When Dennis M. King
took over leadership at
Harley Ellis Devereaux Corp., he spent his first year
analyzing his own personal
leadership style as well as how
the organization could succeed.
“It came down to an understanding that all of us pulling
together, taking advantage of
our myriad of different views
and visions and ideas and capabilities and talents could take
the organization much further
than me as one person trying to
do it all,” says the company’s
corporate chairman and CEO.
That’s when he realized the
importance of vision in leading
the 500-employee commercial
architecture organization,
which posted approximately
$70 million in revenue last year.
Smart Business spoke with
King about how empathy and
persistence are critical to communicating your vision.
Q. What are the keys to
being a good leader?
You have to begin with a
vision that invigorates the organization. If you can’t articulate
and share with everyone a simple message about where you’re
going, then it’s very difficult for
employees to get excited about
an organization. So, having an
invigorating vision is important.
You have to be able to sell
that. You have to be able to
communicate enthusiastically
— to sell the vision and communicate it and repeat and get
people to buy in to it.
You just have to be able to
have empathy and understand
how people are feeling about
your message. It’s one thing to
just sort of give directions or
make suggestions. It’s something entirely different to
understand how your message
is being read and felt by your
organizations. So you have to
be empathic.
Maybe above all, you have to
be persistent. Leadership is all
about the sort of traditional follow-me kind of concept. If you
keep changing direction or giving conflicting messages, it gets
very muddy and difficult for
people to understand where
they’re going.
So persistence is really
important.
Q. How do you show empathy?
Everyone learns differently.
Some people learn from listening, some people learn from
reading, some people
learn from writing and
combinations of all those
kinds of things. A lot of
people take a different
amount of time to
absorb and appreciate
things based on their
interest, their training,
their background, their
knowledge.
Particularly when you
are trying to implement a
change of some sort in an
organization, you have to
be persistent and, more
importantly, you have to
be watchful of how the
message is being accepted and how people are
embracing it. There is the
natural, initial resistance
for any change because people
don’t like to upset their lives. So
they are going to wait to see if
change is for the best and if it’s
going to last or whether you are
going to give up on it.
