Fast Lane
Success from chaos
How to create a culture of empowerment
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Tampa Bay | March 2008
Elaine C. Myrback
president and CEO, EMS Consulting
Elaine C. Myrback trusts and
empowers her employees,
but she’ll step in to help if necessary, even catching the
next flight out to meet a client
to discuss a potential contract.
Above all, the president and
CEO of EMS Consulting — an
Enterprise Resource Planning
consulting service — and its subsidiary, Intelligent Chaos, wants
to make sure her customers’
expectations are being met.
It’s a fine line between being
an involved CEO and treading
on your employees’ toes,
Myrback says, and she tries
very hard not to cross it.
“You want to believe in your
people; you want to give them
the latitude but guide them as
needed,” she says.
Under Myrback’s guidance, the
115-employee company posted
2006 revenue of $17.8 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Myrback about why growing
your business can be like spinning plates.
Q. How do you attract quality
employees?
When you’re in a growth-oriented mode, you continue to
go out and touch base and meet
as many different candidates as
you can. The success comes
from being consistent in interviewing candidates and knowing where the right person fits.
It’s like a puzzle, making sure
you have the right skills and
capabilities in people and putting them in a position where
they can be successful.
You have to make sure you
give them a dynamic environment where they can have personal development. They’re
encouraged to have that creativity, and they are rewarded for it.
Q. How do you create that
environment?
It’s a very competitive environment because people get rewarded for their hard work.
People see that, so they want to
be rewarded, too. You end up
raising the standards. If you
have that kind of positive momentum in the organization, it
really attracts good people.
Q. Once you’ve got them,
how do you retain employees?
If they are some of the
key management people,
they have a stake in it.
They are a shareholder.
They see the bonus potential if we all hit our objectives.
By people being happy
in that dynamic environment we create, it keeps
people for a while. That
way, it’s challenging; it’s
not boring. There are
always some new things
to learn or try to conquer.
People need challenges.
The more intellectual folk
are always looking for
challenges.
Q. How do you empower
your employees?
I really trust in the employees
to make the right decisions. I
still take the responsibility overall for those decisions that are
being made, but I give them the
latitude to have the creativity
and run this like it was their
own organization.
I give them a bit of the framework of what we’re trying to
accomplish, where our vision is,
where we need to go. Give them
a bit of a starter kit to help them
be a little more assertive in the
areas they need to focus on. It gives them a chance to prove
themselves.
When you give people the
space to be able to make their
own decisions and they see
the results of that, it says a lot.
Something you definitely do
not want to do is micromanage.
You can’t put all your eggs in
one basket. You have to really
spread yourself — across markets, across people.
Give them the latitude to
make their own decisions but
also make sure they are responsible for what their decisions
have been by measurement. It
all ties into corporate objectives
from a profitability and growth
standpoint. They all fall in alignment.
Q. How do you keep
objectives aligned as the
business grows?
If you do a good job in scalability, then you’re able to grow
your company in the right way.
If you can’t scale the size, then it
cripples you.
So from a growth standpoint,
how do you scale your key people? How do you get the people
behind them to be similar in
skills and capability? That is
really the challenge.
When you get more opportunities and you sign more contracts,
sometimes you realize you
haven’t scaled well. You haven’t
set up the proper amount of
trained resources across the
country. So you have to continue to attract, retain and grow, in
addition to having an open number of people you feel you need
to bring into the organization.
It’s a careful balance; you’re
spinning a lot of different plates.
When you sign contracts, you
have to make sure you’re able
to carry them through with
enough qualified people in the
field. That’s scaling.
Q. How do you plan for
scalability in your business?
When you propose and sign
contracts, you know what your
resource requirements are. You
don’t know when you’re getting
those, when you get those you
have to make sure you have
enough people on board,
trained and ready to go, and
hopefully, those contracts come
through. If they don’t then they
go to another project.
It’s the whole cycle of managing future growth and sustaining
what you currently have.
HOW TO REACH: EMS Consulting, (813) 287-2486 or www.consultems.com
