Women in Business
Designing culture
How Mary Ann Lievois cross-trains employees to keep iscg inc. in shape
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Detroit | June 2007
To work for Mary Ann Lievois, you have to have a flare for sales,
an eye for design and the ability to talk to customers. But if you
don’t have all that right now, Lievois, CEO of iscg inc., is willing to
teach, if you’re willing to try. By cross-training all of the workplace
design and furnishing company’s employees, Lievois has turned
everyone into a specialized commodity for the company.
Lievois doesn’t want people to look at cross-training as a hazard
but instead as a boon to their skills.
“I don’t have a problem with change,” Lievois says. “I look at it
as an opportunity and embrace it.”
By embracing change, Lievois has kept her staff together and
pushed revenue to $20 million at a time when many of her competitors have faced layoffs.
Smart Business spoke with Lievois about cross-training and celebrating victories.
Q: How do you keep your employees motivated?
I focus constantly on how to refresh someone’s job, how to take
the best skills of somebody and create something unique about
that. I prioritize job enrichment by allowing employees to wear
many hats. They want that ability and embrace it because it’s a job
enrichment tool.
If you have a good attitude, that employee is inspired to grow
and open up that opportunity to look for empowering positions,
but it’s all about attitude.
There’s no place for somebody to have a very narrow job
description. We haven’t laid anybody off, but our competitors have
had to. A lot of that is about cross-training, and there’s not a niche
position in this place. There’s no time for niche positions in this
economy.
Q: What’s the key to hiring people when employees wear so many
hats?
The first obvious issue is how aggressive they are and how creative they are in seeking us out. That says a lot right there.
But we don’t hire people without putting them within a peer
group, and then with a group of one person from every department to talk to them about how they work together and ask questions about how they work with others and how they would see
themselves in that position. Because we’re small, the training
takes a long time. We don’t have a training department to send
someone off to, to go learn.
For all the energy and time we invest in training and educating
them, I can’t afford to have someone spend four months here and
then decide they don’t like what they do.
We make sure they completely understand the job. We have a
customer support person or designer talk to them about what they
may have to do, and what their personality will have to be, and
that they may have to step into another role where they deal with
customers. If you’re an administrative person, for example, and
you know that you’re an introvert, and you hear that, you will
think twice. I want all that on the table early.
Q: How do you encourage people to make decisions?
When you’re empowering people, you need to take that fear
away of making a bad decision. We’re very clear about telling people that no one gets fired for making a bad decision.
Making a bad decision or a mistake, it’s not some fireable action;
it’s hiding those mistakes or not addressing them early enough. We
work hard to let everyone know that so that everybody understands that if there’s a problem, let’s all jump on it and find the best
solution.
Q: What do you consider your most important job?
Understanding who you work for. I say that I work for my 30
employees. I have to create efficiencies and remove roadblocks so
that people work smarter, not harder. It’s our job to keep people
focused by fashioning the way for whatever it might be we do
next.
If there’s a problem, I want to know about it first thing, and we’re
going to drop everything and take care of it. That becomes my priority for the day.
I have to ask myself questions every day about if I’m helping
them. Did I really do everything I could to make the whole team
more productive? Was I keeping everybody as efficient as possible? Was I making sure they were working together and stepping
in to help with any conflicts?
Q: When things get tough, how do you keep up the energy?
We try to always focus on finding the celebration of the day. We
have something on our wall called ‘Celebrate the yes.’ It was just
questions about how the employee gets through their day, asking
what they did to help iscg get through the day. There were questions about whether or not they helped with new business opportunities.
It’s just keeping the positive, celebrating the yes. If I’m having a
bad day, I’ll leave or I’ll close my door. Sometimes I go out and try
to find someone who I know did something positive that day and
talk to them about that.
HOW TO REACH: iscg inc., (248) 399-1600 or www.iscginc.com
