Business Services
Rock solid
How to empower your employees
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Cleveland | June 2008
Page 1 of 2
Robert E. Troop
CEO, The Shamrock Cos. Inc.
One of the toughest things
Robert E. Troop has had to do at The Shamrock Cos. Inc.
has been finding someone to
replace him.
Troop says he’s been trying
to retire for years, but he just
hadn’t found the right person to
succeed him at the marketing
communications and project
management company, which
has fared well under his leadership — 2007 was the 14th
consecutive year it achieved
double-digit percentage growth.
But now, after the 250-employee
company finished 2007 with
revenue of nearly $80 million,
Troop has appointed Tim Connor
as president. Troop, who still
retains the CEO title, says
Connor expressed interest in
his job when he first started at
Shamrock 14 years ago at the
age of 23. After working with
three presidents in the last
seven years, Troop is optimistic
that his search for a successor
is at an end.
Smart Business spoke with
Troop about how to build your
team for success and why you
can’t give employees all the
answers.
Build your team through a process
of elimination. One of my greatest assets — which can also be
one of my biggest liabilities — is
I tend to have more confidence
in people and their abilities than
they have in themselves.
I brought some people into
my life as executives who had
difficulty completing a job or a
process or a project. When I
say I did it through process of
elimination, I mean there have
been a number of people I’ve
associated with in this business
that had success as a salesperson, that I felt would be
great leaders in my company.
The challenge is when you
find highly successful sales-people, you’re looking at type A
personalities. These people are
truly entrepreneurial, so we
preach the necessity for them to
be accountable for their successes and failures. But at the
same time, we preach family
and team, so it’s a little bit of an
oxymoron if you will.
Let your employees figure it out. The most important thing I’ve
learned is to keep an open line
of communication with your
employees. It’s incredibly
important to practice what
you preach.
I’m a firm believer in empowering my employees and holding my sales team accountable.
I think you can micromanage,
which I have never been one
to do.
I have a little philosophy, and
my people kind of chuckle
about it, but they also embrace
it: When you talk about empowering people, one of my favorite
lines is to tell my employees to
figure it out. If they have a problem that they really should
know the answer to, if you give
them adequate time, they’ll figure out what the solution is.
That’s a theme that is
behind the success of our
company. Our people really
do take the time to figure it
out. Whether it’s a problem,
it’s an initiative, whatever it
is, they somehow, someway
are able to figure it out.
