When Eric Thomas gets up in the morning, he’s not listening to the radio or watching the news. Instead, he’s listening to “Good to Great” and other business books on CD.
It’s not something that he’s always done, but after hearing a speaker talk about the benefit, he thought it would help him in leading his 46 employees as CEO of FreedomVoice, a provider of toll-free number service solutions.
“He was talking about this idea that you listen to music, and how many words for songs do you know, and the reason you know them is because when you’re in downtime mode, when you’re getting ready in the morning or whenever, you’re listening to that,” Thomas says. “What if you took that time that ingrains and puts all this information in your head and used it to put information in your head that would help you or your company?”
Smart Business spoke with Thomas about the things he does to be a more effective leader.
Look for opportunities. Looking for opportunities is a lot of common sense — it’s understanding the industry, understanding what things are needed, what pains exist for the customers, what problems need to be solved. Then look at those to see if there’s some sort of way to make a business opportunity out of it.
It really just has to do with putting yourself in the position of a customer in whatever particular marketplace and/or product idea that you’ve got. Think of it from the customer’s perspective and try to understand what would make a difference, what would they get emotional about, those sorts of things.
Ask good questions when hiring. You’re looking for people who are the 20 percenters — the 20 percent of the people that do 80 percent of the work, that are creative, driven, self-started. Ask all the questions that might find you those people.
Things that I ask are, ‘What do you do when you’re not at work?’ If you’re hiring a programmer and they say, ‘Well, I play video games.’ That would be less compelling than somebody who says, ‘Well, I like to do research on new programming languages, and I like to read trade journals,’ — things that tell me that they’re passionate about their particular talents and how they’re going to contribute to the company.
‘What are you reading?’ That’s usually an indicator. I like people who read and are trying to always develop themselves.
Give them examples of situations, and try to do it in an open-ended way … to see if they answer on the way of doing the right thing as opposed to what most people think an employer wants to hear. Sometimes people will answer in a way that’s like, ‘Wow, I wouldn’t give them the refund because the company should keep the money,’ versus, ‘Well, the right thing to do is to give them the refund, so I would give them the refund.’ I’m looking for the guy who’s going to look after the customer and do the right thing. A lot of times people think the company is always about the money. Money is on the list, but it’s pretty far down.
