Automotive
Team effort
How to encourage - and make use of - employee input
By Brooke Bates
Smart Business | February 2009
Page 1 of 2
Mike Pruitt
president and CEO, Mike Pruitt Honda
Mike Pruitt has translated
his success as a
Cleveland Browns running back
to success as the owner, president
and CEO of Mike Pruitt Honda.
Pruitt says he learned the
basics of business — and how to
interact with employees — by
watching former Browns coach
Sam Rutigliano interact with his
players on the sidelines.
“He had a personal relationship with just about all the players on the team,” he says.
“Players could come to him if
they had a personal problem.”
Pruitt now emulates his former coach as he interacts with
his staff of 75 at his dealership,
encouraging open communication by making himself visible
and approachable.
Football also taught Pruitt how
to set the table for the team’s
success.
“You also have to have a game
plan at work, what you’re going to
do for the month and how you’re
going to get there,” Pruitt says.
To do that, he invites strategic
ideas from employees and
measures progress by meeting
frequently with managers at the
dealership, which posted 2007
revenue of $42 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Pruitt about how to gather input
from your employees.
Set a game plan with managers. One of the keys to being a
good leader is to make sure
that you’re on top of everything that’s going on in all the
departments. Every month, we
take forecasts of where we
need to be for that month.
I get a weekly report on how
we’re trending [during] managers’ meetings. Managers tell
me what’s going on in their
department, what’s going on
with their employees and
some of the things they’re
doing to increase sales.
Managers should have meetings with their people at least
once a week to let (employees) know where we’re tracking so they can be a part of
that, as well.
During our managers’ meeting, I’ll ask them if there’s anything that came out of those
meetings that we should go
over. Most of them will say, ‘Yes,
so-and-so had a good idea.
We’re going to try this.’ We’ll try
their idea, and they’ll get recognition for that (on our) Good
Idea board. The Good Idea of
the Month will be one of the
employees’ [ideas], like we have
an Employee of the Month.
Check the progress. The CEO
always has to inspect what he
expects of his managers to
make sure that they have the
best interest of the company at
heart. You give them opportunities to make decisions or to
implement ideas, but you
always follow up to make sure
that those ideas are working
or you’re getting the kind of
result that you had anticipated.
If they’re not, then you’ve got
to go back to the drawing
board and make some new
decisions. We monitor where
we are on a weekly basis, if
we’re trending toward the forecast that we were supposed to hit.
Make yourself accessible to
employees. We take a person
from each department to sit on
a committee. That committee
gets to (say) what’s going on in
their departments. They get to
go over it with me and not with
their manager, so we can put
down anything that they feel is a
hindrance to their department,
including the manager.
It gives them the opportunity
to open up, whereas before
they wouldn’t have opened up
because they don’t want to
offend anybody.
It all boils down to communication. You’ve got to have communication with your managers and the people in the different departments. You have to have an open-door policy.
The process is to, if there’s a
real concern, go to your manager first and see if he’s handled
it. If not, they can go to the general manager. If that’s not
(enough), then they can come
to me.
