It is said that you don’t know a man
until you’ve walked a mile in his
shoes. Ask Adrian Cohen and he’ll tell you that you don’t know a business until
you’ve walked a mile in every position at
the company.
Since being hired fresh out of college
in 1974, Cohen’s advanced through every
role at Widom Wein Cohen O’Leary
Terasawa — from print boy to designer
to project manager. Now, as president,
CEO and managing partner of WWCOT,
Cohen has put his intimate understanding of the architectural
design firm to good use, building
trust with his 170 employees and
leading the firm to 2006 revenue
of approximately $25 million.
“You need to know every part of
your business in order to lead it,”
Cohen says. “If you don’t, you
have to talk to people, find out
what they do and really hear
what they’re saying.”
Smart Business spoke with
Cohen about trust, autonomy
and how to foster employees’
personal growth.
Q: How do you grant employees
autonomy?
At every level, there has to be
delegation and trust. If you
micromanage, you’re really
never successful because people then lose their interest in
whatever job they’re doing.
You know what their
strengths and weaknesses are
and basically delegate everything you can based on their
strengths. If you know someone is going
to be a great, creative designer, just let
them go and let them explore ideas.
Just because I’m the CEO of the company doesn’t mean that I’m smarter than
everybody else. The thing that makes me
smart is if I can see that someone is better than I am at a certain aspect of the
practice and trust them and let them do
that job.
Opening up that opportunity that people
feel that they’re working for themselves is
really what allows us to grow because
now you have all these individuals who hopefully feel that they have their own
practice, and they’re working really hard
to do better projects and bring projects
to the office.
Q: How do you build trust with your management team?
In order to trust somebody, you need to
know them well. It shouldn’t be blind
trust. It should be trust based on what
you know their abilities are.
I generally attend the project meetings.
I try to personally attend key meetings to
gauge how the project is going, to see if
there’re any changes that we need to
make in terms of our approach. That’s
really how I know.
I’m also involved in the billing, so I see
what progress we’ve made on the project and how we’re doing based on the
fee that we have. Usually, you see if the
project is going smoothly or if there are
some challenges up there that we need
to work on.
Q: What one thing can prevent growth?
A company that doesn’t provide opportunities for personal growth.
No matter what kind of industry you’re
in, people want to grow. No one wants to
be stagnant. When you get up in the morning and you don’t want to work, you’ve got
a problem.
Make sure that every supervisor in the firm
knows that part of their job is to provide
opportunities for the people they supervise.
We have a performance review, which
takes a very interactive approach. We
have specific forms in which we ask
the employee to not only talk about
their performance and how they rate
themselves, but what needs do they
have that are not being met and what
can we do about it.
At the end of that employee review,
you develop a plan for the next year
in terms of not only if they need any
improvement in their performance,
but also, you identify their needs and
growth desire. That plan might
include specific training on an area
that they want to grow in. That might
be going to conferences or seminars or
those kinds of things.
The only way (the company’s) going
to grow is having those very unique
individuals that have an ownership in
the company. And by ownership, I
mean actually feeling that their personal needs are being fulfilled.
Q: What else do you do to foster personal growth?
One of our senior partners here, he
spends a lot of time teaching our
younger people. We have classes like a
university class that’s done in a long
lunch hour, and we invite people to
come in and talk about a particular subject that’s important to our profession.
That is part of the personal growth,
understanding more and more of what is
happening in your chosen career. It gives
you an understanding of the entire operation. It also enforces everybody to
work toward the same goal because they
understand the big picture.
HOW TO REACH: Widom Wein Cohen O’Leary Terasawa, (310)
828-0040 or www.wwcot.com
