Real Estate and Construction
Walking the talk
How to get honest feedback from your employees
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Chicago | February 2008
Alan D. Lev
President and COO, Belgravia Group Ltd.
Alan D. Lev has a plaque on
his desk that reminds him to send fewer e-mails, be a better listener and not pick up the
phone if he’s in the middle of a
meeting with someone. Those
reminders aren’t just there for
show, either — each is something the president and chief
operating officer of Belgravia
Group Ltd. was instructed to
improve upon for his next performance review.
Who had the temerity to tell
the president and COO of a
$155 million home building
company how to do his job? His
employees, that’s who. It’s all part
of a confidential review process
that the company uses to solicit
ideas and honest feedback.
And Lev takes the results of
the reviews to heart. If he didn’t
work on his personal problem
areas, he says, the whole
initiative would be a sham.
And because he takes it
seriously, his employees do, too.
Smart Business spoke with
Lev about how to show your
employees that all your opinion-gathering isn’t just window
dressing.
Get input and act on it. As a
leader, you can foster an
atmosphere where you solicit people’s opinions. But the
real key is not just soliciting
because you can solicit a
couple of times, but if you
don’t act on it or if you
ignore it or if you don’t
sometimes accept the opinion, then it stops.
If you have enough foresight as a leader to say, ‘I’d
like to get everyone’s opinion
on this,’ but it’s just window
dressing, you’re done.
The converse is true, as
well. If there are a couple of
times that you actually
implemented something that
someone came up with as an
idea, people say, ‘Oh, he really does listen to what we say,
and he really does try to
change things and do things.’
Resist the temptation to micro-manage. I used to micromanage
quite a bit, and I saw the
light several years ago. As
we’ve grown, I’ve weaned
myself off that a bit.
I’ve become more of a
cheerleader, more of a
visionary at the 30,000-foot
level of the company. The
trick is letting go of some
things and letting the great
staff we have do their thing.
It’s very hard to go from
being the one who does everything when you grow — and
we started very small — to
the size we are now. You’re
so used to having done
everything before that the
temptation is still there to
put your fingers in everything.
If your company is really
small, you have to wear a lot
of hats. When there were
four of us, I did the legal
work because I’m a lawyer, I did the development stuff, I
used to show office space —
I’d walk around with a ring
of keys and do everything.
That’s why it’s hard as you
start to get bigger to start
giving up pieces of what you
used to do.
Part of it is who you have.
If you have enough skilled
people, as a leader, you
could and should try to delegate most of the day-to-day
and detail work and really
focus on being the glue for
the organization.
If you’re 10 people, you
probably can’t do that. If
you’re 35, you can start to do
that. If you’re 100, you’d better be doing that.
Be patient with your employees. If
you delegate and they don’t
get it done, and you lose confidence in your people, then it
just doesn’t work. You have to
come to the realization that
they’re not going to get it done
how you would do it exactly,
and they’re not going to do it
100 percent right.
You have to have the mind-set that it’s a pyramid. You
can’t do it all yourself. As
long as they do it reasonably
well, reasonably effective on
it — they’re never going to
reach your own high expectations of what you think
you could have done, but it’s
the only way to leverage
your organization and your
time. You can’t do it all.
Be picky with your hires. Our
organization has a family
type of atmosphere to it.
There is a lot of consensus-building around here. Unlike
a lot of other organizations
where whoever is the president says, ‘It’s my way or the
highway,’ we don’t operate
like that.
We’ve had new hires who
came in laterally who had
that attitude. They’d say, ‘I’m
now head of marketing; this
is how we did it at my old
place, this is how it’s going
to be.’ Well, those people end
up not making it here.
We’re very much about
including people, getting
their opinions, changing the
way we’re doing things and
trying new things.
There’s the cultural aspect,
and then there’s the brain power part. You have to be
able to meet both tests to fit
in here. There’s the way we
interact with each other, and
you have to have the knowledge and the skill sets. If
you’re missing one or the
other, it isn’t going to work.
I’ve had both situations
here. I’ve had people who fit
in great but you could tell
pretty quick they didn’t have
the background or the gray
matter to succeed. Or, they
had all the experience in the
world, but they came in like
the bull in the china shop.
They just didn’t fit in. It
takes both.
HOW TO REACH: Belgravia Group Ltd., (312) 751-2777 or www.belgraviagroup.com
