A.R.E.

I N S I D E R

international perspectives By Michael Diliberto

Our Growing Family

ike so many others in our industry, our company started as a family business, although we are not all family in the true sense of the word. Working together with a small group of colleagues for many yearsfor the majority of our waking hours inevitably imbued us with this sense. Working in a small company, our ability to get work done together successfully was predicated on our ability to build relationships with everyone around us. I know I speak for all of my colleagues when I say in those early years we knew we could rely on each other and trust each other like family. Without the structures and hierarchy of a large organization to get in our way, our family business performed at a level that transcended our small sizeand the nimbleness of a small company coupled with our commitment to one another drove us to accomplish great things. GROWING PAINS It was the cohesiveness of our small company that drove our initial success, and it was that success that pushed us to grow our company. But as we grew, we moved away from the very components that had made us successful. The transition from a family business into a larger company came with its own unique challenges. So many of our early hires were people with whom we already had relationships. We met people, often as customers or vendors, and eventually some of them joined our companyand our family. We had established our relationship with those employees even before they were hired. A few years ago we entered a significant growth phase in our company and for what felt like the first time, we had to reach outside of our network to recruit and hire. Early on, I tended to focus on skills-based assessments during interviews. Does this candidate have project management experience? Is the candidate SolidWorks-certified? Does he or she have a certain number of years of metalworking experience?

Especially when adding staff to our Chinese operations, it was very easy to default to cold hard facts during the interview process. What I ignored were the softer skills, the question of whether a person would fit in with our companydid we, as a team, actually want to add this person to our family? Those are hard questions, but as I came to find out, they are the most important. FAMILY VALUES What I learnedthe hard way at times was that just because a person has the right skills for the job does not mean that person would be a good addition to the company. Like any family, our company has a personality all its own. Some of our early hires were highly skilled individuals who just did not end up fitting well with our companysome left soon after starting, others we had to let go after many attempts to help them fit in. What I came to realize was that we had, in fact, set some of these early employees up to fail by bringing in people that we should have known would not align with the culture and values of our organization. After hundreds and possibly thousands of interviews, I have distilled the musthave characteristics of our potential hires

down to two key criteria. The first, and singularly most important criteria, is whether the candidate will fit in with our company culture; that is, do the candidates values match our company values? Second, I need to know that the candidate is dedicated, passionate about what he or she does, and most importantly, passionate about what we can do together. COMPANY CULTURE I spent some time thinking about what exactly defines the characteristics of a person that would fit into our company. I asked some of our executives to come up with one-sentence descriptions that they believed reflected our company values. I was absolutely floored by the responses, because almost every time one of them submitted a response, everyone else in the room nodded in agreement, myself included. Impossible is nothing. Amaze our customers. Never deliver late. You get the idea. Their responses reflected the passion that we all shared in our work and in our business. Where we were challenged was in finding others who reflected these same values. In China especially, I found that involving the entire executive team in the interview process helped significantly. Once our manw w w. retailenvironments .org

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agement team had defined what characteristics we were looking for, the challenge was now to find those people. The second characteristic that I mentioned above is dedication. I often use the word trust when I talk about dedication to the job. Trust is such a fundamental characteristic, yet because it is often hard to quantify, it gets skipped during the interview. When I say trust, I dont mean trust in the broad sense, as in trusting an employee with my life, but rather in a much more narrow sense of whether I can trust that employee to do their job, do it successfully, and raise their hand if things are going wrong. Do I trust that if you say the prototype will be finished on Thursday that it will really be finished on that day? Do I trust that you will communicate good news and bad news with equal expediency? Without trust, our employees have no hope of being successful. We often create in our minds the position description for what we believe would

be the perfect employee. Someone that has great experience, the right cultural fit, has existing relationships, and can literally hit the ground running on day one. If only it were that simple! I have learned that those perfect employees rarely exist, and even when they do, it is easy to get seduced by the thought that an employee that is awesome at one company will be equally awesome at your company. My competitors top project manager could in fact be my worst. In reality, I have found that great employees are not as much hired as they are created. What is most important is that we start with the right fundamental characteristics and attitude. Once we find an employee with this right foundation, we can build on that foundation by adding in the company knowledge and skills that an employee needs in order to do his or her job. The knowledge transfer process varies depending upon the division of the company. For some areas it might mean shadowing an experienced employee

for a period of time, while for others training classes might be required. Most often it is a mixture of both. Our company, like many of our peers, felt the pain of needing to growbut without knowing how to do so successfully. We learned many lessons the hard way, but have come to appreciate the importance of hiring right and training right. There is nothing more fundamental to our success than to invest heavily in finding, growing, and retaining talent within our organization. To do so meant defining who we are as a company, our culture, our values, and what it takes to be a member of our family.

Mike Diliberto is general manager, China, for Bloomington, Minn.-based Lynx Innovation Inc. Contact him at miked@ lynxinnovation.com.

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