Real Estate and Construction
Steve Baird
President and CEO, Baird & Warner
By John Nank
Smart Business Chicago | November 2007
Steve Baird remembers clearly the day when he realized the culture he had worked to establish at Baird & Warner had taken hold. At
a meeting of about 15 midlevel managers, Baird was told that one of his top executives — the direct superior of several of those in
attendance — was not “a Baird & Warner person.” Though disturbed that he had somehow failed to notice this fact, Baird says he
was nonetheless encouraged that his leadership team knew so well what it meant to be part of the 2,200-employee organization,
which, with 2006 revenue of approximately $160 million, is the largest independent real estate broker in Illinois. Smart Business spoke
with Baird about how to avoid complacency and make smart hires and the importance of establishing and reinforcing your vision.
Hire to fit your style. Any leader sets up an
organization and hires people to his model.
You essentially build your organization
around your leadership style.
There are really good people who don’t
necessarily work well with me, and it’s a
stylistic thing. Initially, I thought it was just
about hiring good people, and if they were
good people, they could work together.
What I’ve realized is that not only do you
need good people, you need the right kind
of people. It’s not right in an absolute
sense, it’s right in that they need to fit with
your style and your culture.
Recruiting for that is the hardest thing,
and I don’t have a lot of confidence in my
own ability to make judgments about people through an interview process. What we
have tried to do is to eliminate variables.
So, for most of the positions in the company, we have standardized questions that we
ask, and we’re trying to build some experience in what works in our organization and
what doesn’t work based on a standardized
interview report.
We also have multiple-people interviews.
Nobody works here in any major position
without going through at least three or four
interviews — and more like six or seven.
Define your expectations. The leader of any
organization sets the tone. You define the
culture, and you set the vision and the
goals. The better and more distinctively
you define it, the easier it is for the organization to become that culture. Then it takes
some time. These things don’t happen
overnight.
How do you really define those things as a
leader? First is you set it out there and say,
‘Here’s what I want’ — culture, goals, planning, strategy, all that stuff. But the real definition comes firstly in who are the people
you hire, but more importantly, who are the
people you fire? The people you fire send a
very distinct message that this kind of person or behavior or approach is not tolerated.
Everybody realizes when you hire that
you’re trying to get there, but they give you
some slack. When you don’t fire to that
standard, whatever your threshold level for
firing is, that becomes your standard.
Twice in my tenure I have fired the No. 1
producer in the company. Both times it
shocked a lot of people, but those people
were not Baird & Warner people. As the
leader, almost everybody else in the company knows more about this than you do.
You’re the last guy to know about it, so
when you don’t do it, they’re watching you.
Even though they might be good people,
if they see that you’ll tolerate that kind of
behavior or activity or attitude, they will
say, ‘He’s not as strong on this issue as I
thought he would be, so next time I can
come to the meeting a little late.’
If your standard is that everybody shows
up on time and you allow a couple people
to be 10 minutes late, your standard
becomes 10 minutes late.
Reinforce your vision. You always want to
look for things that reinforce your vision,
your values and your goals. There are some
simple ones — compensation programs —
that reinforce the kind of behavior you
want, but I’m very sensitive to things like
what you do at a Christmas party. How do
you act? What kind of party do you throw?
In almost everything you do, you are making decisions to do things a certain way. You
have to look for opportunities, particularly public opportunities, to make a statement.
Some of them are very subtle. How do you
build out your space? How much money do
you spend? And, if you want to get very literal about it, what’s the tone of the carpet?
You project a certain image. We moved our
corporate headquarters to a brand-new
facility about seven years ago. We had been
in the other facility for about 15 years, and
it was a reasonably nice office, but when
we moved over here, it really defined to
people what we were about.
It was an opportunity to make a physical
statement. We did some things in the way
the space laid out that was more in line
with our culture that kind of made all the
other things click, and I was surprised it
had that much of an impact.
Avoid complacency. Any organization has to
be able to change and adapt, whether it’s
how they do their business or how they
make their products. There are a lot of people who don’t like change, and that’s just
built into people’s psyches. Companies
become complacent, but change is just a
dynamic thing that happens in the marketplace. Organizations that continue to
change and evolve are ones that are
healthy and growing, and companies that
don’t change, it’s just a matter of time
before they’re going to struggle or be left by
the wayside.
We’re a 152-year-old company. When I
took over our company, I gave a lot of
speeches about change, how other business have been affected by change and
continually reinforcing how it works. The
other thing I’ve tried to do is let people
know that it’s not bad to fail. That’s a very
hard thing to let people know about.
Employees, by their nature, are trying to
please their bosses, so to foster a culture
where people try things and fail is a really
difficult thing to do. You have to be very
careful that when someone tries something
and fails that they don’t get down about it
because if you’re not willing to fail, you’re
never going to change.
HOW TO REACH: Baird & Warner, (800) 644-1855 or
www.bairdwarner.com
