Cover Story
Abdicating the throne
Smart Business St. Louis | August 2008
Page 2 of 4
Don’t try to be a hero
One of the employees who perhaps had the most difficult
time adjusting to the significant growth at MMS was Reeve.
“I was actually running myself ragged,” Reeve says. “I handled
the insurance, banking, sales, operations, purchasing of equipment, negotiating our leases, and our acquisition team was really
one person. I couldn’t keep up anymore. It was impossible. That’s
where I had to be flexible.”
One of the first steps was to hire Tom Harris as his executive
vice president.
“Tom came on board, and I shifted a tremendous amount of things to Tom,” Reeve says. “At this point, my job is much different than it was five years ago. I still handle our leases, and I
do a lot of the financials and still have relationships with the
banks, but it’s much different on the day-to-day stuff.”
The hard part for Reeve was staying away from many of the
tasks that had been his responsibility.
“It’s relatively easy to pass it off, or at least, it was for me,”
Reeve says. “The hard part was staying away. Once I passed it
to Tom, then it was hard for me not to say, ‘Wait a minute, you
ought to be doing this,’ or, ‘I would do [it] this way.’ That was
probably the most difficult thing. To keep telling myself, ‘If I
get involved, then I might as well not even have given it up. If
I’m going to continue to do all those things, it doesn’t mean we
still can’t sit down.’”
As the CEO, you may have to literally remind yourself that
you have other employees and a management team and a staff
for a reason. It’s not all on you to make your company go, and
once you delegate, you have to let your people do their jobs.
“If you really want to give something up, you have to let
somebody else go with it or else they will never attain the ability to even do it,” Reeve says.
And just because you’re turning over a task or two to another person, as the CEO, you still have every right to ask questions and be in on the discussion of key issues.
“You’re always going to be there,” Reeve says. “If I see us
wavering from where we’ve all agreed to go, at that point, it
doesn’t mean I won’t say something. There are always two
roads to get to the same place.”
Shifting responsibility is a gradual process and works better
if you don’t just dump a job on another person without any
support or orientation to the new duties.
“You work with them a little in the beginning, and as you go
along, you just go ahead and, more or less, give them the
responsibility and back away,” Reeve says. “It’s a continuing
process. We try to empower people to make a lot of their own
decisions. If they make bad decisions, you rein them in. But if
they are making good decisions, we’ve empowered them to
move ahead.”
