While trying to establish a new energy market, T. Graham Edwards and other Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator
Inc. leaders didn’t have as much time to spend with their customers. But as things have fallen into place and settled down,
Edwards, the company’s president and CEO, has been able to build those relationships, and his company is better for it. Midwest
ISO operates 93,600 miles of transmission lines across 15 states and one Canadian province. Founded in 1998, the company now
has 646 full-time employees. Smart Business spoke with Edwards about the importance of relationships in business success.
Stay focused. You cannot focus on everything at one time. You need to pick your
three to five main items that you’re going to
focus on, communicate that to your
employees and move forward with it.
Don’t waver on that. If you try to take a
scatter-gun approach and be everything to
everybody and address every single issue
in the most depth, you’re not going to get
there. Have a course charted that is very
clear so that the employees have a line of
sight to what that vision and mission is.
Walk the talk. It’s not just, ‘This is what I say.’
I’ve got to walk the talk. If they see me saying one thing and doing something differently, then they are not going to believe
anything I say, anyway.
I’m a big believer in management by
walking around. I think you learn a lot from
your employees when you walk into their
office and just sit down and talk to them.
Stop and talk to them in the hall. The
employees here call me Graham, and that’s
what I want them to do. We have a very
relaxed and informal setting here.
If people disagree with me, I expect them
to say they disagree, in the right way, of
course. They’ve got to feel free to speak
their mind.
I don’t believe that you get the best results
from anybody, personally or business-wise,
without being participative. You need to
always get feedback from the folks that you
are working with. For one, to make sure
they get the buy-in, but secondly, you always
get a better decision that way.
See the change, understand the change. Our
industry is always changing. We need to
make sure that we understand what the
changes are.
As an executive team, we need to come
together with how we think we need to
best approach changes within the industry
from the company perspective. Then we
need to get the feedback from management and employees on that direction.
When we go through a strategic planning
effort, we do it with our executive staff and
our officers and get feedback from our
directors and managers before we roll it out. Then we roll it out to our stakeholders.
The employees of the company need to
understand how we’re dealing with it
before the external world understands
how we’re dealing with it.
Everybody is different. You’re never going to
have the ideal employee and the ideal manager throughout your organization. Everybody is different. You just need to try to
manage people the best that you can. You
handle folks in different ways.
Any CEO or any vice president or any
officer of a company knows who they can
count on and who they can’t, just through
past performance. Those folks that you can
count on are the ones that you are normally going to go to the well with every time to
make sure things get done, but also to
receive that feedback.
Let leaders lead. I look at every vice president as running their own business unit.
I’m not going to tell them who to hire and
who to fire.
The time that I step in and do that and I
say, ‘You hire this person,’ and that person
doesn’t work out, it’s probably a sure failure to start with. They might feel pressure
to hire them, and they are going to make
sure they don’t succeed.
It’s up to me to hold my direct reports
accountable for their business units and
make sure they are performing.
Don’t react too quickly. You need to be ahead
of the pack, but I’m a believer that you
need to let somebody else try something
first, and then you improve on it.
I don’t want to be out there leading the
pack on innovation. However, I want to be
in the front quartile on implementation.
I think you can overreact too quickly and
go down the wrong path without having
sufficient data and empirical evidence to
say that’s where you should be going.
Work with your board. It’s up to the CEO to
develop the relationships with each individual board member and the board members collectively.
You do that through performance, by
being held accountable and by keeping the
board informed of what’s going on.
The relationship I have with my board is
one that I will talk to board members once
every couple of weeks. But it’s not on a personal basis. It’s on a business basis. You’ve
got to develop the relationships where
there is confidence on both sides.
I’ve seen CEOs where they have bucked
their board and tried to implement things
that the board was against or did not support. And normally the CEO is the loser on
that.
It’s up to the CEO to adapt to the style of
that board.
Don’t micromanage problems. Admit it, fix it
and move forward. It’s always hard, but
you’ve got to do it. You have no choice. If
you don’t, then you have no credibility.
Without credibility, that really is a recipe
for disaster.
You need to ensure when you fix it that
you really do fix it. If you continue to fail on
it, that gets right back to your credibility.
I’m not going to micromanage somebody.
You’ve got to avoid that temptation.
It’s very difficult, especially when you
have grown up within the organization.
You’ve got to consciously back off and not
get involved. But you’ve got to also not
back off so far that you’re not holding people accountable.
HOW TO REACH: Midwest ISO, www.midwestiso.org