The leaders at Nike might
have a hard time seeing eye to eye with Ray Buehler.
The shoe company that made
the phrase “Just do it” its slogan might have some philosophical differences with the
president and CEO of Schneider
Downs & Co. Inc.
That’s because Buehler’s
management style at the 300-employee financial management
and advisory firm isn’t based on
directives. Instead, it’s based on
something he calls “smart-aggressive” leadership.
It’s the idea that you’re never
going to be able to drive your
company to where you want it
to go without having everyone
on board. To do that, you need
to show every employee the
“why” behind his or her marching orders and make each person feel like his or her work
contributes to the company’s
success as a whole.
Buehler says if you don’t have
a work force full of enabled,
big-picture thinkers, you run
the risk of internal detachment,
of having each of your departments operating in their own
disconnected silo.
Smart Business spoke with
Buehler about how to develop
workers who feel like they are a
part of something bigger.
Sell the small picture first. You
have to stress how important
each little piece is. When we
talk in the individual units or
in business meetings, the plan
is certainly way more defined
in each one of those business
units and administrative units
as to what they’re going to
accomplish.
What I like to say to people
who run any key administrative area or key department is,
‘Just pretend you’re the president of the company.’ It makes
it much smaller but more
empowering, so that people
understand it might be part of
a bigger map, but they control
and are empowered to have
their stake and operate with
some degree of autonomy.
It takes what might be a bigger issue that might seem
overpowering at times and
brings it down into a much
smaller group. People can
understand it better when it’s
within the confines of their
specific areas.
Align horizontally. It looks like
everything goes vertically,
but there is also a horizontal
map to Schneider Downs in
that within each of our business units, we’re organized
by 10 industry groups focused
on the same issues.
These groups cross over all
our business units. They’re all
focused on the same issue:
growing that practice, growing
that industry, people development, product delivery. The
bottom line is communication
and constantly reinforcing the
business unit goals, the individual goals and the administrative support goals.
If you were just vertically oriented, everything seems to be
powered from the top down.
In an inclusive organization,you don’t want each unit operating in its own silo and only
being concerned about what
their silo or their business unit
is doing. In reality, from your
customer standpoint, they
don’t see you as silos. They
see you as one organization.
In order for you to properly
service those folks — I call it
cross-pollination — you want
people to see it as a seamless
delivery of these silos.
Whether people see us as
audit, tax, wealth management, corporate finance, technology, ultimately, [we] want
our clients to see us just as
Schneider Downs.
It has a lot to do with marketing, but it also has a lot to
do with product delivery, and
it also has a lot to do with people development because
we’re looking for people to develop not just in their own
silo but to recognize that
Schneider Downs is more than
just one business unit.
