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Companywide Meeting Presentation

Companywide Meeting Presentation

December 11, 2007

Last year at this time, we got everyone fired up about the future of our companies. This came off the heels of working with Ken Allen in our strategic planning process. Then, as Jennifer Coleman said, “We got all excited and had so much hope! Then, no strategic plans appeared, decisions slowed, and projects were delayed to a turtle’s pace -- and we lost hope!”

I would like to make my presentation today in three parts: (1) Some of you are learning who I really am. I would like to give you a little more background. (2) Then, I would like to talk about what the research says a great company and its leaders should look like, and finally, (3) I want to close by talking about the vision I see for us in the future. Don will end the day by talking to you as a group without me in the room and then we will go bowling! Tomorrow, you will meet with Don in focus groups (individually as leaders and the others in small groups).

I. Background

My background begins in Darlington, SC on a rural dirt road. My greatest memories were flying each afternoon with my grandfather, who owned an airport, until I was about 12 years old.

My parents divorced when I was 12. My home burnt to the ground shortly thereafter and we lost everything. We were suddenly thrown into the ranks of the poor and moved into a trailer. My bedroom became a 6’ square. Mother was a single parent and was a mill worker at Dixie Cup. My parents never mentioned the word “college” when I was growing up. Fortunately, we moved into the “city” of Darlington with a population of less than 5,000 and there I hooked up into a peer group that was going to college.

My guidance counselor seriously told me that I would never amount to anything (yes, I had a ball in high school!). I was voted Most Wittiest in high school, so my humor began more than 40 years ago!

I worked as a meat cutter in high school and pretty much paid my way through college. Gas was 16 cents a gallon and my college tuition was $175 per semester! But I was one of the highest paid workers at the time at $1 per hour.

My first year in college resulted in a .8 average out of a 4.0 and I had to beg a teacher to give me a D so I would not flunk out! However, I met my wife and had nearly straight A’s for my last two years and finished college in 1971 in a three-year span.

My father, who ran a liquor store, said I did not have the know-how to run a business.

In 1971, my first professional job as a food stamp worker paid $6,000 per year and my first office as a professional was a freshly painted jail cell at the York County Department of Public Welfare.

I went on to work for seven state agencies, two governors, and a non-profit. This experience was extremely valuable because I saw our world from many different environments.

In 1981, I opened six businesses with no experience. In 1985, I had to take those successful businesses out of business when Texas Instruments suddenly decided to quit making home computers. I had all my eggs in one basket and was not diversified.

I became clinically depressed for two years. Yes, Mr. Positive and Mr. Optimistic fell into the pit. It was a terrible time. My family is filled with tragedy and many relatives killed each other or themselves. Blake, my son, attended a reunion one time and said there were more rednecks in that one setting than he had ever seen!  My father went to prison. I was the first child on both sides of the family to graduate from college.

I am sharing this with you because I really want you to know who I am! I had nothing given to me and had to work for everything I own. Nothing was easy and it was a lot of hard work!

While much of my life has been filled with tragedy, I now consider them gifts from God. I used these tragedies and turned them into wonderful learning opportunities. All the pain turned into gold because it is all how you look at life, mistakes, and tragedy. Your past can become rich diamonds that will help you grow ….or baggage that forever haunts you! I chose to benefit.

I see life and running a business as a grand experiment, game, or puzzle. I have learned that the key to success is to dream the impossible; think beyond your reach; have faith in God because there is tremendous power and peace there; surround yourself with people who are smarter, more experienced, and organized than you; lay out a roadmap of where we are going and how to get there with others’ input; and then let people do their jobs. There is no one secret to having a successful business – it is a constant experiment to find what works – and what works today may not work tomorrow. We saw this happen in our Training and Publications Division. Success occurs when a lot of the right things come together at once. It is a series of small steps and successes that build long-term success.

A successful leader needs to first understand who he or she is. Jim Collins in Good to Great and others say that an effective leader is humble, gets things done, executes well, has high amounts of energy, and is constantly coaching, mentoring, and leading. I have tried every form of leadership. What I saw developing over this last year with its hierarchy, controls, and bureaucratic inefficiency is not what I envisioned when new roles were implemented in January 2007. Based on my individual interviews with you, you likewise felt the same way and in what I have heard and experienced, we have all been frustrated at how our company and leadership operated. And I know that you want change.

