Five years ago, when Bob
Coughlin’s company was posting about $10 million in annual
revenue, he met with his management team.
At that meeting, a statement on
the wall asked what prevented
Paycor Inc. from becoming a
$50 million company. There were
also pictures, and one of those
— a drawing of someone in a
rowboat trying to pull an ocean
liner — spoke a thousand words.
The group saw the parallel in the
effort; as the rowboat didn’t have
the ability to pull the ship, neither
did the payroll service provider
have the management depth and talent to pull the company to the
next level.
The management team members concluded that Coughlin
should hire another level of management above them to take the
company to where they wanted it
to be. Coughlin says it was important that they came to that conclusion on their own because if he
had said it, they would have been
defensive. Coughlin, founder and
CEO of the 450-employee company, says using a collaborative
approach has helped his company
reach $47 million in revenue for
fiscal 2007.
Smart Business spoke with
Coughlin about how recognizing
your strengths and weakness
can help you take your company
to the next level.
Involve employees early in the
process. I’m a big believer in
having people involved
upfront and buying in to
what the goals are and even
maybe in setting the goals.
We have a position within
the company, which I think
is game-changing for us,
who’s a chief quality officer.
Essentially, their job is to
involve all the stakeholders
in laying out a successful initiative, including putting
stickies on the board and
deciding what the goals are.
Sometimes, you start with a
weakness-based statement
like, ‘What prevents us from
doing something?’ Put some
parameters around it, and
then get the team involved in
coming up with the issues
and coming up with solutions. That, versus a top-down approach of saying,
‘Look, I’ve studied this, and
here’s what we need to do,’
[is better]. I think they’ll
prove me wrong.
Don’t try to change people. We do
basic personality profiling
here, and it’s very useful.
Starting with just the basic
personality profile and
understanding people’s DNA
is important.
I don’t think you can fundamentally change certain
things about people. So
knowing that somebody is
particularly structured in
their approach or conceptual
or data-driven or using these
different quadrants that you
might have of people lets
you understand that you
can’t try to change them.
You’ve got to work within
their strengths, and if they
have weaknesses, figure out
how you are going to shore
those up, either with a structure, with some help, with
somebody else on the team
that can help them with that.
I think it’s a failed plan to try
to have somebody who is not
structured, for instance, do a
very structured activity.
When I was getting the
business going, I tried to
believe [that] with intent,
you could make somebody
anything they wanted to be.
I’ve learned over time that
it’s more about aligning people’s strengths and weaknesses and not trying to
change people.
Establish a communicative environment. You do it every day.
You do it when you walk by
somebody in the hall and
how you say hi to them. It’s
body language.
I do block out an hour
probably three different
times a week where I just
walk around. Not everybody
is here, but I walk around …
and say hi to people. I say,
‘Is there anything I can do to
make your job better?’
If they give me something,
I follow up on it. I say, ‘Let
me look into that. Let me figure out what we can do.’ It
could be something as mundane as their chair is broken.
Find a balance with your success. There is always room for
improvement. It seems like,
over time, whenever you are
satisfied with where something is, it goes backward.
Things are always movingupward or downward. So
getting too comfortable is a
potential pitfall. Being overly
uncomfortable is a potential
pitfall because people can
feel like you are so never satisfied that they’re worn out
by it.
It’s as much art as science.
It’s being conscious about
the fact that we just had a
tough meeting about something, and now I need to go
pick somebody up. It doesn’t
do us any good if people are
walking around with their
heads down if we don’t perform well on something.
At the same time, that
doesn’t mean all the meetings are going to be roses. I
think a lot of it is just being
conscious about the fact that
attitudes matter.
Put your money where your mouth
is. If you say, ‘We are going
to focus on training and
development this year’ [and]
if they don’t see anything
happen, then you lose credibility with people.
When they see that you go
out and hire a director of
learning and add a couple of
resources and put money
behind things that you say
you are going to do, the people know they can trust me if
I say, ‘This is what we’re
going to do over the next
year.’
If we don’t do it, it’s not
going to be for lack of effort
because we have a history of
doing what we say we’re
going to do.
HOW TO REACH: Paycor Inc., (800) 381-0053 or www.paycor.com
