The secret behind any successful company is having the right people, says Tom Lipar.
As founder and CEO of LGI
Development, a land and home
sales and developing company,
Lipar says that he struggles
with hiring and retaining quality
employees.
You can implement an extensive interviewing process, which
LGI has, but that’s just the start,
says Lipar, who has 105 employees. Once you hire the right
employees, you need to give
them the tools to do their job. To
create a healthy, successful work
force, you have to give employees the tools to do their jobs,
educate them and help them find
ways to meet both personal and
company goals.
LGI Development, which posted 2007 revenue of $118.3 million, has been successful largely because of its sales training
program, which Lipar carried
over from a previous job, where
he was charged with creating a
similar program.
Smart Business spoke with
Lipar about ways to help
employees maximize their
potential and, in return, the
potential of your company.
Involve employees in setting goals.
All of our people in our company do goal setting. It’s a true
goal-planning process. It starts
from the top down; it starts
from the business plan. We do
that on an annual basis for
one-year goals. Then, every
month, everybody in the company meets with their directs
and goes through monthly
business and personal goals so
that we’re all on the same page
with objectives that the company wants.
The employee doesn’t just
write the goals down and
bring them to the company. It’s
a goal-planning session where
the manager sits with the
employee and they discuss
what’s going on in the company, what the employees need
to do to achieve his personal
goals as well as the company
goals.
When they’re discussed, if
the employee sets it too high,
then the manager should
know enough and say, ‘I think
you’re a little bit too aggressive; we need to probably pull
it back because one thing we
don’t want you to do is seek
failure and not reach your
goals.’ We try to be realistic.
The principles of goal setting
are they have to be realistic.
They have to be written, and if
you don’t reach them, they
should be changed.
It definitely works. No. 1, the
people who work for you have
to know what the job is. They
have to know how to do the
job, and they have to know
what they can do to achieve
results in the job.
You should have a mutual
expectation between management and their directs, so the
manager knows what’s expected from their employees and
the direct knows what to
expect from their manager.
And they should know what
the overall objective of the
company is, what their financial goals are, what the production goals are. Then, the
employee can determine how
he can effect that objective —
be effective on that objective
— to achieve through his own
goals.
They know what the company’s goals are, and they then
have the opportunity to say,
‘Well, I’m going to be this part
of that company goal; I’m
going to do this much to
achieve that overall company
goal.’ In other words, ‘I’m
going to reach my goals,
which, in turn, will help the
company reach their goals.’
