Technology
Driving growth
How Bruce Moeller grows DriveCam Inc. by empowering his staff
By John Nank
Smart Business San Diego | May 2007
While many leaders work to build trusting relationships with employees, Bruce Moeller prefers granting trust right away and risk being
mistaken. As president and CEO of DriveCam Inc., Moeller says that to best serve his customers, those on the front lines need the authority to make decisions.
“It’s an inverse pyramid,” Moeller says. “The people closest to the customer are the ones empowered to make the right decisions. Those
of us who are further away from the customer are here to support those decisions and make sure we give them the tools and the cultural environment it takes to be effective.”
The cultural environment Moeller refers to is one that embraces change, and that has helped grow DriveCam, which produces equipment that monitors driver behavior, to 2006 revenue of more than $28 million.
Moeller talked to Smart Business about the importance of trust and the dangers of second-guessing your team.
Q: How would you describe your leadership style?
I’m very trusting and open, so I take people for what I believe them to be and I let them prove me wrong, as opposed to being suspicious and letting them earn my trust. I don’t read a resume, for example. I do a behavioral interview.
I don’t want to be tainted by what you say you are or can be or have been. I look at how you’ve lived your life behaviorally up to this
point so that I can start to draw a picture of who you really are and how your mind really works and what kind of values you have as to
what you’ll base your decisions on.
Q: What are the benefits of that style?
When you have an open and trust basis, it allows for communications to happen pretty freely and regularly without a lot of politics or
fear. What we’re trying to create here is an environment where people are fast-moving and unafraid to take risks, take chances and make
things happen.
We like to have a bias for action, and as long as you’re not violating some basic core principles, people are going to make mistakes, and
we know that. We encourage people to just be adults, and own their own decisions and the consequences of their decisions.
As long as there is nothing nefarious about what their decisions are, the best way I can empower everybody to be where I can’t be and
shouldn’t be at all times is to share a vision and values that they can act upon them the same way I would if I were there.
Q: How can a leader encourage risk-taking?
It comes down to reinforcing certain behaviors, whether you’re reinforcing them positively or negatively. If you say you want a bias for
action and you encourage people to do what’s right for the customers, which is what we do, you don’t have to ask permission to do the
right thing for a customer. Make your own judgment.
In doing that, if you, in your value judgment, thought that a customer deserved a refund or a complete reinstall or whatever it is that
you think should be done, you’re the best judge of that. That’s what we hired you for.
If you encourage people and empower people to do that in whatever they do, and you then second-guess them or you say, ‘That’s not
what I would have done,’ you’re basically reinforcing that you may say that and it might be written on the wall, but don’t dare do it again.
You’re effectively putting a negative consequence on a behavior that you say you want. You have to be really careful that what you’re
reinforcing, either positively or negatively, is what you really want.
Q: How do a leader’s responsibilities change as his company grows?
As you get bigger, you have to be willing to duplicate your messages, your thinking and your direction and the values by which you get
there. You have to be willing to let go of that so other people in the organization can engage their minds and their hearts, and it isn’t all
just from you.
Things start moving so quickly and there are so many different facets to the business that you can’t possibly keep up with it. That’s why
culture becomes everything. You have to trust that the culture you built will do the right thing at the right place at the right time, because
you couldn’t possibly keep your finger on the pulse of all of that yourself.
As long as you don’t try to become a micromanager or think that you’re superhuman, as long as you are self-secure enough to
know that you’re just part of it and not all of it, you’re hiring the right people and giving them the right direction. The leader needs
to stay focused on strategy. From a macro level and from a micro level, you’ve got to learn to let go and trust.
HOW TO REACH: DriveCam Inc., www.drivecam.com or (866) 419-5861
