Eric Holmen believes the
strategy for success at
SmartReply Inc. is analogous to succeeding on a soccer
team.
In soccer, players often have
to shift quickly between offense
and defense during the course
of a game, and their ability to do
so successfully goes a long way
toward determining the outcome of the game.
Likewise, in the business
world, employees need to be
ready to adapt to new challenges to ensure that their company continues to grow.
“Problems aren’t solved by
individuals; they are solved by
everybody,” Holmen says. “Likewise, problems aren’t created by
individuals. If an individual has
that much ability to create a
problem or to reach failure, the
rest of the organization is falling
short.”
Holmen has created a culture in which everyone, including himself as company president, is trained to check their
egos at the door. This philosophy has helped the retail marketing solutions provider grow
to about 50 employees and
2007 revenue of $9.4 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Holmen about why reaching
consensus isn’t all it’s cracked
up to be and why you’re probably not the smartest person in
the room.
Q. What’s the best way
to stimulate employee
engagement?
An admission that you’re not
the smartest guy in the room. If
you come in with that perspective and you’re demonstrating it,
other people might have better
ideas that need to be fleshed out.
It makes it so much more efficient to solve the problems and
pursue the big ideas. I’m not
afraid. I don’t think good leaders
should be afraid to admit often
that they don’t know or that they
are wrong or that they need help.
Sense of destiny can be a very
powerful driving force. You
know it’s inevitable you’re going
to get to that destination. You
may not have the plan or the
specific pieces nailed down to
get to that destination. It’s going
to take a lot of attempts and
ideas and collaboration to get
there. That’s why these two
things work together.
Q. How do you
generate those ideas?
Structured meetings
tend to be the worst place
to bring new ideas. It’s letting things kind of evolve
organically and mature.
The meetings tend to be
very much, ‘Here’s what
we’re here to talk about.
Here’s the whiteboard.
Grab a marker.’ We take
turns or sometimes argue
over the marker and diagram things out on the
board and end up with a
conclusion.
So how do you make
purpose out of these
organic sessions? I
strongly believe you have
to start out being very
clear on what is the problem we’re trying to solve. If
you’re not solving that problem,
is it really a problem?
If everybody came in and said,
‘I know the answer to the problem,’ you’d have more traditional corporate meeting structures,
which are very monotonous
and not productive. If you start
out and say, ‘Here’s the problem
we’re trying to solve,’ everybody has the ability to solve this problem if we work together.
Q. How important is it to
gain consensus?
Consensus doesn’t have to be
reached. That’s one of the rules
of the meetings. When it’s a
majority agreement where we’ve
solved the problem or come up
with a good solution for the
problem, we move forward.
What consensus has the threat
of doing is making everyone
harmonize, and that can destroy
great ideas. Harmony is not
what it’s cracked up to be in
problem-solving.
If we went into a meeting and
said, ‘Here’s the problem that
we’re here to solve, and we’re
not leaving the room until we all
agree on the solution,’ you can
end up with compromises along
the way instead of a disruptive
idea rising to the top.
Something that can be very
difficult for some people on the
team to accept for a variety of
reasons. They don’t get it, or they
don’t have experience in it, or it
means a lot of work for them.
If you go for consensus, everybody is going to start out saying,
‘I think I already know what this
person would agree with me on,
so I’m going to give that watered-down idea instead of something
that is really a breakthrough.’
Q. How do you avoid hard
feelings?
I don’t think that we see an
individual’s ideas as something
that is a winning idea or a losing
idea as much as what is the best
idea for the company to solve
this problem. We’re all in it for
the long term, whether our
ideas are chosen or not. The
wounds aren’t very deep.
Team-building happens off the
field. Provide regular environments for people to connect
outside of the day-to-day grind
of work. We do everything from
a day at the races to paintball.
That’s where team-building
really happens.
You can be genuine and
authentic. You get to know that
person a little bit better. If your
idea gets shot down, generally
it’s shot down a little more
politely than what you might
expect because you’re dealing
with friends. You can make up
on the paintball field. Or discuss
it over pingpong.
HOW TO REACH: SmartReply Inc., (949) 340-0700 or www.smartreply.com
