Before you can begin a
quest, you need a goal,
so S. Sam Yadav makes sure his employees at Quest
Environmental & Safety
Products Inc. have goals to
work toward.
“Try to find out what the
individual wants out of their
career,” he says. “In individual meetings, I ask them personally, ‘What do you want
from Quest to help you
become the businessperson
you want to be?’”
Yadav, founder and president
of Quest, has guided the developer of safety solutions to 2007
sales of $11 million and anticipates 2008 sales of between
$12.5 million and $13 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Yadav about how to keep your
employees on the path toward
self-improvement and how to
determine whether your company should branch out.
Q. How do you get
employees involved with
the company’s direction?
Try to find out what the individual wants out of their
career. I take people to lunch.
Today, we’re celebrating a successful third quarter, so we
have a cookout. I sit next to
people at lunches that we have
or one-on-one in groups, and
say, ‘Tell me what you experienced this quarter. What was
exciting to you? What would
you like to see happen this
quarter?’
With key individuals whom
we’ve pegged for management
roles in the future, I spend
every three months one-onone with them for three hours
going through, ‘What skill sets
do you want to work on to help you get to this goal?’ and
they’ve done a map out of, ‘In
two years, I want to be in this
position, in three years, I want
to be in this position, [and] in
give years …’ Then I break it
down and say, ‘Here are the
skills I think you may want to
consider.’
Q. Once those goals are set,
how do you hold employees
accountable?
We talk through it. For sales-people, I tell them you never
want to make a sales
decision based on commission or what expenses you have coming up.
To get you out of that
decision-making
process, let’s talk about
how you are setting
yourself up for financial
success personally.
So what I get out of it
as a business is you’re
going to make a long-term business decision
versus a short-term, ‘I
need cash’ decision. I
tell them, if you want to
get to this position, what
do you think you need
to do financially to get
there?
It allows them to feel
that they are in control of
their future. They also know
their own milestones. I used
to wait for my manager to say,
‘Good job.’ If they are
accountable and they’ve
already put it on paper, they
know when they have done a
good job. It’s just a bonus
when their manager congratulates them; they know when
they’re on the way to success.
That makes them a better
businessperson, more confident individual, and they’re
setting their own path.
