Ron Clarke has a simple formula for getting quality work and time efficiency out of his 800 employees at FleetCor — he makes
sure they’re doing the right work, and he gives them short deadline cycles. The combination of making sure they work on the most
valuable tasks and reviewing the employees frequently keeps productivity and progress high at this fuel card processing company.
Smart Business spoke with Clarke, chairman and CEO of FleetCor, about how he keeps employees focused on the job at hand and
why reviews are critical to producing useful work.
Know your job. My job is to make sure the
attention and energy of every single human
being that touches my company is working
on the right work. Every second that I lose is
leakage, which means I lost valuable energy
of people to things that aren’t important.
Leaders that minimize leakage win.
If you know what the right work is and you
can get them to work with 5 percent leakage, you’ll beat, every time, the competitor
that has the same amount of resources but
isn’t on the right agenda, and he’s got 50 percent leakage.
Determine the agenda. Great leaders figure
out how to spend the most valuable resource
in the world, which is time. Agenda is job one,
and it’s job one every day because if you don’t
know, how can the company perform well?
Reverse-engineer the financial statements.
The report card of businesses is numbers. If I
look at the report card of your company, I can
quickly figure out what needs to be worked
on. Is there a growth problem? A margin
problem? A product mix problem? A cost-competitiveness problem? You can see the
smoke signs of what needs to be focused on
first in the financials.
Once you’ve looked at the report card, then
get outside of your company. The game is in
the marketplace, so it’s getting out and getting clear on your customers and prospects
and competitors and figuring out where you
are, there would be the second place.
Then go through the entire executive team
next and reverse-engineer their agendas.
Call them all in and [say], ‘Tell me the top
three things you’re working on.’ Consolidate
those 30 responses, and in a short period of
time, you can figure out the gap of what’s
being worked on in a company versus what
should be worked on in a company, and
they’re never right.
Document and clarify expectations. The
great thing about blue-collared work was the
work was definable. You put a widget in
something. White-collar work is incredibly
ambiguous, and if you don’t take enormous
steps to clarify with somebody and get agreement on exactly what you want to have produced, think about the impact of that as you
move down the organization.
If my 10 or 12 guys don’t get it right, then
think of their 10 guys and their 10 guys.
You want to talk about the world getting
less clear.
Specify the work in advance. Maybe I’ll
make you say it back to me, and you’ll say,
‘OK, Ron, I got it. Leave me alone. I’m clear
now.’ Taking that clarity exercise almost to an
extreme has tremendous return.
There’s nothing as useful as documenting
things that people can go back and look at
what their commitments are. Getting it written down and then reviewing it is important
so people would be able to measure how
they’re progressing as the year rolls on.
Establish strict deadlines. Tie it to financials. If you have a new product you’re supposed to launch on July 1, and we think we
can sell $1 million a month, I spend my
entire life telling you, ‘$6 million. Don’t miss,
you got to get it. You got to find $6 million in
’07,’ and I make you sweat with me to deliver the number.
The only way you can deliver the number
is to get started on time because if you wait
an extra quarter, you’ll be at $3 million, not
at $6 [million]. If you didn’t have deadlines,
who knows when they’d actually start doing
the work?
The only way you can be sure that people
are doing the right work and producing
useful work is to review it. I’ll review you to
death so that you don’t have a chance to
not work.
Read people. As we start to interact, you
can see what’s working with people. It’s the
old take an action and observe. See what
the reaction is, and you’ll get a sense pretty
quickly what works for people.
Some people completely get frazzled with
deadlines, and others rise to the occasion
on them. Pick a course, try it and look and
see what you’re getting back.
There’s no science there — you just keep
modifying. It’s relatively easy to sense how
the relationship is going — not much different than your at-home relationship —
what works with your other half. If you
want to talk him into going to the movies,
and he hates the movies, or you want to go
to the museum and he hates the museum,
you find the ways that work for that person, and it’s no different for me.
Hire winners. If you’re more than 22 years
old, you’ve had to have actually done something. The first thing that I’ll get into is,
‘Have you accomplished anything?’ Most
people do interviews and ask people about
what they’ve done. I only want to know
what did you deliver.
No. 2, I want people that want the ball. If
it’s fourth-and-goal from the 1, and you go
back into the huddle, and the whole game
is on the line, and I say, ‘Do you want the
ball?’ and you say, ‘I want the ball,’ and I
say, ‘It’s all on the line,’ and you say, ‘Give
me the ball,’ I want people who want the
ball and aren’t afraid.
Make good decisions. In my mind, I sort
them like clothes into small, medium and
large. On the big ones that matter, make
no decision before its time. They say
about fine wine, drink no fine wine before
its time.
If the decision doesn’t need to be made
today, I wake up tomorrow. If it doesn’t
need to be made tomorrow, I wake up the
next day. Then there’s a funny thing that
happens, and it settles in, and I feel like I’ve
got the right decision — there’s a day that I
wake up and I go, ‘I got it. Here’s what I’m
going to do.’
HOW TO REACH: FleetCor, www.fleetcor.com or (800) 877-9019