager, which a lot of people have. I mean, anybody can hit whatever the industry average is that you’re in.”
Instead you have to communicate bigger goals to each other.
“What I’m looking for are people who answer that question in
a constructive way,” Varel says. “Then it becomes a dialogue
and the communication opens back up again. We as leaders
have to ask the right open-ended questions that allow the individuals to think beyond the parameters of what is the norm.
Otherwise, you will have the norm.”
