Victoria Tifft isn’t the smartest
person at Clinical Research Management Inc., and she’d be
the first one to tell you that. As
founder, owner and president of
the biomedical research firm,
she’s surrounded herself with a
team of people with superior
levels of expertise in many
fields of study.
Although some egos might
collapse under this arrangement,
Tifft says it’s the savviest way
to manage in business. Leaders can’t know everything, she
says, and when they approach a
gap in their knowledge, where
better to turn than a bevy of
skilled, in-house resources?
At CRM, Tifft has approximately 200 such resources at
her disposal, which she has
used to push 2007 revenue to
more than $17 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Tifft about how to tap into the
potential of your staff members
by supporting their decisions,
learning from your mistakes
and establishing a culture of
trust.
Support your employees’ decisions. Even if you don’t agree with
decisions, you have to let
them make decisions unless
you know the decision is
going to be harmful to them
or the company.
Sometimes, I would not
have done something a certain way, but because it’s
important to them and they
want to do it a certain way, I
let them. Nine times out of
10, it’s a better method. You
have to stand by them and
support them.
It used to be that people
were incentivized by money.
Today, it’s a mixture. It’s financial and the fact that they feel
important — that they’re a
value added to the company.
With our managers, the biggest
thing for them is, they’ll say,
‘On that day, when I made
those decisions, you supported
me. I felt like I made a difference and what I had to say
mattered.’
Don’t give out all the answers. We
learn from mistakes, or we
learn by trial and error, or we
learned because we made a
good decision and it worked.
I have a director who needed
help in a certain area. She
sends me an e-mail and says,
‘Do you have any advice for
me?’ I can tell her exactly
how to do it, but that doesn’t
help me. It helps me if she
can learn to do it on her
own, so I give her advice and
advise her so that she can
think and create her own
decision, which will be different than the one I had, but
it will work for her.
It’s important for them to
find their own way. If I make
the decisions for them,
they’re not moving forward.
They’re standing still.
Learn from your mistakes. You
can’t grow if you don’t learn
from your failures or your successes.
We just finished a very large
project, and we all had lessons
learned. Everybody submits
their ‘lessons learned,’ and
then we sit down and talk
about it. We call it a ‘lessons-learned’ culture.
We all discuss, ‘Here’s what
happened to me, and how
could we not have that happen
again next time?’ We have a
discussion group of any way
we can come about having a
better way to do that next time
so we don’t have that same
‘lesson learned.’ Nobody wants
to go through the same mistake twice.
We can’t afford to make a
mistake, but we’re human, and
we make mistakes. The difference is that we have a culture
where a mistake is brought
out on the table.
You have to do that diplomatically. I wouldn’t recommend just saying, ‘OK everybody, come in here with your
failures.’ Some folks will say,
‘I’m going to hide them. I don’t
want them to know my failures because that will make
me look bad.’
Elicit honest participation by
establishing trust. I always come
forward and say, ‘Here are the
mistakes that I made during
this process, and here’s what I
think I can do better.’ In that
environment, it has to be an
open forum, and everybody’s
on equal footing.
What happens in that room
is progress. We don’t bring
that up later on an evaluation and say, ‘Well, Johnny,
on such-and-such a day, you
said you made these mistakes.’
We receive a great deal of
benefit from it because there’s
an open forum where we
trust one another to bring
forward our mistakes. That’s
the biggest benefit, that we
don’t do it again. We don’t
have to keep repeating the
same mistake and getting
aggravated by it. We’re able
to overcome and move on.
Walk through the muck. When
things are difficult, don’t stop
communication. You cannot sit
back and hope it goes away.
Walk right through it. Address
it head on.
If there’s a swamp, and
there’s a lot of muck in the
middle, and you need to get
to the other side, you must
walk through the swamp.
That’s what I tell our staff all
the time: ‘We’re walking
through the muck because
that’s the only way to make
it to the other side.’
In those cases, you have to
increase everything you’ve
done. Increase communication. Put a lot of resources if
there’s an issue or a problem,
and tackle it. That says to the
customer or the employees
that we’re listening, and we’re
trying to do something, and we
haven’t turned the phones off
and turned the computers off to
try to stop communication.
HOW TO REACH: Clinical Research Management Inc., (330) 278-2343 or www.clinicalrm.com
