Empower
Varel doesn’t live in San Francisco. He doesn’t live in
California. He doesn’t even live in the continental United
States. Instead, he has a home in Maui, and every other
week, he visits a different FusionStorm office.
The fact that he doesn’t have to watch over the shoulders
of all his people is a testament to how much he trusts them
to get their jobs done themselves, and that empowerment is
the third ingredient to successful growth.
“The first word that comes to mind is the word ‘trust,’”
Varel says. “You said you were going to do it, you said you
can do it, you said you will do it, so I trust you. But if you
stumble, I can be your worst enemy or your strongest supporter, depending how you stumble, and if you fail because
of that, then we’re both mutually responsible.”
If you want to have that same attitude, you first have to
throw your employees a line.
“I give them enough rope that they’re either going to show
their true colors and hang themselves, or they’re going to
execute beyond my wildest expectations,” Varel says.
He says that another major part of empowerment is to keep
your mouth closed and your ears wide open.
“Secondly, I’m listening while they tell me what their plan
is,” he says. “Most managers want their ideas heard. They’re
intelligent people — they’ve grown through the ranks. Young
or old, they have some basis for believing that they are right
in what they want to say, and then I let them talk that
through.”
While he doesn’t always do everything that his people suggest, he says that allowing them to present their ideas helps
them feel that they can contribute to your vision.
“After they’ve had the opportunity to execute on their own
plans and see them succeed or fail, they grow stronger as a
manager and/or leader and have earned the right for that
empowerment,” Varel says.
But it all comes back to the first two parts that Varel has hit
on.
“It’s in not doing the first two — communicating or collaborating across groups, they’re going to fail at empowerment,” he says. “They can’t operate within their own island.
They’ve got to have the first two down in my opinion.”
Lastly, he says that as the leader, you have to be careful
that while you sit in on meetings, you don’t dominate the
meetings. By empowering his people instead of micro-managing them, it has created a culture that people want to
be in, and numbers talk — FusionStorm’s turnover is less
than 5 percent, which is about one-third of the industry average.
“I could very easily sit in and spend my day sitting in on all of
these calls, but then we wouldn’t be a company that’s growing
at 70 percent annual compounded growth,” Varel says. “We
wouldn’t have gotten out of that fire we were in in 2002 to grow
from ($12 million) to a half a billion [dollars]. If I were micro-managing, I wouldn’t have had any leaders that were capable
of doing anything because I would be doing it all. You can’t
scale that way.”
HOW TO REACH: FusionStorm, (415) 623-2626 or
www.fusionstorm.com
