Monte Ahuja says that business really isn’t rocket science.
“My focus has always been build my business around people because [with] the right people, the right atmosphere, the right attitude, you’re going to achieve the success,” he says.
As chairman and CEO of Transtar Industries Inc., a driveline solutions provider, he’s learned that innovation is driven by the people. To get the right people, he looks for what he calls the AAA philosophy.
“It’s a formula of three A’s people must display — ability, attitude and achievement,” Ahuja says. “You have a solid performance and solid outcome when you have the three-A personality in people. If they don’t have the ability, nothing will happen. If they don’t have the right attitude, you won’t achieve what you want. … You can have the right ability, right attitude, but if you don’t achieve anything, you don’t succeed in life.”
The tough part, though, is recognizing these three qualities in someone. The ability and the achievement parts are a little easier to recognize because for ability, you can gauge someone’s education and their past roles, and for achievement, you can look at their past successes. But the tricky one is attitude.
“The attitude is reflected on the atmosphere and culture that the person grows in,” he says.
He says that you can make your best assessment about people based on the interviews, but you won’t truly see their attitude until you work with them, so during the first few months, you have to work very closely with someone in order to gauge that.
“You want to have a very, very close contact relationship with the individual to see if he displays the right combination of the three A’s,” Ahuja says.
But if you see that someone isn’t displaying one of the desired qualities, then you have to make a tough decision.
“If you do your focus and you’re looking at a key position and you don’t see those three A’s there, you’ve got to cut loose,” he says. “I’m not saying you hire and fire; that’s just not my philosophy. And you want stable employees, but if you realize that what you’re looking for, you’re mistaken or misrepresented, then you’ve got to make that decision.”
Dragging out that decision can have negative consequences for your business, for you and for your employees. He says that while the length of time varies depending on the person and the position level, with nearly anyone, within six months, you will know if you’re working with and watching them closely.
“You need to be very frank and forward about it to see what you’re expecting and what you’re getting, and some things change and some things don’t,” Ahuja says. “Attitudes don’t change easily.”
When you do have the right people, it’s then important to provide them with another A — a great atmosphere.
“You really have to let the people be free to innovate,” he says. “You need to encourage and incentivize them. It’s the atmosphere that you need to create. It’s not one thing that you do to create innovation. If you have a total environment where people feel they can put forward their ideas and you, of course, allow them to prosper and, most importantly, you incentivize them, that’s how you drive innovation.”
One of the biggest parts of this is rewarding people for their work.
“Most people believe that they’re working hard, but they’re not recognized or acknowledged and not sharing in the growth of the company, and they’re not encouraged,” Ahuja says.
There are many ways to recognize someone, whether it’s providing a lunch or writing a note or making a comment to him or her. Little things can go a long way, but you also need to have larger programs in place, too.
“Whether anybody believes it or not, money is a great motivator for anybody, …” he says. “But depending on each position that you have, there are many ways to create incentives. You have to find out what motivates people. That depends on long-term, short-term goals and what’s achievable. There’s no one set incentive program that you create for people because they’re all different kinds of people that require different kinds of incentives.”
When you highly reward people, then you can have higher expectations for them.
“People rise to the occasion,” Ahuja says. “People rise above the normal level of performance. … There’s also a lot of competition, and people believe everyone is performing better, and they’re invigorated to do the same thing.”
How to reach: Transtar Industries Inc., (800) 359-3339 or www.transtarindustries.com
