Technology
Hearing all sides
How to manage growth
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Tampa Bay | September 2008
Page 1 of 2
Barry Shevlin
founder and CEO, Network Liquidators Inc.
Micromanaging can hurt an
organization in many ways, but it can especially
affect your top performers.
“It’s typically with the highest-performing guys who you want
to give as much latitude as possible,” says Barry Shevlin,
founder and CEO of Network
Liquidators Inc., which posted
2007 revenue of $41.2 million,
up from $16.6 million in 2006.
“So it’s inevitable that sometimes
they are going to take things personally and feel that we’re micro-managing them. That’s a pretty
delicate situation.”
Shevlin, who leads the
provider of pre-owned and
refurbished networking equipment, says he tries to stay away
from that type of managing.
“Take a step back and realize
that you have to spend a good
deal of your time working on
your business as opposed to in
your business,” he says.
“Otherwise, you’re not going to
be able to get out of your own
way and grow. There’s definitely
a balance there.”
Smart Business spoke with
Shevlin about learning to step
back and delegate and how to
keep employees ready for
growth.
Manage growth properly. Don’t
get caught by indecisiveness.
Make a decision. Even if it’s
wrong decision, that’s OK. It’s
better to make a wrong decision than no decision at all.
You can fix a wrong decision
with a decision down the road.
Then communication is
something that we are constantly working on and constantly want to improve,
making sure everybody
understands the vision, that
you are setting people’s goals
and holding them accountable. That’s what a leader’s
responsibility comes down to
— setting or sharing the
vision, setting people’s goals
and holding them accountable for the same.
Learn to delegate. We’re grooming our next leadership team
and giving them more and
more responsibility. The executive team has a weekly meeting with our leadership team,
which are the up-and-coming
leaders in the organization.
We want them to be able to
do just about everything. We’d
like every decision to be able
to be made at that level.
We normally start the meeting by saying, ‘OK, let’s pick
one problem we can solve in
10 or 15 minutes,’ and we’ll
throw a problem on the table.
... We’d figure out what the
current issue is with that
process. We take 10 or 15 minutes to fix one specific item.
After that, we’ll go into larger-picture things — what do we
want to focus on fixing or
improving over the next three
to six weeks — and prioritize
those things.
They assign tasks to one
another, and everybody leaves
the meeting knowing what
their takeaways are, and
comes back and updates it the
following week.
When we started doing that,
we came in and everybody
had a list of 20 things that they
wanted to discuss or deal
with. So, what we agreed to do
was pare it down, where every
week, we decide to deal with
one. Then we try to prioritize
everyone else’s list of things
that we wanted to have
worked on.
