John Matig admits he doesn’t know it all. But neither do any of his 60 employees at Frontier Steel Co. Inc. So while ideas might start with an individual, they only manifest when the whole team works together.
The founder, president and CEO relies on managers to carry their loads at the steel distributing company, which had $54 million in 2008 revenue.
“You’ve got to let key personnel manage their area of expertise,” Matig says. “I don’t know anything about operations. I have to trust the people there.”
But he also recognizes the value of multiple perspectives.
Smart Business spoke with Matig about how to plan debate into your decision-making.
Q. How do you set up meetings so everyone’s voice is heard?
The best thing is to spend more time on the front end in terms of preparation, knowing what you want to talk about, so when you’re in the meetings, it doesn’t derail. Everybody has the same sheet of paper of what we’re going to talk about today. Now we do open it up for new business or long-range planning or whatever you want to call it at the end of the meeting, but basically, every person has an idea what their responsibility is.
I put an agenda together of each person, what we want to talk about, and then we have an open forum. Everybody gets a chance to talk about their domain, talk about what’s going on, talk about their concerns, talk about their needs and wants. And then the group listens. And when the first person’s done, we go around the room until the last person’s done. Everybody has a chance to have the floor and everybody talks about their areas. And then at the end of the day, we have a wish list and new business and things we need to talk about.
The agenda is usually followed up with an action plan based on what we talk about: ‘OK, you’re responsible for this. You’re responsible for that. Delegate this down the line.’
Every company that’s out there, if they’re not doing some type of round-table management on at least a biweekly basis, too many things get missed. Something that may not be important to that person — even though they’re in the area of expertise — somebody else may be able to look at it a little differently and say, ‘Wait a minute, what about this?’ So you’re pulling from a lot of knowledge and you’re trying to extract the right information.
The key is there’s no egos. You break down the egos [by saying], ‘We’re all in this together. We’re all around the flagpole. Everybody’s taking the bullet.’
