Smart Leaders
Get out of the way
How to empower your employees
By Brooke Bates
Smart Business Cincinnati | February 2009
Page 1 of 2
John Limbert
president, National Bank and Trust Co.
John Limbert likes to
think of his 210 employees at National Bank and
Trust Co. as a baseball
team, albeit a large one.
Limbert, president and
CEO, can’t pick up a bat or
run the bases for his
employees. Instead, he has
to stay out of their way and
let them succeed.
To do that, he gathers their
input before setting goals
and then gives them the
reins to reach those goals creatively, keeping an eye on
their progress and providing
support when necessary.
The 40-year banking veteran
says he has made it through a
career of tough decisions and
tasks by relying on the team
effort of his employees.
“The most rewarding part
about the job is giving people the opportunity to fail
and then helping them avoid
that,” says Limbert, whose
company posted 2007 revenue of $41 million.
Smart Business spoke
with Limbert about how to
empower your employees to
reach their goals and how to
follow up on their progress.
Get input on decisions. Early in
my career, I used to micromanage everything. When you do
that, you diminish the worth of
the person that you’re talking to.
Once you’ve hired a good staff,
you sit down, you formulate a
plan and then you get out of
their way.
There’s three pieces I normally
use when I look at a situation.
The first thing you do is sit
down with the people that are
responsible for that area and
you get their perspective on
what’s working and what’s not
working. The second thing is
you put a financial analysis,
independent of the operating
group, against their observations and against the metrics
that you think that group ought
to be earning.
Then you sit down with both
the finance side and the operating side and walk your way
through: If something’s earning
4 percent and we think it should
be earning 8 percent, what are
the steps? It’s not a one-person
decision.
Baseball teams mirror what I
believe a successful company is.
You’ve got nine players who
play the game and a manager
who never takes an at-bat. I’m
managing things with the input
of coaches and players. You
build a team, and they all have
different strengths, and you’d be
a fool not to rely on those
strengths.
Set the goal and let employees go. There shouldn’t be any mistake
in any manager’s mind about
what the goal is. Sometimes
there are lapses in communicating, but at the end of the day,
most of our folks understand
what the goal is, at least at the
management level. If we haven’t
gotten it down to the last person
hired, then we probably need to re-examine our communication
process.
If everybody understands
what the goal is, you can tell
them, ‘There it is,’ and let them
be creative and figure out what’s
the best and the quickest way to
get there. When you do that,
what you get is people who, A,
enjoy what they’re doing and, B,
are allowed to be flexible and
creative on their own.
I don’t think the buy-in is the
hard part; I think creating the
opportunity for them to be successful is more difficult. It all
gets back to empowering.
What’s worked for me is finding an operating mechanism
that allows them to own their
book of business. That management person has to be the
author, not the reviewer [of their
budget]. Then sitting down on a routine basis and mapping their
progress to that budget affords
you the opportunity to say, ‘You
said you were going to operate
this department with a $10,000
profit this month, and we only
made ($8,000). What didn’t
work? What can we do to help?’
And then sit back and listen.
Agree on the strategy, agree
on the targets and then (have)
regular communication to find
out if it’s working or not. It’s like
sailing a ship. You’re always
looking at that compass to figure out where you are. If you’re
not doing that, you’re going to
end up farther away than your
port of call. You’ve got to keep
checking.
