Whether your business is made up of five people or 500 people, the most important job of the President does not change. Regardless of your industry, the most important job of the President does not change. No matter if you are in a recession or an economic boom time, the most important job of the President does not change. The responsibilities of a President are vast and include all areas of the company from client relations to vendor relations, from accounting to technical product issues, and all of these areas can exhaust a President quickly. However, there is one area that will make or break every company without exception and is worthy of any President’s time: it is the Who in your business. Who is it that is representing your company? The employees.
The people we hire and the people we develop and the people we lead will be the reason you are a great President–or will be the reason you are not. I did not always understand this and my leadership suffered greatly. I thought strategy and product innovation were the keys. If everyone would just do what I said, it would all go well. This resulted in a very stressful environment for our employees as well as very heavy and unnecessary burden for myself. It also held us back in accomplishing our best because we were not harnessing the talent of our people.
Over the next three months, I will share with you what I have learned about attracting, developing, and retaining talented people. Each blog will focus on one of these three key areas to having great people on your team. I want to share with you some of the benefits we have been experiencing since 2008 when we began applying some of these best practices regarding the people who make up our team.
Peaceful Work Environment: While it is not perfect, since we began hiring and pairing people together on teams based on their personalities and strengths, we have seen the contentment along with the work relationships increase drastically. It has resulted in a peaceful and productive work environment.
Great Competence: We have the most competent people we have ever had. I had a friend tell me the other day “Dustin as I walk through your office place, I just observed such confidence in the team and you could just tell they were very good at what they do and they knew it.” While it was a great compliment to our team, it told me that we are getting the right people on the bus and getting them into the right seat on the bus.
Great Productivity and Growth: Talented people require an environment where they can accomplish great things and operate in their talents. Releasing our team members to accomplish great things has resulted in far greater productivity than we could have ever accomplished with people just doing what I said. There are many areas of our business where the people leading those specific areas have better ideas and know how to execute those ideas better than me. If I did not empower them to operate that way, we would miss out on that improved productivity and we would eventually lose that talented person to someone who would value their talents.
A More Productive President: By getting out of the way and allowing talented people to operate, I find that I have time and capacity to focus on the areas where I can best serve our company.
At the end of the day, the President needs to be keenly focused on hiring, developing, and retaining talented people that will fit well in the company’s culture and compliment the existing team. We will talk about better ways to do this and what we have learned in this area. I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas in this area – please add your comments at the bottom.
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Good stuff Dustin, I am learning this in Indonesia as I try to help companies grow beyond a tightly micro-managed entity into organizations that can trust it's people to take them forward. It is challenging for both the management and the people, who have never had to have too much self-directed activity.