Advertising PR Media
Culture of creativity
Drive innovation by giving employees freedom
Smart Business St. Louis | January 2008
By Matt McClellan
Kimberly Boyer’s employees own their own destiny. The knowledge that their input can actually change
the direction of Adamson
Advertising has helped create
a culture of ownership at the
60-employee firm, which had
2006 billings of $60 million.
Boyer, president of
Adamson, says she gives her
employees the leeway to
maneuver independently, and
she attributes the firm’s success to that freedom.
Smart Business spoke with
Boyer about how giving
employees freedom allows
them to be creative and to
excel.
Q. How involved in the day-today operations should a leader
be?
Most people who are promoted to a position like mine come
from the trenches. When you
become a leader, you have to
slowly but surely let go of a few
things.
Occasionally, when you’re
doing changes, it varies. If you
had a speedometer and one
side of the speedometer is high
involvement and the other side
of the speedometer is low
involvement, it will vary by the
individual you’re working with.
The goal would be to get everyone close to the middle.
As a leader, there’s no reason
for me to be involved in every
single detail. If that were the
case, we would not grow. I
can’t do everything, and I don’t
have all the good ideas.
Occasionally, a leader has to
be deeply involved just to
show commitment. But you
have to know when to get out
of the way to let your people
have the freedom.
It varies by team, the individual, and the goal would be to
let people have enough freedom to move forward and not
constrain them.
Q. How do you empower
employees?
We empower them by asking
them to set objectives for their
teams. We’ve gone through an
entire reorganization this year.
We went through some small
group meetings, and I laid out
the objectives on where I
wanted the company to go.
I asked the team leaders to discuss and
decide the process how
we would reorganize
our company in order to
meet the coming challenges. By doing it as a
group, they owned it. By
owning their own destiny, that empowers
them.
If you’ve read the book
‘Good to Great,’ I totally
agree with (Jim Collins)
that you can’t motivate
people; they have to be
motivated from within.
With that type of thinking, we create a culture
where people can aspire
to creativity.
Our mission is a freedom to be creative and excel. I
don’t have to do a lot of it;
they inspire each other.
If we can give people the
freedom to work together and
come up with the best ideas,
that’s how we create a quality
product. By evolving the culture into that environment, it
will help us in the future.
Q. How do you create that
culture?
We’ve doubled our training
budget this year. When you
expose your staff members to new ideas and give them new
opportunities to learn, that
inspires people.
Great ideas can come from
everywhere. So, we’re now
training everyone from
accounting to receptionists.
Sometimes when we have idea
sessions, we involve people
who aren’t in the roles we’re
having ideas about because
you never know where a good
idea might come from.
The more they know about
our business, the better.
Training is a key for that.
Q. How do you achieve
growth?
You pick and go after new
business. And you have to pick the right things to go
after — things that you as a
team have strength in, and
that you can absorb within
the company.
Sometimes you can get new
business and not have to hire
anyone. That’s easy.
When you have to add staff,
that’s more challenging, but if
you have a good sense of the
type of people who fit well in
your company, it’s easier to
manage.
The individual is the key to
achieving and managing business growth. If you hire the
best employees, you’ll do it
successfully.
Q. How do you attract the
right employees?
We looked at the personality
traits and characteristics of
the individuals we all wanted
on our teams. So we put those
together in a list, and when
we presented the plan to our
staff members, we told them
the characteristics a successful team member will have.
The way to attract additional
quality employees is by first
creating a culture your own
staff members love, then they
will spread the word.
When we interview people,
we have various team members interview them. If you
don’t have people who love
the company interviewing,
then you won’t be able to
attract great employees. So
our goal is to keep the team
members we have now motivated and happy in a culture
they enjoy.
Then they, themselves, will
attract great employees.
We’ve hired excellent people,
and they know excellent
people.
HOW TO REACH: Adamson Advertising, (314) 727-9500 or www.adamsonadvertising.com
