Early in his career, Stephen Stuut was faced with an unenviable task. His firm’s parent company was selling to a competitor, and
Stuut had to prepare the company’s reorganization while the competitor’s CEO was moving into his office. Stuut, now president
and CEO of TruePosition Inc., knew he would be unemployed by the end of the week, but he kept his focus. Later, a former
colleague told Stuut that people were impressed at how he had simply taken care of business at a time when his own future was
uncertain. But Stuut says he just knew that there was a lot of work to do, and that it was his job to do it. That focus has served
him well as the leader of TruePosition, a $200 million, 400-employee company that develops and provides high-performance
wireless location solutions. Smart Business spoke with Stuut about why having a strategy is useless if you change it every year
and why you always have to be ready for the next stage of growth.
Make sure your employees get it. One thing
about strategies is if the employees don’t
know what it is — or at least the parts
they need to know about — then you
don’t have one.
If you don’t know how to implement it,
then how do you have a strategy? The
whole idea is, if you want to have something happen, people have to know what
it is.
So make sure the audience includes
people who are fully aware of all the ups
and downs. A lot of times when you have
these big meetings, someone walks out
of the meeting and makes some comment, like, ‘I don’t get it.’ Then, someone
nearby can say, ‘Oh, let me tell you what
I understood that as,’ or, ‘Here’s a way to
view it.’
Essentially, I’ve got people out there
who are on top of what I meant to say
because maybe I didn’t say it right that
time.
I always use the same charts over and
over. Sometimes people will say if you
have last year’s strategy chart this year,
shouldn’t it have changed? The answer is
no because if you have a strategy and it
changes every year, you didn’t have one.
Limit what you share. Strategy is not a document on a shelf. It’s something that you
do, that you implement.
You can only do that if people know
what it is — to a degree, of course. There
are some things you won’t tell everybody. Imagine Napoleon putting a plastic
card in every soldier’s pocket with the
strategy on it. If somebody got captured
or left it on the field, that would not be a
good idea, would it?
So there is a limit to what you show
and share. It’s dependent on what level
of management you are talking to at the
time, and there are some things only I
know about.
Responsibility starts at the top. To empower
(employees), I like to delegate. One reason is because if I try to do everything,
I’ll just die, I’ll grind myself into meal.
But if I delegate, and then observe
what the people I’ve delegated to are
doing, but let them take care of it, that’s
how things get better. Individuals see
that they are given responsibility.
Now, does it go methodically eight layers down below me? Probably not but
maybe. If you don’t start with your own
level, it’s never going to propagate.
That’s why I encourage people to tell me
when I’m wrong — which is something
most people are reticent to do — or tell
me when I might not be fully aware of all
the circumstances.
Go through the proper channels. You can’t
blow past the layers of management
between you and something you want to
see done. I may know who’s doing something, and if I go blowing past people in
between, the one I end up talking to is
going to answer back to me, and suddenly I haven’t delegated very effectively, have I?
If I want to touch a layer below or two
layers below, I contact the ones in
between to make sure they don’t want to
do it themselves. I tell them what it is I
was after, and they may want to capture it in their own style. Or they just say,
‘Hey, go straight to them; just tell me
what you did.’
It’s important because if you flatfoot
who you’ve delegated to, it doesn’t work.
You’ve got to watch them like a hawk.
And sometimes, when you’ve just arrived,
you don’t know who’s really on top of
their game. Let them make a mistake; just
make sure it’s not too big of one.
Think it through. Say you’re aspiring to
some deal that if you get it, it would
transform the company. Then you get it,
and it’s like the dog chasing the bus. The
bus stops and the dog says, ‘What do I do
with this bus?’
You haven’t thought about it. You
haven’t organized the structure; you
don’t have the first idea of who you’d
give it to manage.
So think it through. If you were to succeed, how are you going to manage it?
How are you going to structure the
organization to do that? You need to pick
the right management and go more than
just one layer down in thinking about
how you would adapt the organization to
new opportunities.
The same thinking applies when somebody leaves — for good or bad reasons,
it just happens. Think about the layers of
management and who’s getting a new
opportunity or who’s being kept in a silo.
I like giving people new opportunities,
even if you’re taking them out of their
comfort zone, because you’re building
management. Or bring in people who
you know can already manage and are
somewhat ambidextrous.
Most start-ups that go through that are
explosions and little shards of burning
metal on the ground. This place excelled
at it. It had its issues, but it did very well.
To keep going, you have to be ready for
that next stage of growth.
HOW TO REACH: TruePosition Inc., (610) 680-1000 or
www.trueposition.com