Michael B. Kennedy Jr. was wondering what was taking so long to get a computer rendering completed at KAI Design & Build. He stopped by the desk of the guy who was working on the project and asked what the delay was.
“He said, ‘I’ve been working on this for 25 hours over the past month,” says Kennedy, the 97-employee firm’s president. “If I had this software, I could have been done in five hours.’ A quick ROI in my mind and I said, ‘How much is the software that you need?’ and he said, ‘It’s $1,000, and they said they didn’t have it in the plan.’ You’re a $100-an-hour person and you just said you’re spending 25 hours. That’s $2,000.”
The situation drove home Kennedy’s strong belief in staying in touch with his people to collaboratively come up with the best way to manage a business.
“You really have to get out there and talk to your people,” Kennedy says. “Ask them, ‘Do you have what you need to do your job?’ It’s going to make your business more profitable and your people happier. There’s no way as president I can know what that person is doing in their cubicle to make their job more efficient. Unless you go around and talk to them and implement their ideas, you’ll never know.”
When Kennedy stepped in as president at the design and build firm in June 2008, he assumed the leadership role that his father had held since founding the firm 30 years earlier. He felt he had to prove himself worthy of being the leader.
“My position was to build that trust first,” Kennedy says. “I heard everybody out and asked them if they all had the tools to do their job. I do that with everybody from a lower staff member to an executive. Do you have the tools to do your job? Is there a way you can more efficiently do your job and how can I help you? Instead of a dictatorship, it’s an entitlement. I wanted people to feel like I had an open ear and they could trust me. Then I had to perform.”
That, of course, is the key. Anyone can go out and ask for feedback. It’s what you do with it that makes the difference.
“The difference is when you write it in a plan and put it on a shelf versus coming up with your missions, goals and strategies,” Kennedy says. “Those are the three boxes of a business plan. You’ve got your mission, you’ve got your goals and you’ve got your strategies. Then it sits on the shelf. How do you drive that down to the lowest level of your company? That’s where you need to write the initiatives to implement your strategies. Then you need measurable objectives that you measure yourself on yearly, monthly and weekly in your reports.”
Again, it’s the next step that is key. You need to have those conversations with people to see what they need in order to help you achieve your goals. When everyone is involved, you don’t have the disagreement over the need for software that Kennedy had to deal with. Everybody is on the same page.
“The last thing that is the most difficult thing once you get your initiatives and objectives in is getting the individual objectives at every level,” Kennedy says. “How does the receptionist and the assistant, what are their individual objectives to help us on the overall objective? It’s getting all those driven down.
“Everybody at every level has to understand, ‘Well, how do I contribute to that? How am I measured against that?’” Kennedy says. “We started rewriting those objectives and metrics into their yearly evaluation so they know what’s expected of them and how they contribute to this business plan.”
How to reach: KAI Design & Build, (314) 241-8188 or www.kai-db.com