Don Jenkins is conducting a needs assessment on where we have been and where we need to go. I encourage you to be frank and forthright with him. We are trying to figure out what our new company should look like in the future. I don’t have all the answers right now, but I do know that we will adhere to servant leadership in the future. That is defined as being where leaders:

• Will serve you and our customers.

• Help employees to do their best.

• Coach and mentor.

• Encourage self-expression.

• Build a community and family.

• Create a positive and open culture where we all want to come to work each day.

• View our staff as part of a family.

• Treat employees as owners and partners.

• Want to learn, are humble and not know-it-alls or domineering, and want to be coached themselves.

While servant leadership will be our focus, also look for a strong CEO in 2008. I accept all responsibility for the direction this company took this past year and I don’t want us blaming others for what has happened. I do not promise you anything in the future other than positive change occurring. How this change will occur will depend on you. If you want positive changes, then you are going to have to help me make them!

I am not a micromanager and do not like to control. If you find me micromanaging, then you are not doing your job. I am what my leadership chart says I am: I love outlining goals, I want to give input in the early stages and before you pull the trigger, and then I want you to run with the ball.  I love it when you stay a step ahead of me! When things go wrong (and they will), I want us to learn and I do want not hear excuses.

I am a blue in my preferred mode—very creative—and thrive around people who like to dream and think outside the box. As a blue, I used to drive Kim Inman of our Columbia Conference Center crazy because I would try to make the “perfect decision!” When she came up with an idea, I would throw five back to her. What has happened in our company over the last year was there was a lot of talk, but little action and a lot of procrastination. Sure, we are paying our bills, but people expressed a lot of dissatisfaction to me about the way we did things here.

As a blue, I had to teach myself effective and timely decision-making by gathering the facts, soliciting input, and making prompt decisions.

If you really want to know how I operate, talk to Kim, Stephanie, Ed, and Lori. We have a great relationship because we get things done and communicate well. I ask that you judge me not by what people have said about me, but what you see. And don’t mind kicking me in the butt if you see me doing something wrong!

Don’t get spooked when I throw a dumb idea out on the table. I am very creative and need to think and talk about the idea as I seek different options. I will sometimes criticize my own work or idea. You will find that I will generally meet you halfway on decisions if you work with me in turn. However, I want you to speak your mind!

I don’t have all the answers and as Sam Walton said, “If I get it right 50% of the time, I am doing pretty good!” I am a strong believer that we have the opportunity to learn and grow from our mistakes. But the most important step is that we have to recognize that we made the mistake or failed in the first place! The key to working with me is to keep me informed and let me know what you are doing; solicit my input; when you run into trouble, don’t see asking me for help as a weakness; and then let me know before you make a final decision.

My philosophy is to hope for the best, prepare for the worse. We must plan for failure and threats if we are to succeed. I have been running businesses and writing grants for nearly 30 years. Let me just be one of you as we move this company forward. Now, let me share some of the research about how our leadership and company should look like if we are truly committed to making this a great company.

II. Research -- Successful Companies

If we are serious about developing a great company, then we need to understand what the literature says it should be.

• Get the right people on board and then decide where you want to go. We are at that point and time.

• We must maintain an unwavering faith that we can and will prevail, regardless of the circumstances.

• We have to discipline ourselves to confront the most brutal facts about ourselves and our company.

• The best people do not need to be tightly managed.

• We need to maintain a culture of disciplined people. When you have disciplined staff, you don’t need hierarchy.

• Leaders have high levels of energy, are humble and never accept credit, and are not concerned with their egos, power, and control. They should be constantly coaching and mentoring so they are working themselves out of a job, must have an incurable need to produce results, and most importantly – EXECUTE!

• Good is not good enough if you want to succeed in the long range.

• Endless restructuring is not needed in a great company. As Stephanie told me, “We have been in transition far too long! We need to get things going!”

• Good to great companies will make many mistakes, but they will make more good decisions than they do bad ones.

• Great leaders are constantly asking, “WHY?” Great leaders invite others to ask WHY and give them answers when asked. They engage everyone in the debate to come up with the best answer and then make prompt decisions. They seek to eliminate bottlenecks and slow decision-making processes and just get things done! When criticized, leaders listen and then look into the mirror. They focus more on growing and improving than rationalizing or excusing their actions. Blame is not a part of their vocabulary or thinking processes.

