Build a management team that can follow suit. It’s hard to find because I prefer to hire talent first. By talent I mean in a lot of industries if you find a good manager they can do the job well, but in our business, you have to have a specific skill set, a marketing skill set, maybe you’re a writer, a designer or a strategic planner or a public relations expert or whatever, but in addition to that, when you’re more senior level, I also need you to be a good manager of people, and it’s often hard to get both the right lobe and the left lobe of the brains operating equally. A lot of times you find someone who is a good manager, but they’re not that talented. Or a great talent, but they’re a disaster as a manager. So my greatest challenge has been building a management team that has both.
We hire slowly, and if we make a mistake, we fire fast rather than the other way around. We take our time with people, and we really get to know them. Our interview process is pretty rigorous, and you have to meet with a lot of people on the team, and then you have to spend some time with us out of the office. We don’t want to check the references you provide, we want to check the references we discover, and if everything comes up real well, then chances are you’ll be a long-term member of our team. It’s so much easier to check outside references today than it was five to 10 years ago with all the online tools and strategies. You can find people who know these people. You can do some networking, leverage some social media. We find that there is always someone who knows someone who knows someone.
We take them to a ballgame or go out for a drink, go out for a bite to eat (to spend time with the candidate outside the office). Sometimes little things like seeing how an individual candidate treats a waiter or a waitress can be very revealing. Anybody who is going to treat a waiter or waitress disrespectfully is going to treat a report the same way.
Stay in touch. I write a newsletter every two weeks here, and it’s something that I refuse to delegate and that gives me a voice to the company. We have an office in Philadelphia, and we have an office on the West Coast in Seattle, and this keeps me in touch with everyone. I just write an introduction, so maybe 400 words, and I’m writing a piece on whatever I believe is relevant at that time, but it always reinforces what we believe in.
I hold town halls on a minimum of a quarterly basis, sometimes more. They’re plugged in (in Seattle), we conference them in. And I also write a blog on Ad Age at AdAge.com, so they can also read what I’m thinking.
They get it. I convey it in all ways, through my newsletter, through talks to the company, through my director’s meetings. Everyone understands. Fortunately, we have such good people here that I really don’t have to push very much. If anything, they’re pushing me just as hard. We have people who care so much that it hurts. We’ve been told that we ooze passion.
How to reach: Brownstein Group, (215) 735-3470 or www.brownsteingroup.com
