Q. How do you avoiddistractions?
Stay focused. Keep thepeople who are part ofthis team focused onwhat we’re here toaccomplish. It’s easy toget distracted. There area lot of things that seemto be lucrative or aneasy win for us, but ifthey don’t fit with whatwe do, we can’t changewhat we’re good at.
If you stay consistentand focused, and youcan communicate toyour people and lead byexample, you’re going tobe pretty successful.
Q. What are the keysto staying focused?
The easy path is to go afterthings that seem to give yousome immediate success. Butif you’re in business, you wantto be in business for the longrun. If you can choose a pathand stay on path, people willfollow you. If you start deviating and moving in differentdirections, it’s going to send amessage to the organization,and they won’t believe in yourleadership.
For example, we support datacenters. That’s the center ofour competencies; that’s wherewe thrive. We want to workaround the mission-criticalheartbeats of organizations.That’s what customers are willing to pay a premium for, andthat’s what keeps them up andrunning. That same customermay have people working athome on PCs or laptops. Somebody supports that, but itwouldn’t be us.
So a customer may come tous and say, ‘You do our datacenter; would you mind doingour end-user PCs? By the way, we have 300 employees whowork out of their houses.’ Notonly would we have to hire100 more engineers, but ourcurrent engineers would seeus waver from what we’regood at. If that happened, thatwould be catastrophic.
At the end of day, it’s yourpeople. If great leaders don’thave people to follow them,they’re not really great leaders.If you want people to followyou, you have to stay consistentin your approach to leadership.
Q. How do you ensure youremployees will follow you?
It starts with your first team.You need to find managers andleaders who are willing toempower their people and listen to their people at all levels.We have not built a bureaucratic management team. It’svery entrepreneurial, and welove that culture.
But all good ideas have tostart at the field engineeringlevel because they are theclosest people to our customerbase. Sales engages and disengages with customers depending on the opportunity, but thefield engineers, the peoplewho are the heartbeat of theorganization, they are with thecustomer every day. They arethe true measure of how we’reperforming. If we can take thatinformation, roll it up throughthe management chain, wecan enact change across theboard if it’s necessary.
They’re out there. The hardestthing about doing that is youdon’t like to take them out ofthe field. But you have to do it;you have to make arrangements, because they really havesignificant valuable input.
HOW TO REACH: Park Place International, (800) 931-3366 or www.parkplaceintl.com
