Mario D. Apruzzese is a
big fan of consistency.
Yet, to him, being consistent doesn’t mean employees should use the same
method for a certain task
every time, just employ consistent values during the process
of completing a task. The
method has helped his company, employees only, a professional employer organization
that posted 2006 revenue of
$76 million, adapt as the business world has changed.
“Because, when you had the
consistent values, it didn’t really matter if it was green or red
or blue because whatever
decision was made, in terms
of how to do it, it always had
the same solid foundation,”
says the company’s head
visionary and CEO. “So, we
became less process-driven
and more value-driven as an
organization.”
Smart Business spoke with
Apruzzese about how to maintain consistency in your organization.
Q. What advice would you
give to a leader who wants to
be consistent?
If you are running an
organization and you are the
man or woman that is at the
pinnacle, if you will, you
have to find a way to have
somebody measure you. I
don’t know if that’s a life
coach or a business coach …
whether it’s your board.
I dealt with this family-owned business, and it was
two brothers-in-law, and all
they did was fight, and I was
in the middle of it as a CFO.
We developed an advisory
board. It wasn’t a board of directors. They didn’t dictate
where they went. But, they
helped us formalize the communication.
And so, when John says,
‘We are going to do X,’ and
Sally says, ‘We are going to
do X,’ (the board members)
were free to, one, challenge
the objective both from a
‘Can it happen? Are you
going to be accountable?’
and what have you.
So, you have to have a way
to sort of measure yourself because it is like
looking at a compass.
You’re in a boat, and
you’re out at open sea,
and you’re fighting
waves, and you’re fighting wind, and you’re
fighting a lot of different factors on your
boat. Well, how do you
know you are being
consistent? You can
hold the wheel of your
ship still, but that does-n’t mean you’re heading
stays true.
So, [you need] that
external compass, if
you want to call it that.
You’ve got to have
something that you’re
sort of measuring yourself against so that you can
always make sure your headings are appropriate because
business will move you one
way, economics will move
you, your personal life will
move you, and all of those
things need to be balanced,
obviously. But, at the same
time, you’ve got to understand your heading. Not necessarily your goal, but your
heading.
And finding that true north
— you can’t do without
some external reference
point.
Q. How has consistency benefited your company?
The concept behind that is
you put a system in place
that’s repeatable. I think it’s
really been a couple of advantages. No.1, it’s very easy as
you grow your company to
bring new team members to
the forefront of what you do
because everyone is marching
to the same beat … and
nobody can fool you into those core values — they have
them or they don’t.
If you get someone who is
unproductive, not because
they are slow but because they
have got negativity or some
other baggage, you don’t have
to wait for management to figure it out. The people on the
team go, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,
what are you doing? That’s not
how we do it here.’ And so, it
really takes a lot of pressure
off of management to worry
about everybody.
And it really gives people
that are on your team the ability to sort of represent themselves. They don’t have to go
to their support, a manager,
whatever it is to say, ‘Oh,
Johnny is not doing his job, or
Sally’s not doing her job, or
this isn’t the right person.’
They really feel compelled to
say, ‘What are you doing? We
are all about X, Y and Z here,’
and they can talk about it, and
they can repeat it because that
consistency is the underlying
factor.
One of the other ones is, as
management then acts in a
consistent manner, you know
what’s going to happen if A, B,
C occurs. And again, it’s very
liberating for people because
they go, ‘I really don’t like that
result, so I’m not going to do
A, B, C.’
So, you really avoid a lot of
what I might call the normal
unpleasantries of being in the
employer-employee relationship or in the co-worker relationship.
Everyone is, in a sense,
speaking. It’s not like I tell
them to go drink the Kool-Aid,
and they go do it. They challenge authority. They challenge the policy because they
are challenging it, not, ‘I don’t
want to do it.’
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