Give them a chance to run
As Inter/Media started to dig itself out of a hole, Yallen learned the value of giving up his own athletic spikes and taking up more of a front-office job.
“I don’t want to say that my role is more of a coach, because I can quickly translate into the GM mode, but I really try not to micro-manage, which by the way comes with a lot of maturity,” he says.
While the turmoil Inter/Media faced was rough, it gave Yallen the opportunity to restructure. The lost accounts meant the closing of some offices, and the end alignment has each unit president located at headquarters today. That may not last forever, but Yallen is able to let go more because he knows his people are close by, and he can have weekly meetings with his leadership team.
“So if I’m getting constant updates and status reports, and I know where the ball is headed, so to speak, I am able to back off,” he says. “If I’m getting information and we’re not headed in the direction we need to be headed, I’m obviously going to step in a lot quicker.”
Not every company can keep its leaders in one building, but Yallen’s comfort comes from the fact that he’s made an effort to create lines of communication with each direct report to see the overall scope and timeline of their work. If you can get your people giving you regular overviews of their work, whether they’re in the same office as you or not, you can let them take over and feel free to be more creative to help the company become more distinctive.
While Yallen feels good having his people close so he can give them feedback, part of pulling Inter/Media from the depths was hearing what every employee with an idea had to say.
“Look, if you’re an athlete and you’re not listening to your coach and you’re not able to synthesize what they’re telling you, how are you going to reach your best performance?” he says. “Same thing in business, so you have to know how to listen and be listened to.
“I try to be respectful of everybody, whether it’s a maintenance person emptying trash cans or a high-level executive president of a company where I’m trying to get their business. I grew up in the civil rights era, so I believe everybody is equal. Period. Some people are just a little luckier, and some people work a little harder, but everybody is equal. Now, from a practical standpoint, am I spending as much time with an admin as I am an executive? No, but they have the right to give any input that they have.”
To show that respect, you have to be willing to put down your BlackBerry and let go of your mouse when people come to see you. You also need to encourage or better educate them.
“One of my people came to me today with the idea of going after a certain piece of business, and I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that I’m going to get that business,” Yallen says. “But I don’t want to discourage her. So I explained why it was not the right company to target. So I sat down and said, ‘This is what you should be looking at.’ I tried to encourage her because it’s to all of our benefits that we’re all thinking like that.”
By helping his employees find that autonomy, Inter/Media was able to pull itself out of debt and start to really differentiate itself in the marketplace. Today, it provides service to clients like the U.S. Army and DISH Network Corp. and has grown to more than$450 million in billings. While Yallen thinks his company would have dug itself out of the hole, the things he learned about keeping calm and finding and empowering the right people really helped Inter/Media to the next level.
“I think we would have been OK because, at the end of the day, it’s how you perform for your clients, and we’ve always done an excellent job at what we do,” he says. “It would have been a question of how much we would have grown, and I know we wouldn’t have grown to this extent. We would have gotten through and made a good living and employed a lot of people but not had near the amount of success that we’ve had.”
HOW TO REACH: Inter/Media Group of Cos., (818) 995-1455 or www.intermedia-advertising.com
