Real Estate and Construction
The big picture
How to connect everyone in your company to your vision
By Abby Cymerman
Smart Business Philadelphia | June 2008
Page 1 of 2
John ‘Ozzie’ Nelson Jr.
President and CEO, NELSON
John “Ozzie” Nelson Jr.
doesn’t like to get wrapped up in the details.
Instead, the president and
CEO of NELSON, a $70 million
international design and consulting firm, surrounds himself
with people who do focus on
the details so he can focus on
what all of those details could
become in the big picture.
That big-picture thinking has
helped fuel 12 merger/acquisitions for NELSON during the
last three and a half years.
During that period, Nelson
has focused on rapid growth,
avoiding distractions, being disciplined in speed to market and
quickly doing transactions, a
textbook approach that was
exactly what his company needed to get to the next level.
Now managing 36 locations
around the world, Nelson has
adapted his management
approach from driving growth
to becoming a servant leader to
his 500 employees.
Smart Business spoke with
Nelson about how he took on a
new leadership style while
maintaining his vision for the
company.
Adopt a servant-leader attitude. I’m a firm believer in being willing to roll up your sleeves and
do whatever is required but
also being a vision-based leader
that can help others see what
they might not see in the day to
day of their working experience. There are some tactical
ways you do that, and there are
strategic ways you do that.
I try to spend as much time
as I can shoulder to shoulder
with our teammates. Yesterday,
I was in one of our offices and
spent the day with our team,
helping to add any value that I
could and really getting to
know the culture and people
within that office. It’s really
getting into the trenches to see
that.
I keep a directory with photos of all of our teammates
with me. Over time, if we’ve
had four phone calls, it’s kind
of like working face to face
with them. It’s amazing to me
the smile that will come on
someone’s face when you
walk through an office and
know their name and you can
make that connection with
them. In this environment, I’ve
come to appreciate the importance of psychic compensation
for our teammates.
I also send out a weekly e-mail every Friday without fail
to every teammate within the
company. I try to be very conscious of not having that be
the format of just the things I
want to talk about but a combination of the things that I
think people want to hear.
That’s an important part of
the way they connect with me,
and I can share a little bit of
who I am, but it’s also a piece
that is as much personal perspectives of mine as business
perspectives. It shows some
vulnerability that allows people to connect with the person
instead of the position.
Support your team. In our environment, everybody is a team-mate as opposed to an
employee. It sets a tone that
we are all teammates in a
vision and mission that we are
trying to accomplish.
When someone who’s at a
junior level in the organization
sees themselves as a team-mate and they see they have a
place on the team that’s no different than the spot the CEO
has on the team, they’re more
likely to have buy-in. They’re
more likely to be connected to
the company vision.
When people have put a faith
in you and have treated you in
a certain way, those are the
people that you never want to let down. It’s everything from
the way that you talk to them
to the way that you listen to
them. It’s not any one thing
that you do as much as it is a
lot of years of consistency; it’s
showing that you really mean
what you say and that you’re
committed to them.
