John Bostick would love to watch
more television, but he doesn’t have
the time. Between spending time with his family, working out and serving as CEO
of LÛCRUM Inc., a business services firm,
he can’t fit TV into his personal life. In fact,
he stopped watching football all together.
“I was a big [Chicago] Bears fan and
when the Bears won the Super Bowl in
1985, I said, ‘I’ve seen it all; I’ve seen my
team go to the top,’ and I actually stopped
watching football,” says Bostick, who led
the company to more than $16 million in revenue in 2006. “I love football, but I had to have a balance and
make a choice.”
Smart Business spoke with
Bostick about making choices, delegating authority and how to create a
people-centric culture
Q: How do you create a people-centric environment?
When I find CEOs or leaders that
want to become more people-centric, the very first thing I say is,
‘Triple your listening and halve
your talking.’ Too often, CEOs and
top leaders know their business
strategy because they live it and
breathe it every day.
The challenge is, the people
underneath them don’t understand that strategy. The CEO or
leader doesn’t understand why
they don’t understand it because
to them, they live it every day, it’s
simple. The people from an individual contributor level, which
tend to be operational, are not
living it every day, so they can’t
see how they relate to that strategy.
I look at that and say, ‘Ask a lot of questions and do a lot of listening.’ When you
do that, the questioning gets heuristic in
style, and one question begets another
question, which begets another question.
You’ve got to kind of take your predefined
notions you live with every day and your
strategy, and park them outside your
office, put them in a drawer and sit down
with the people you are working with and
just start asking questions and listening
and start spending time getting them to
talk and not you to answer.
I always like to say, ‘The art of managing
is listening and questioning, and not talking
and answering.’
Q: How has being people-centric helped
your business?
Being people-centric creates leadership,
leadership creates momentum, momentum allows us to achieve our planned numbers and also have an opportunity to hit
our stretch goals.
Any time I look at an area where we are
underperforming, it’s typically because
people didn’t understand the objectives,
the objectives change through external
dynamics or internal dynamics, global
market or internal organizational competencies or incompetencies. So, you look
at that and say, ‘How do I get these people
to march to the same drumbeat, and how
do I get them to make sure they understand what I was trying to get at when I
first dealt with them?’ I ask myself those
kinds of questions because I always think if you ask those questions in a self-deprecating fashion and see the warts
and see the parts where we’re not achieving the original results — call it failure —
then you can look at that and take a perspective of, ‘We are where we are.’ So,
you have to face where you are and continue to move forward.
Q: How do you talk to an employee who
isn’t living up to your standards?
You have to go back to listening and
questioning, rhetorically. My style
is to get the person to switch
shoes with you. So you say, ‘OK,
you are the CEO, and I’m the manager or the leader in this one business unit. How would you treat me
right now?’ Switching sides makes
a very interesting way of going to
the lowest common denominator of
how we communicate. These are
simple techniques that I use on a
constant basis.
Q: How do you know when to delegate?
I have a very simple philosophy.
The CEO should be in charge of
shareholder relationship, strategy,
and setting the tone for the people
dynamics and the culture of the company. Shareholders first. You are in
business to make a profit, and the
profit should be demonstrated back to
shareholders, first and foremost, for
every business. No. 2 is strategy:
Where is the company going? And
third is setting the culture on the people-dynamics side.
If you can’t delegate 100 percent of
everything else, then you have the
wrong group.
Business is a bunch of exceptions, and
an exception right here is, I believe, in
every single company, the No. 1 customer
representative is the CEO. I just said delegate all that and, at the same time, I’m
going to contradict myself and say, ‘That’s
right, delegate it all. But, at the same time,
absolutely the CEO is in charge of customers first and foremost.’
HOW TO REACH: LÛCRUM Inc., (513) 241-5949 or
www.lucruminc.com