• When mistakes and errors occur, leaders conduct autopsies without blame. They bring mistakes out into the open and learn from them. They see mistakes as learning opportunities and gifts and then prevent the mistake from happening again (Total Quality Management).

• Great companies only pursue activities that they do their best, are most profitable, and are passionate about (Hedgehog Principle in Good to Great).

• Great companies avoid bureaucracy and hierarchy; they instead create cultures of discipline. Leaders in these companies clearly outline the parameters within employees can operate and allow them the freedom to blossom.

• Great companies stop doing things that don’t work as often as they do new things or continue doing what works.

I recently read an outstanding book by Marshall Goldsmith called What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. A lot of the successful ways we have done business in the past will just not work for us in the future. While we need to pay our bills, there must be more to success and building a great company than just writing grants. That is why 75% of you said that you would not be with the company in five years!

I also read another book called Execution:The Art of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy. He points out (and we need to listen to this): The main reason companies fall short of their promises is a failure to execute. In companies that fail to execute, there is a lot of talk and planning and little or no action. Too many leaders fool themselves into thinking their companies are well run and falsely believe they are very good leaders and managers, when in reality they are not. Ineffective leaders use the excuse “Our strategy will take time to execute to produce results!” The main difference between successful companies and less successful competitors is the ability to execute. Leaders who create cultures of execution design strategies that are more road maps than rigid paths. It is simply about getting things done in successful organizations. Execution must be the key element of an organization’s culture. It is a systematic process of rigorously discussing the how and what, questioning and debating, making prompt decisions, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability.

The bottom line is that all of you have expressed a strong desire to change the way we do things and to change our form of leadership. You simply want a better way to communicate, be involved more in the decision-making process, make more money, make decisions faster, and execute projects more efficiently.

And we plan to do just that. We have made some strides, including:

• Increasing the carryover of leave from 60 to 80 hours a year.

• Salaries have been increased to near industry standards.

• Professional development will be a key focus in 2008. I would like to form a committee to help provide input.

• I would like to see us develop an advancement process where we do not have to follow the classical hierarchy. We need to examine how you can make more money or accept new roles. I need your input on this.

• While PESOS was not implemented, I think you understand better now from our earlier presentation. But be patient. It will come.

• Security is under control. We are planning to install cameras, you have been trained on the use of mace, we have a system now to help each other, and we have installed a locking door with a code at the top of the stairway with signs to warn intruders.

Now, I want to go into the vision for the future. First, I promise you nothing. Joel and Dan have been coaching me to ensure that whatever I say, we do. So, when you return from the holidays, know that I can only promise you change. But you will have to help me develop what that change looks like and then ensure that we execute. For it will take all of us as one village to raise this firm into what you want it to be.

III. My Vision for the Future

First, I want to say that while I will spell out where I want us to go, I want to turn my vision into “OUR” vision. So, see this as the first of many steps to create that vision. Don’s role is to help us assemble the vision and strategic plans and then ensure that we implement them.

Leadership

• We must expedite our decision making process and execute better.

• Leaders’ plates will be reduced so they can have the time to lead, coach, and mentor.

• Leaders need to learn to delegate and trust -- you need to say, “I can help you!” It is a two-way street.

• Leaders will solicit input, discuss issues with you, and then make prompt decisions. We need to learn that good decisions today are better than possible perfect decisions tomorrow (Patton). I want all of you to push us to make prompt decisions.

• We need to track projects better and assign realistic target dates. Then, all of us should hold our feet to the fire.

• Everyone in our organization should be treated like leaders, owners, and partners.

• Division leaders will be allowed more freedom to run their divisions with minimal interference. Dan, Joel, and Ed will report directly to me.

• Leaders need to give you ongoing feedback, coaching, and mentoring on a one-on-one basis and as groups. I would like to see each leader meet with each employee at least monthly if at all possible. I want each of you to push for this. Leaders need to develop processes where they have the time to perform.

• I will meet with everyone monthly (in person or by conference call) to address any issues or questions you may have. This company will become more open to anything you want to ask or challenge without fear.

• I would like to see each division have weekly meetings and/or conference calls where everyone checks in to discuss strategy and briefly go over what everyone is doing.

• Leadership titles will be scrapped and leadership positions re-defined. All future senior leaders will be more on an equal footing and bureaucracy and hierarchy eliminated. While you will see a strong CEO, I want to be just one of the senior leaders.

