Travel as a team
You need to set the tone from the top if your organization is to rebound, but you can’t do it all by yourself. You need a competent team that believes in your vision, that as a group believes in what you are trying to accomplish in the future. And in order to build that kind of team, you need to find and retain the right players.
For Cook, it is another balancing act. He wants leaders who will help form a galvanized spearhead for the company’s future initiatives, leaders who embrace the same values and will carry forth the culture in unison. But he also doesn’t want to shy away from differing viewpoints. He also wants leaders from different perspectives and business backgrounds, so that each management meeting can become a learning experience for all involved.
“Finding the right people for a management team can be a tough task,” Cook says. “First of all, you try to find individuals who want to make a difference. You find people who maybe don’t share your viewpoint, who might bring a different look and feel to the decision-making process. But ultimately, you want them to all have the same vision. You want input from wherever it might come from on the leadership team. You want everybody to contribute.
“At the end of the day, it is my job as the leader to make the final decision if it falls into my lap, but I also don’t override sound decisions of others. If you give people that kind of latitude, that is a main way by which you instill a high level of trust on your team.”
One of the overarching points that Cook routinely emphasizes to his leadership team is that cultural principles and core values don’t change, but a vision can be adjusted. Future plans can’t become so rigidly entrenched that a company can’t react to changes in the market or new business opportunities. That has become a critical lesson to learn as the economy has slumped and businesses have needed to capitalize on any worthwhile opportunity that arrives.
“You always have to remember that no matter what you’re doing, it can be done better,” Cook says. “You always want to be challenging your people to find ways to do something better, ways the company can do more, and don’t have any ceilings in place.”
In a down economy, revenue is often the driving force behind business decisions. It’s a philosophy with a solid and obvious motivation: Without revenue, your business doesn’t survive.
But Cook says you should still aspire to something beyond the dollars and cents of your bottom line, and your management team should, as well. It’s the achievement of goals above and beyond driving revenue that will get your people to aspire to something bigger and could play an integral role in allowing your business to rebound from the economic downturn.
“You can have a budget, but your goal and forecast can be more than the budget,” he says. “The budget gives you and your team the guidelines, the way to get to the numbers that you need to achieve, but that alone doesn’t need to be your company goal. You need to set something that is a little ways out there, a little more difficult to attain but still reasonable.”
Cook wants his agents to sell a percentage of homes beyond the sales goals set up by management.
“We have a budget that gets us to the profit that we need to be at, but we also have a goal and a forecast that exceeds the budget,” he says. “From a sales standpoint, in our case, maybe it’s to get to the revenue number by selling 10 or 15 percent more homes than we have to meet in the budget on a monthly basis.”
As you and your leadership team prepare to chart a course for a more prosperous future, you need to make sure that you are learning the lessons that other business leaders have been learning during the past few years.
Cook says every leader should expect cycles in his or her industry and build a team and an organization that can move and adapt with those cycles — and do so as a unified force.
“You have to expect business cycles,” Cook says. “Things are not always going to be smooth sailing. As you grow and build your organization, you have to be flexible and know that there might be a down cycle out there, even after the economy has recovered, and you have to be ready to move on a dime. You can’t wait for something bad to happen before you are ready to react. Anticipate the challenges and downward cycles that happen in business, and do your best to stay ahead of them.”
How to reach: Prudential California Realty, (858) 792-6085 or www.prudentialcal.com
