Empower people
Once, Aronson had an employee who worked around the clock for three months straight on a transaction. He was very enthusiastic about it, and given that in the private equity industry, people often define success as when you complete a transaction, he had an end goal on his radar. However, in the end, he ultimately recommended that Roark not proceed with the transaction, despite the amount of time and money the firm had spent working on it.
Most would look at this situation and say the man failed, but at the end of the year, he was actually rewarded with a promotion.
“Instead of rewarding just people that close deals, we rewarded great insight and great judgment, and we promoted him,” Aronson says. “It was a great message for the rest of the team.”
Rewarding people is just one way that you can empower your employees, and it also helps create an environment where people can thrive, which is another challenge Aronson has faced in his career.
“Ideas are often in the team’s head, and so facilitating and creating an environment where people feel comfortable and excited to share their views is really one of the most important things,” he says.
One of the key things you can do is to reward your employees for the positive contributions they make.
“People don’t celebrate successes enough,” Aronson says. “The world is very competitive, and the economy is difficult, and we’re all under pressure for more results, and so we’re putting out fires all day, and we forget to step back and make sure that we celebrate the successes along with the challenges.”
You may not always be able to give someone a promotion, like the man who recommended that Roark not proceed with the transaction, but at least calling to other people’s attention your employees’ successes can still go a long way.
“Make sure that people proactively spend time focusing on successes and who helped lead those successes and call those people out with their peers and their subordinates and their seniors,” he says. “Make sure everybody knows when somebody has done something well and hopefully reward them so you’re focusing on both successes, not just challenges.”
Another way to create an environment where employees feel comfortable sharing their ideas is to make sure you don’t talk down to them.
“We work hard to recognize and reward good ideas and good work ethic and good focus, and we also make it really clear that if we disagree, we treat that disagreement with
respect, and we really don’t talk down to anybody,” Aronson says.
In those situations, he says it’s key to explain why you disagree and thank that that person for participating so that they’ll be encouraged to participate again in the future.
“We really want to hear the ideas, so in order to make good decisions, we want to hear what the possibilities are, so try to create that environment where people feel good about sharing good ideas, and they don’t feel bad about sharing bad ideas,” he says.