• Based on my discussions with TEG staff and on my observations, I am promoting Joel to Vice President of TEG. Let’s congratulate him on a job well done! However, the title of Vice President will be short-lived because 2008 titles will be changing once our needs assessment has been completed. I have worked with Administaff to consider different options as we restructure our company.

• I want to build a strong leadership team and if something happens to me, there will not be a president but rather a management team that will run the company.

Fun

• We will have more fun and celebrate our victories. The ELC Committee will have a budget of $3,000 in 2008 to be shared between Columbia and Atlanta. They will be unsupervised and will do as they please with very limited supervision from me.

Accountability 

• We need to build in more accountability in everything we do to our customers and ourselves. The T/A Model Dan and his team are proposing will go a long way!

• I want us to conduct a simple survey of our grant and evaluation customers no later than April 2008. Then, every time we annually bill customers, we send out an evaluation.

• We need to complete our strategic planning by April 2008.

• We need a clear road map of where we are going and how to get there. Yes, there are a lot of unknowns, but we need to plan.

Fringe Benefits

• We will retain the same insurance we have with Administaff, but I am implementing a special program where at the end of the year (12/31/08), you can submit a request for reimbursement for up to $500 per person to cover medical and prescription expenses that were not covered.

Being Proactive

• We need to work harder at predicting problems before they occur and be more proactive. I am tired of hearing about the “ox in the ditch!”

• We need to predict and deal with threats early on. We just cannot stick our heads in the sand and hope that everything will work out. We need to hope for the best but prepare for the worse.

• The new customer support model may help us in reducing the fires by pinpointing problems while they are small.

Efficiency

• We need to develop EPRs to match job descriptions that are customized for each employee.

• Our new copier will arrive on 1/11/08 and our old Docutech will leave on 1/30/08.

• Staff will be able to make their own travel plans. Lori will train you in the near future. Lori will make the large group travel plans such as attending conferences.

• We will stop scheduling and cancelling meetings.

• We must learn from our mistakes and turn them into learning opportunities. Our culture must be one where members feel comfortable bringing mistakes out into the open and then conducting autopsies without blame. Once we learn, we need to ensure that they do not happen again!

• We want to create a culture in this company that anything anyone wants to say is acceptable without fear.

• We will be opening a new office in Atlanta.

New Opportunities

• While we need to focus on what we do best, what we are passionate about, and activities that are the most profitable, we are too dependent on the US Department of Education. We need to find new non-USDOE grants to pursue, even if they are smaller.

• We want to venture into Tennessee and Florida as our next focus.

Better Communications

• We will do a better job of asking for input and letting folks know what is going on in the company. That includes announcing grant awards as we learn about them.

• If you are in a meeting and need a decision, do not hesitate to call me so that we can expedite the decision.

• You will have full access to me.

• There will be less e-mail and more face-to-face communication.

• You will have one set of policies.

• We will eliminate bureaucracy wherever possible.

• Staff located outside our building will be included on building-wide e-mails to keep them in the loop.

Being More Charitable

• Once a quarter, staff will be able to dedicate one day to charity work in teams. I would like to have some volunteers to help me design the program.

Our Culture 

• From everything I have heard from a variety of different sources and methods, my understanding is that these are the company culture’s values you would like to be involved with in our companies: Ethical, honest, winning, open, humble, strong communications, sharing information, preferably face-to-face, team-focused, customer-driven, accessible, freedom from micromanagement, life-long learning, helping others, charitable, proactive, efficient, effective, entrepreneurial, some structure with lots of freedom, caring about one another, ongoing feedback on performance, good work ethics, lots of opportunities and challenges, high quality work that we can be proud of, high but realistic standards, different, sensitive, and above all, you want to know WHY!

Conclusion

Don’t say that you will sit back and wait for my actions and outcomes. You need to be an equal part of the solution and helping to create those outcomes! If you want action, then make it happen!

My role is to get the train moving and to keep it moving. We need to create a company that is not dependent on any one person. Your job is to tell me where the train needs to go and then get on board! It is important that we know where we are going and how to get there. It is imperative that we set aside some time to plan that will result in measurable objectives and target dates with everyone’s input and as Al Walker said yesterday, “Just do it!”

The time for talking and excuses are over. Now, let’s rock and roll. And as Forrest Gump said, “That’s all I got to say about that!”

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