Fast Lane
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How to get your employees engaged in the solution
By Mark Scott
Smart Business Akron/Canton | September 2009
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Lisa Huntsman, president, Lauren Manufacturing
Lisa Huntsman did not hold back as she laid out the problems she believed were hurting Lauren Manufacturing.
“You have to put your cards on the table,” says Huntsman, the custom rubber company’s president. “I think where people make mistakes is they try to skirt around the real issue. People can’t help if they don’t know what the landscape is.”
Sales had started to lag and were beginning to drag profits down with them at the 230-employee company. In her assessment, Huntsman decided the system was more of a problem than the people. So she began a process to better put their talents to use.
Smart Business spoke with Huntsman about how she got employees at the $50 million company to buy in to a new way of doing things.
Q. How do you deal with mistakes?
You have to exemplify it through the way you treat people and what your actions are telling them. What’s right and what’s wrong. If people know that if they fail, they are going to be judged and they are in fear (for) their jobs, then you’ll never move a company forward.
It’s through those failures that they will succeed down the road. It’s more about what are the lessons learned and what are the takeaways when we reflect back. If you’re trying to break paradigms in terms of culture, you have to be able to try something new.
Even though we know it’s not going to work sometimes, there is more value to allowing people to step out of the box and try. ... It’s about making sure yourself and your senior staff is really conveying the same message and that they are living what we’re trying to get for the company.
It’s servant leadership. You don’t have to have the answers. You just have to lay the groundwork by saying, ‘This is the problem. No idea is a bad idea. Let’s start putting these things up. How can we approach this differently?’
It’s not as threatening. It’s about being open to new ideas and new suggestions and really involving the people who are at the base level of the organization so they feel like they have a voice in decisions that are being made.
Q. How do you convince people to get involved?
It’s really constant reinforcement. It’s applauding them for making the suggestion. Even if we don’t take it, it’s not making people feel defeated because they brought the suggestion up. Even though it may not be the best idea, it’s the fact they were able to put something out there. It’s being receptive to it and not shooting them down.
Most people don’t bring ideas up because they are afraid of failure. Promote that it’s OK to fail if it helps get us to the next level. Your idea may make us think differently and send us in another direction. It’s really trying to get people to understand a culture where the fear of failure causes us to not do anything.
If you don’t have any action, you’re going to get what you got, and you don’t get to move the ball forward. I always use the example of Abraham Lincoln and how many times he failed, yet he persevered. How many great people had so many failures in their life that made them a better person the next time?
