Health & Medical
The writing’s on the wall
By Patrick Mayock
Smart Business Los Angeles | September 2008
Page 1 of 2
Robert Nickell
founder, president and CEO, HNP Pharmaceuticals
How to communicate your vision to your employees
The walls in Robert Nickell’s
office are floor-to-ceiling
whiteboards. So are the walls of most of the offices
at HNP Pharmaceuticals, a
100-employee pharmaceutical compounding laboratory.
“We started off with just a
basic whiteboard that you’d
buy from Office Depot,” the
founder, president and CEO
says. “It’s just not big enough.
You can actually go to Home
Club and buy the whiteboard
material in 8-and-a-half-by-11-foot sheets, and it’s just
like paneling on your wall.”
Now, when Nickell or his
employees start brainstorming, they can literally write
on the walls. The process
has proven invaluable at the
rapidly growing company,
where revenue has grown
from $3.2 million in 2003 to
$8.6 million in 2007.
Smart Business asked for
Nickell’s two cents on how to
communicate a vision in a
fast-growth environment.
Q. How do you communicate
your vision to your staff?
The growth of the company
is always due to the vision of
the leader. My goal is to
always be three steps ahead
of my staff as far as vision so
that they can understand
what I’m trying to do.
Each one of your key staff
people will comprehend it in
a different way. The way my
CFO thinks as opposed to
my pharmacist in charge as
opposed to my COO as
opposed to my operations
manager — they all think differently. The job of the CEO
is to be able to explain it in
their language.
I’m ... writing an entire outline
and then including, ‘OK, so
from an attorney’s standpoint,
this is what we need to do.
From a finance standpoint, this
is what we need to do. From an
operations standpoint, this is
what we need to do. From a
software standpoint, this is
what we need to do.’ It kind of
gives them a blueprint.
Q. What else do you do to
make sure your employees
understand your vision?
In some cases, I whiteboard
it. It’s a teaching technique. We
can be in the boardroom or in
my office or in a meeting room
and somebody can stand up
with a marker and we can
start drawing out a flowchart.
If your walls are white-boarded, you can draw a
huge flowchart. Then
what we do is we take a
digital image of the wall,
and we forward that
image, or we save that
image. So later on, if
we’re having a meeting,
and we’re like, ‘Wow, we
flowcharted that before,’
we’re able to pull up the
digital image and put it
up on the big screen,
and we can go back and
review it.
