As John Kirksey continues to lay the
groundwork for the future of Kirksey
Architecture when he is no longer in charge, he realizes the delicacy with which
he must take each step in the process.
“A lot of these professional service
companies, the original founders control and manage the company way past the point they should,” says Kirksey, founder and president of Kirksey
Architecture, a $21 million, 120-employee architectural design firm. “When they
finally say it’s time for me to give some
leadership to younger people, those
people aren’t necessarily young
anymore. They’ve never been
given leadership, so they don’t
know how to deal with it.”
By getting future leaders
involved early, it becomes easier
to achieve a seamless transition
of power.
Smart Business spoke with
Kirksey about the best way to
develop leaders.
Q: What do you look for in a leader?
We put more of a premium on a
spiritual leader than we do on a
dollar-driven leader. People that
exude self-confidence and a
positive attitude and are supportive of other people and
respect other people are much
more powerful to us than someone who says they can bring in five new clients every month.
You really need to understand
the characteristics that you are
looking for in an individual
that can translate into leadership in your company. Many times, it’s not going to be a
Type-A personality. It’s going
to be quietly self-confident people who
have good primary skills that just need
support and motivation and a good
example to follow.
Q: How do you find these leaders?
We throw everybody in the pool, and
certain people surface as being able to
swim a little better than others. We just
give them a lot of latitude to prove that.
They are people that take initiative and
are proactive and want to be aggressively
involved in developing their careers, not
waiting for us to give them instruction.
We ask a lot of the people that work here.
We also expect them to take the lead.
We can tell people to be certain things,
but unless they want to be it, it’s never
going to happen. Instead of me telling people what they are going to be doing,
you’ve got to listen. When people start
telling you, ‘Here’s what I think I’d be good
at,’ you can then really get behind them
because generally, that’s what they will be
good at.
Q: How do you gather employee input?
When we establish objectives, there are
11 team leaders. If you just take 120 people, divide it by 11, it’s very close to 10 or
11 people in a small political unit. We ask
our team leaders to give us feedback on
the pulse of what their team is thinking.
We break it down into units of 10. That
gives you a lot better understanding if there are grassroots issues and problems
that are happening within a team. An
employee is more likely to share with
their team leader than stand up in a
meeting of 120 people and say, ‘I don’t
really agree with this.’
We look at it both in front of our quarterly meetings and behind our quarterly
meetings. In front of our quarterly meetings, we try to get our team leaders to
bring issues to the table because they
have weekly meetings with their team.
After the quarterly meetings, we ask our
team leaders to bring issues back to the
table and respond to what people saw at
the quarterly meeting. If anyone has
an issue or a problem, we want to
know about it.
Q: How do you deal with failure?
You try to get over it quickly.
Instead of mourning the loss of
that project, you go out, and there
are plenty of other projects out
there. The key thing for us is to
acknowledge it right away and try
to work to correct what it might be.
The only time we’ve really had big
problems is when we tried to ignore
a problem that we were part of versus immediately trying to deal aggressively with any problems we
might have encountered.
Q: How do you empower employees?
We have a big commitment to personal respect for everyone and trying
to allow people to find their own
channel to success. When people
have ideas, if we think it’s a good
idea, we’ll give them all the running
room they need.
Every Tuesday morning, we have a
marketing meeting. Anyone in our
company is invited to come to our marketing meeting. If people want to show
some initiative, they’ll show up. That’s
how you start identifying people that
really would like to get more involved
and take charge of their future and manage a little bit of their career.
HOW TO REACH: Kirksey Architecture, (713) 850-9600 or www.kirksey.com
