Real Estate and Construction
Charlie Garcia
President and CEO, Garcia Construction Group
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Indianapolis | June 2007
For five years, Charlie Garcia had been trying to make a big change at his company, and he was frustrated. Garcia, president and
CEO of Garcia Construction Group, wanted to change the management style at his construction managing and consulting
company to a more democratic process, but he was dedicating too much of his time to the effort and not enough time to what
was in front of him. Instead of giving up, Garcia committed to the change by hiring an internal consultant to lead the way. With
that conviction, Garcia started to earn staff buy-in and the company continued to move forward, posting more than $32 million
in revenue. Smart Business spoke with Garcia about changing his company’s direction.
Know when you can’t stay stagnant. When
we made our change, it was because I
looked back and asked, ‘Have we grown
in all areas as a company?’ I was looking
not only in areas of capability, capacity
and profitability, but as a whole and
wondering if our behavior as an organization was any different than it was in
the two or three years previous, and the
answer was no.
That meant that what we were doing
wasn’t working. I made a decision at that
time to hire a consultant in-house, and
his entire focus is to facilitate and monitor our change in management style.
He’s an organizational psychologist, and
his role is making sure we’re heading in
that direction.
Convince your staff through your conviction. The first thing I had to establish
with people is conviction — that I was
convinced about this new direction — so
that came through open dialogue and
statements to both groups and individuals. We set up a number of town-home
meetings internally and we talked about
it, and I opened the floor to what people
thought about it.
That was one where people understood that I was convinced in leading
them in this direction. The other thing
was making the commitment. I know it’s
difficult to change paradigms and behaviors within a 12-month period, so I’ve
committed three years, and it’s not going
to be short-term in any fashion.
And it may go beyond that, but three
years will give us a good basis for the
fundamentals to move forward.
Give employees a chance to make the
change. We built the curriculum and we
have built the format of how we move
forward, but we’re all adults here, so it’s
really up to the individuals to agree and
to grow in their commitment and conviction, and that happens fairly easily when
people see results. So we’ve seen some
strong results in their behavior as people
are getting excited about the change.
We never take the attitude that someone can’t change. We don’t say one person can change and the other one can’t.
We give everyone the opportunity, and
let them make the decision. Really, they
will put themselves out it if they don’t
want to make the change; it has little to
do with us.
Be prepared to lose some staff in the transition. The challenge we have is people
who are adamant about not changing.
We use the analogy, ‘If we’re all going to
Chicago, and you want to go to
Nashville, you’re on the wrong bus. So if
that doesn’t interest you, you better get
off the bus now, because we’re going to
Chicago.’
We’ve had a few of those, so we don’t
make it mandatory that people attend
meetings. But what I always tell people is
‘These aren’t mandatory meetings, this is
not a mandatory initiative. But if you
don’t — either you decide you do not
want to or you can’t — change, then most
likely you won’t be in here in three years.’
That’s not a threat, that’s just a fact of
where we’re going. It comes to a point
where it would be almost impossible to
remediate some individuals, and most
likely, those individuals will have to
leave the organization.
Get new perspective to help make decisions. We have internal committees and each one meets twice a month, and we
change members of those committees by
about 20 percent every six months, so
we have constant fresh perspective, and
constant change and cross input for our
organization.
We have changed our facility so that
we have a large training facility here, so
that group is identifying curriculum for a
three- to four-year program. From a
knowledge base, we will be updated consistently to stay on the cutting edge.
We also are working out a deal with a
university so that all of our people can
continue their education to keep every
end of the business looking at different
things. We’re served better in all of our
deals if we keep people thinking about
new things.
The boost will be that we will be more
efficient from not only a standpoint of
production but from our thought
process and decision-making.
Communicate your victories. What we
were experiencing was a lot of people
within our organization digging their
heals in, waiting for the company to
revert back to the way it’s been. Now,
after 12 months, they’re coming to the
understanding, because of the results,
that it’s good for us as an organization
and good for them as an individual.
We have a committee that works with
the internal consultant, and they work
on getting people to simply communicate openly and honestly without fear of
retribution, without fear of negative
feedback from the company. It’s helping,
because change for any human is very
difficult, and it’s a difficult thing to ask of
someone, so change can occur more easily when there is open communication.
And open communication, we believe,
establishes trust. We seek to understand
each other. And, in doing so, we hope to
bring more value by communicating
more information to them so they can
see our direction and see how successful
it will be.
HOW TO REACH: Garcia Construction Group, (317) 254-3240
or www.gmconstruction.com
