Departments
Send the right message
How to help employees learn new roles
By Tim Opsitnick
Smart Business Cleveland | July 2008
"I don’t know how to do
that.”
Most business leaders wouldn’t think that’s a
great comment to hear from
their employees, but at
JurInnov Ltd., we’ve created a
workplace where our 24
employees are actually
encouraged to say that.
JurInnov, a technology company that provides litigation
support services to law firms
and corporate legal departments, has grown by leaps and
bounds since being founded in
2000, including an annual
growth rate of 50 to 60 percent
the last three years.
For us to maintain our rate
of growth, our employees
need to grow and evolve, as
well. And that means that, at times, people are
asked to perform
tasks that they are
not familiar with or
that we have never
done before. The
only way that we
can be successful is
for employees to
feel able to ask for
help, additional
resources and expertise to get
the job done, and to create an
environment where they feel
they can make mistakes without fear of being second-guessed.
We went through a period
where our infrastructure grew
markedly, and we were hiring
people to support the growth,
but you can only hire so fast.
So you work hard at getting your direct reports
and supervisors to
understand that you
are not walking
around with a
sword to take people’s heads off, and
then encourage
them to do the
same with their
direct reports.
You take the extreme examples and openly dissect what
went wrong, and you underscore that it’s nobody’s fault.
When people see there is no
hunt for the guilty, but rather,
a focus on learning, they
respond.
We work hard at this, creating project plans, identifying
knowledge gaps and risks,
and we debrief after every
project to identify lessons
learned. I expect people not
only to admit when they
make a mistake but to also
lead the charge for brainstorming a solution.
The only way we have
found to maintain those standards is to empower employees to be as aggressive and
passionate about learning
and developing new skills as
they are about client service.
TIM OPSITNICK is founder, senior partner and general counsel of JurInnov Ltd. (www.jurinnov.com)
and a member of the Cleveland Chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization (www.eonetwork.org), an international organization of business owners dedicated to helping each other learn and grow.
