An open ear

Several times a year, the
employees at Columbus Fair Auto Auction Inc. stop
working for a couple of hours
to enjoy lunch and each other’s
company.

These lunches also provide
an opportunity for them to
share ideas with Keith Whann,
CEO and general counsel, and
the company’s other top management.

Whann says the nearly 700
employees are sometimes surprised that management wants
to hear their ideas on how to
improve things at the wholesale
auto auction company.

“We’ve had some of the best
ideas, including how we park
cars to routing traffic in and
out of our recon shop, come
from employees who say,
‘Why do we do it this way?’
‘Because we’ve always done it
this way.’ ‘Because it would
work better if you did it this
way,’” Whann says.

Listening to and acting on
employee ideas has helped the
company prosper and grow,
and in 2007, it posted revenue
of $38.5 million.

Smart Business spoke with
Whann about how to really hear
employees’ ideas and how to
get the right people in the right
positions to succeed.

Get the right people in the right
positions.
Experience is not the
most important thing; the most
important thing is to get a
good person. You want someone who is a good person,
somebody who wants to treat
people right, wants to be nice
to their fellow employees and
customers and wants the job.

I’d take that any day over
somebody who’s going to be a
problem child and have a load
of skills and talent, because
you can work with the person
who wants to learn more …
where as the other one is
going to be destructive.

Make sure you get them into
the right job. Give them the
training and support on a dayto-day basis to be able to grow
in that position and develop
within that role. When possible, you promote from within.
Then they get the team concept and think they’re part of
something bigger.

You’re more efficient; you’re
more effective at everything
you do. If the right people are
in the right positions, they tend
to do better at their jobs; therefore, they like their jobs better,
and there’s more satisfaction.

Remain open to employee ideas. You realize rather quickly that
you can’t possibly do it all — or
even most of it. You have to be
accessible. You can’t just say it.
… You have to actually act that
way on a day-to-day basis.

Let them know no matter
what job they have that you
know they exist and understand their role in the success
of the company. You’re going
to have people with different
levels of expertise and responsibility, but no matter what
level they’re at, you have to
trust them to do their job and
do that correctly.

That doesn’t mean you don’t
manage them, you don’t have
oversight, but you have to
believe that you’ve hired the
right people and trained them
well enough to do their job. If
you haven’t accomplished
that, then as the management
team, you’ve failed. You’ve got
the wrong people for the job,
and you’re going to have problems regardless.