When you’re the boss, you’re busy. But
Saru Seshadri, president and CEO of
Ultramatics Inc., says you need to make time for one-on-one meetings with
employees — tee time be damned.
“Even from a pure gesture perspective,
everybody realizes my time is very precious,”
Seshadri says.
So by meeting with each of the $10 million
tech company’s 50 employees one on one,
Seshadri is reinforcing Ultramatics’
commitment to personal service. If the
CEO makes time to communicate the
employee’s role in the grand scheme,
that employee will be more loyal and
more likely to go the extra mile in serving a client, too.
Smart Business spoke with Seshadri
about why he values independence in
employees.
Q: How do you empower employees?
At different levels, there are different
types of empowerment. Certainly on
the technical side, they are empowered to create the best solution for the
customer. Usually they view me as a
senior technologist in the organization and bounce ideas off me.
It also depends on setting the right
rules of engagement. The customer
comes first. Everybody in the organization understands that. We are a
customer-centric organization. By
being flexible to the customer, we
are achieving our goals as well as the
customers’ goals.
Once that ground rule is set for
everyone in the organization, everyone
knows by doing the right thing for the customer, the organization is going to support
those decisions. As long as you make the customer happy, you don’t have to come in for
approvals — that sort of thing. That is a continuous thread that runs in how we do our
business.
The second part of it is … you have to have
the right people to empower.
Q: How do you find the right employees?
When we attract and recruit folks, we look
for the capability to independently operate
— what we call not demonstrating passive
dependence. Passive dependence is when you have someone who needs to be told on a
daily basis what to do and when to do it.
By looking in our recruiting methodology
for such behavior, we inherently recruit folks
who are motivated to do the right thing by
using the common culture of Ultramatics,
which is customer care comes first. They
need to pursue excellence and be passionate
and proud of what they deliver for
Ultramatics and the customer.
Since those characteristics are already
built into employees, the empowerment part
of it becomes easier. You know that inherently they will make the same choice, whether
or not they are told to do it.
Q: What has been your greatest business
challenge?
As you start growing, the ability to delegate
and ability to create a team around you has
been my greatest challenge. Recognizing that
you cannot do it alone, and then having the
right approach to building a team around you
has been the greatest challenge.
One way I’ve overcome it is by methodically
building a go-to team, identifying the right team players who have the right set of philosophies and have goals that are synergistic.
The second way is during the time of building up the team, having the external counsel,
the set of mentors to guide you through these
challenges.
Q: How do you build a team?
First of all, it comes through years of networking and building a profile of identifying
people who complement your strengths
and shore up your weaknesses.
Don’t be afraid to hire people who are
smarter than you. It’s a challenge, but
the key is also to have the recognition
that you cannot do it alone. Put a plan in
place that starts building on the capabilities that you have as a backbone.
Finally, the same value system is a key.
If the value system does not match, that’s
when you have the biggest problems.
Q: How do you manage infrastructure
growth?
First comes the recognition. Many companies fail because they do not recognize
the inflection points.
The ability to recognize inflection points
is the first instrument for managing
growth. Each stage of the organization’s
growth, you hit these inflection points. You
have to recognize them before they come
and start putting things in place before you
hit them, so when you hit them, the ensuing
risks are mitigated.
Once you identify these inflection points
and you see the right steps to take, it
becomes more manageable. In our case, we
matured from a start-up company that was in
the early stages of growth in terms of finding
the first customers to a fairly recognized entity with good brand equity.
We have been profitable since Day One,
and we have been growing every year, either
doubling or more than doubling every year.
Now, we’ve come to a stage where we
have to scale this beyond the initial phase.
That’s when the expansion phase starts, and
we recognized the inflection point about a
year back.
HOW TO REACH: Ultramatics Inc., (877) 862-8427 or
www.ultramatics.com