Consumer Products
Flying in formation
How to empower your employees
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Los Angeles | November 2008
Page 1 of 2
Lyndon Faulkner
president and CEO, Pelican Products Inc.
Every day when he wakes
up, Lyndon Faulkner wants to create something that is the
best it can be.
As president and CEO of
Pelican Products Inc., Faulkner
shares his relentless perfectionism with his 750 employees, all
of whom are expected to strive
to make Pelican’s high-impact,
watertight cases and flashlights
the best products in their class.
“When you’re an entrepreneur
in a small business, it’s very
much about the individual, and
what you’re driving singly,” he
says. “As you run bigger organizations, the effectiveness of the
guy at the top is how well you
drive other people to make
them be effective in their different skill set areas.”
Faulkner’s efforts to help his
employees do their jobs effectively have pushed the manufacturer to 2007 revenue of
more than $150 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Faulkner about the definition of
empowerment and how to make
sure everyone in your organization is moving in the same
direction.
Surround yourself with go-getters. Certainly, you have to employ
the right sort of people, which
for me is people who really
want to make a difference and
go on and make a career for
themselves — people who are
very keen to get on. That’s the
type of individual I surround
myself with — go-getters. They
want to be promoted; they want
to go make a difference.
Nine times out of 10, if you
have the right people, they’re
going to go make things happen
for you. Obviously, you have to
lay a road map out as to what
the business must look like,
because you don’t want people
running around in different
directions. You’ve got to be very
clear on your vision for the company and your vision for the
organization. But once you’ve
got that vision laid out, and that
vision is also somewhat created
by the people who work for you,
driving people then is quite an
easy thing to do, especially if
you have self-motivated people.
Empower people, but keep a hand
in things. Empowerment is
building a road map and building that in association with
groups of people who are
responsible for a business area.
Empowerment for me isn’t
saying to the guys, ‘Go off and
do what you want. Come back
in six months time, and hopefully, it’s a success.’ That is not
empowerment.
What we do is sit down as a
group between our sales and
marketing expertise, and we
talk about the markets, we talk
about what we should be bringing to market and its effectiveness. How much should we be
spending? How many people
should we be employing?
Frankly, what we do then is
build this collective road map.
We have this trust, where we
have arguments and differences,
but we certainly orchestrate
what we’re going to be doing
over the next one and three
years with a one-year plan and a
three-year plan. There’s obviously going to be flexibility built
into it, because things change.
But for the most part, when I sit
down with sales and marketing,
when we target a market with X
amount of products, we build
that into a road map. And at that
point, that road map is invested
in with millions of dollars of new
products, with new resources.
For me, empowerment is
an individual who has been
involved in building that road
map; then that individual or
group of individuals are given
the task of going to execute on
that road map.
If you don’t get their buy-in,
you won’t succeed. We get their
buy-in right upfront. We construct where the company is
going with the input of these
people who know better than
most. If you’ve been in the
industry for 10 or 15 years, and
you’ve got these relationships
with customers, then you know
what they want.
That way, you get empowerment and buy-in, and build that
road map and strategy with
them for any business discipline. Then you go off separately and you build a complementary road map with the people
who might be making those
products.
So the guy off selling them and
marketing them knows when
they’re going to come in and
how they’re going to hit the
market. It’s quite a complex
group of wheels that have to
work together, but if you
empower them both individually and collectively, it works.
