Ball also instituted an employee engagement survey within his first quarter as president and CEO. He needed a baseline of what people liked, didn’t like and what they thought the company could do better.
Each year, the company tries to address some of these concerns, and then re-surveys for even more feedback. The goal isn’t to get to a benchmark, which is typically a median, but to become a top performer, using data to tell Koppers where it needs to go to get there, he says.
An improving culture as facilities shut down or were sold might seem contradictory, but Ball believes it demonstrates the value of transparency — keeping people informed about what’s going on and the rationale behind decisions, especially if they won’t be popular.
“There’s nothing worse than making an unpopular decision and then not saying why you’re doing that,” he says.
Ball likes using plain English to state why something couldn’t be done, not corporate speak that doesn’t actually explain.
It all comes down to trust, and that can be broken in an instant, Ball says. That means following through on what you say you’re going to do. You cannot tell them one thing and do another.
“It isn’t always giving people the answer that they want to hear. It isn’t always acquiescing to everybody’s demands. Sometimes you have to make tough decisions,” he says.
But people can respect that if you look them in the eye, be honest and give a reasonable rationale, Ball says.
“It all comes down to that transparency, honesty and following through on your actions,” he says. “And my experience is that people will go through a wall for you, if they understand that you’re working for them and you’re not just out for your own self-interest.”
Takeaways:
- Say what you mean and then follow through.
- Add accountability by tying employees to performance.
- Transparency eases the effect of unpopular decisions.
The file:
Name: Leroy M. Ball
Title: President and CEO
Company: Koppers Inc.
Born: Monaca, Pennsylvania
Education: Bachelor’s degree in accounting, Florida International University, and an MBA, Robert Morris University
What was your first job and what did you learn from it? My first job was literally working bingo when I was maybe 15. I sold specials and called numbers, and things like that. Set up for bingo, took it down afterwards at the local bingo place. But what did I learn from that? I guess I learned the value of working for a living and responsibility. I was expected to be at a certain place at a certain time. I was expected to do a certain job, and you get rewarded by getting paid for doing that.
What was the hardest management or leadership skill for you to master, and why? Still to this day I struggle somewhat with communication. I’m an introvert who has a tendency to keep to himself. I’ve changed quite a bit, and the roles I’ve been in have forced me to change. But it’s easy for me to revert back to going into my shell. The issues that tend to crop up for me tend to center around communication — and not communicating as effectively as I should be or would hope to be.
If you weren’t a CEO, is there another job you’d like to try? I played college baseball and wanted to be a professional baseball player. It didn’t work out for me, and I got injured when I was in college and ended up having to get a real job. But when I went back to get my MBA at Robert Morris, I went originally for sports management because I wanted to one day probably have Neal Huntington’s job, but then different sets of circumstances took me down a different path. But I still have a love for sports, a love for Pittsburgh sports. If I wasn’t what I’m doing right now, which, by the way, I think is actually cooler in retrospect, it’d be working for one of the sports franchises in the city.
Here and abroad
At the ASPIRE 2018 Conference, keynote speaker Leroy M. Ball explained that Koppers decided to keep its business in Australia that treats utility poles with wood preservation chemicals and sell the one in the U.S. — despite how similar they look at first glance.
“The pole industry in the U.S. and our place in it was much different than what it was in Australia,” Ball said.
Koppers is the No. 1 player in Australia. It provides 70 percent of the poles in that market, and therefore, gets good margins and is a very profitable business. In the U.S., the company was at 5 to 7 percent of market share, and Ball’s team didn’t see a path to scale the business.
The company had an opportunity to divest the U.S. business, get some capital back and leverage that into a supply contract for its performance chemicals business, Ball said. Koppers actually provides the chemical for that particular acquirer, which had always used a competitor before.
“It brought us into the door in terms of being able to serve a fairly large player in the market that we didn’t have a presence in,” he said.
“If we had an opportunity to actually be in that business in a big way where we can be, again, a top-tier player like we are in all the other markets, that’s interesting to me,” Ball said. “Being the 5 to 7 percent market share and the fifth-biggest guy or the sixth-biggest guy — that’s not interesting to me, and that doesn’t really fit the portfolio of the companies that we have.”
