Establish accountability
Simons knew he had to provide some backbone to his push for innovation.
“It’s nice to have lofty goals, but if there is nobody working on it, you’re going to be disappointed at the end of the year,” Simons says.
Key accountability documents, or KADs, help make sure that doesn’t happen.
“We say around here, ‘Is it on somebody’s KAD?’” Simons says. “We all know if it’s not on somebody’s goal document, it’s not going to get done. That’s one of the ways we check internally with each other. Who has the accountability for getting this done?”
The trick is to come up with metrics for the different things you want to do so that you can have that accountability and know if you are making progress.
“The organization starts by saying, ‘These things are important,’” Simons says. “These are the things we’re going to measure ourselves against and, therefore, measure you and measure the organization against. We expect you and your area to have your own project. It has to be one that meets the Novus guidelines.”
Simons doesn’t mandate the numbers and tell his people what he expects them to achieve in each area.
“We have an expectation that each one of the regions will have local initiatives,” Simons says. “We don’t know what the needs or opportunities are as well as they do. We report in our journal report on what they are doing. That recognition causes people to do more of those good things. If you don’t recognize it, they don’t know it was a good thing to do.”
It didn’t take long for the board at Novus to realize that Simons was doing many good things and that it could remove “interim” from his title. The company’s president and CEO was promoting more outreach to customers, and that outreach has expanded around the world and played a part in the company reaching $949 million in 2009 revenue.
“We wanted to better understand what the local conditions for the poultry industry were in Mozambique,” Simons says. “We had no presence in Mozambique.”
So the company set goals for establishing relationships in countries such as Mozambique. It brought a scientist from Mozambique to St. Louis so that the company could learn from her and she could learn from Novus.
“The money we spent bringing her here and having her as a fellow and carrying the cost of her housing is really small compared to the benefit we will have by avoiding mistakes and by going into a market and actually bringing value to the customers there,” Simons says.
It’s the type of work and effort that Simons envisioned for Novus back when he was just the interim CEO. By diving into new opportunities, Simons is confident that Novus is more prepared for the drastic swings that can hit the economy.
“We’ve greatly diversified our product range so we now are not only present in the poultry industry, but we are present across all livestock,” Simons says. “You need to always be open to learning something new and be open to different opportunities.”
How to reach: Novus International Inc., (888) 906-6887 or www.novusint.com
