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Healthy trust
How Jackie Herr leads Ignite Health to steady growth by always focusing on earning her employees’ trust
By Mark Scott
Smart Business Orange County | January 2008
Trust is a cornerstone of any successful
business, says Jackie Herr.
“You have to be able to trust the leadership of a company because you’re
impacting the lives of so many other people and what they do and how their career
goes,” says the co-founder and CEO of
Ignite Health.
A subsidiary of inVentiv Health Inc., Ignite
is a full-service health care marketing
agency that seeks to educate and empower
chronically ill patients and their caregivers.
Just as clients rely on the company for honest information, Herr says employees rely
on their leaders to provide honest
leadership.
“I don’t have all the answers, but I
have a lot of really smart people
working here who say these are the
trends and this is where things are
going,” Herr says. “We listen to them
and employ that in our thinking of
the business.”
Herr has guided her 90-employee
company to revenue growth of
about 30 percent each year since
its founding in 2001.
Smart Business spoke with Herr
about why it can’t just be about the
money, developing trust and why
she encourages employees to
admit their mistakes and move on.
Q: What are the keys to building
employee trust?
When people do talk to you,
make sure you’re listening. If
there is an action that they want,
either make sure they understand that it’s an action that
you’re going to be able to take or
that it’s going to take some time.
Be honest.
It gets back to the trust. People
want to talk to you, and they will talk to you
as long as they believe they are being heard.
Whether or not you can act on what they are
asking you to do, at least follow up and say,
‘Here’s what we can’t do, and this is why.’
Clearly communicate why you care. It
can’t be just about the money. It can’t be
just about shareholders. There has to be a
greater vision. You have to empower and
let people know why you care so much
about the company.
If everyone knows that it’s just for the
money and it’s not for anything else, you
lose the passion in your business and you
lose the dedication from your employees.
You just lose a lot when money is the total
focus.
Q: How do you encourage your employees
to take an active role in the company?
You get to this level in an organization
and unfortunately, you think because
you’ve been at this level, that you pretty
much know everything.
Every day I come to work, my guys teach
me something new and I learn something
new and I learn that listening is far greater
than telling people, ‘Here is what you need
to do.’ Part of it is that as a leader, you tend
to get all the problems. That’s just part of
this job. You tend to get, ‘Here’s what’s
wrong.’
What we encourage our group to do is, it’s
fine to have a problem, but at least have a couple of ideas for solutions to deal with
those problems. If you come to us with those,
it’s a much more positive conversation than
just being stuck in, ‘This is a problem.’
You can’t solve everything because you
don’t understand all the intricacies of every
level within the company of what’s going on.
Q: How can you maximize employee performance?
We tend to be pretty hard on ourselves in
terms of who is good at what.
We try and get people to find their own
sweet spot. Find what you’re good at and
be OK with that and maximize
that particular thing you’re good
at. We just have to make sure we
help people identify their
strengths.
That’s gotten much tougher as
we’ve gotten bigger. When you’re
in a start-up mode and you have
four or five people, then you have
10 people, then you have 12 people,
it’s not unusual to say, ‘I went to this
presentation, and I totally stunk.’
But as the organization gets bigger, that’s a much tougher thing to
do. Our senior staff is charged with
trying to make sure that people
know that there is an open, honest
forum for them to say, ‘Here’s what
happened. This didn’t work so well,
and here’s what I can do better.’
Q: How do you deal with failure?
Admit it, learn from it and move on.
We share successes, and we share
failures where things didn’t work
quite as well as they should have. It’s
important to admit it. A lot of people
have a tough time admitting failure.
When you admit, learn from it and
move on, it makes the whole organization stronger.
Know you can’t please everyone. Don’t
be too hard on yourself, and never take
yourself too seriously. There are plenty of
people out there willing to tell you you’re
not doing a great job. Celebrate the successes and enjoy it.
HOW TO REACH: Ignite Health, www.ignitehealth.com or (949)
861-3200
