Cover Story
Cultural phenomenon
How Peter C. Roberts motivated employees to drive Jones Lang LaSalle to record earnings
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Chicago | August 2008
Page 1 of 4
To hear Peter C. Roberts tell it, there is nothing more fun than
aligning the culture of a company that operates in more than 700
cities in 60 countries.
Tireless in his interest in the topic, Roberts has been anything but
patient in pushing the culture since coming on board at Jones Lang
LaSalle Inc. in 2003. And it’s a good thing, too, because Roberts,
CEO for the Americas, came on just when the company was taking a good, long look in the mirror.
The early part of the 21st century had been a nearly static time
for the professional services firm that specializes in real estate, but
as it began to right the ship in 2003, the senior leaders got together and realized culture was the engine that could drive the company’s growth.
“Culture, to us, is absolutely critical to our success,” he says. “In
a people-based business, culture is critical to success. Why?
Because people are your assets; they are the fundamental value
creators. If your primary value creator is your people, then who
your people are, what they believe in, how successful they are, will
directly impact how successful you are as an organization, and culture is what unites people.
“I would tell you a strong culture is not created overnight. Nor is
it created by accident. We spent almost an entire day talking about
our culture, and we started with what is our culture. And we came
away with a very firm conclusion, and that is our culture, and I
think anyone’s culture, is the sum or the product of the values that
the organization holds near and dear.”
When you break down what your company actually does every
day, you can begin to understand what you can do to infuse your
values into a functional culture. In a people-based business like
Jones Lang LaSalle, Roberts and the team realized the company’s
hard values but understood from a simple motivational standpoint that if you want people to drive things like professionalism
and superior performance, you need to get people fully invested
in the company. So the leaders focused on integrity, inclusion,
fostering a connection between colleagues and tying that connection back to a career in the firm.
By drawing clear lines around what the company wants to be
and what the cultural responsibilities for leadership are to create
that atmosphere, you create a filtering system for every decision
you make.
“That work basically makes explicit for the organization, here’s
who we are, here’s what we believe in and here are explicit filters
through which we feed every decision, pursuit, our strategy, our
clients,” Roberts says.
