Albert M. Berriz doesn’t
believe a great executive comes into being by chance.
Sure, you can be born with
instincts, and you should celebrate those instincts, but you
can’t just rest on your laurels,
Berriz says.
That’s why the CEO of real
estate company McKinley Inc.
stresses education, which he
believes is a driver to becoming
a top-notch executive. And to
emphasize the importance of
education, the company —which posted 2007 revenue of
$167.1 million — gives raises
to reward employees who participate in classes.
That investment in education
not only rewards his 717 employees financially, it also shows
them he is sincere about their
personal development. And
Berriz doesn’t just encourage
his employees to learn; he says
he is also constantly learning in
the classroom, both as a
teacher and a student.
Smart Business spoke with
Berriz about how to inspire
employees and how he balances
giving positive and negative
feedback.
Inspire your employees. It has a
lot to do with a CEO’s view
or a leader’s view of their
business.
You often hear companies
who say they are customer-centric or they are focused on
their customer. But the reality is you have to be people-centric because what you
can’t do in my job is touch
every customer. So you have
to make sure you touch every
person that’s with your team.
For us, I focus first on my
people, and if I do a great
job with my people, I’m
trusting they’ll do a great
job with our customers. I
take a different view than
maybe what is traditionally
out there in the management
world today, which everybody is talking about focusing on customers, focusing
on customers, focusing on
customers.
I believe if I focus on our
people, they’ll, in fact, focus
on our customers. For me,
No. 1 is team, No. 2 is customers, and No. 3 are shareholders. I figure if I have
happy people, they’ll have
happy customers, and those
happy customers will produce happy shareholders.
Don’t only focus on the negative.
You often see supervisors
who only point out the negatives in people. I have a rule
of thumb: For every one negative, you better be doing
five positives. If you aren’t
doing that, you aren’t doing
your job.
You don’t take the time to
celebrate what people are
great at, but yet you are willing to talk to them about
what they are terrible at. You
want to be open and honest
with feedback, and feedback is certainly a gift, but everybody looks at feedback as a
negative thing, and you’d better be celebrating the positives, too.
In our company, all the key
people are connected by
BlackBerry. When something
happens positively in this
environment here, you’ll see
in our company dozens of e-mails that go out throughout
the day. [It] may be a sale, it
may be a financial transaction, it may be a variety of
different angles in the company from different departments and different perspectives, but there is something
positive being said about
Frank or about Joe or Sally
or Jane.
Jane may have done a couple things wrong in the last
quarter, but these great things
she is doing right now, we’re
celebrating.
Be open and honest about failure.
I often discuss what I did
wrong. I tell everybody what
I did wrong. I’m very quick
to point out when I made a
mistake and what I think I
should have done differently
now in retrospect.
I think people need to
know that I am as vulnerable or as able to do things
wrong [as they are]. So, I
think it’s important to celebrate that situation, and
also, I think they can learn
from it. They can learn from
a mistake that I made so we
don’t do it again.
I may be an example of
the mistake, and if I can hold myself out as that,
that’s good. One, it makes
me vulnerable, which is
good. Two, it points out
maybe they can learn from
our mistakes.
Show your employees you believe
in them. You have to allow
people to fail and you have
to give them opportunity, so
you have to let them advance
in our company, and we do
that.
I personally can’t touch
717 [employees], but I have
11 people on my executive
committee, and there are 45
officers in the company. I
can definitely touch the 11
and the 45, all of which
touch the 717. So it’s not
just about me, but it’s about
the 11 people on our executive committee and the 45
officers that we have running the business.
I’ve just got to make sure
that culturally, the 11 and the
45 are walking the walk and
really doing things that I am
talking about every day and
doing every day in my own
way, and they are going to do
it in their own different way.
But they need to be doing
that, too.
If you are a leader in our
culture and in our company,
the price of admission in
our environment is to be
enthusiastic, is to be celebratory, it’s to make people
feel good about themselves,
it’s to make people understand the value they have to
the organization.
HOW TO REACH: McKinley Inc., (734) 769-8520 or www.mckinley.com
