Company an extraordinary place to work is the commitment to dialogue between senior management and all of our employees. At about the time the division was unraveling in Buffalo, the company was conducting our annual employee survey. As you can imagine, given these circumstances, when the scores got to human resources at headquarters in Dayton, red lights went off and the sirens blared. There was a crisis in Buffalo! As you might expect, human resources responded like the Kemper Calvary, and the feedback sessions were quite ugly.
On the heels of the report, I got the dreaded call to come to the home office. I made the trip fearing the worst. Would it be a transfer, a demotion, or the pink slip? Much to my surprise, it was none of the above. Enter life lesson number two: The people who care about us the most are those who stand shoulder to shoulder with us during our most difficult times.
At the time, I worked for Tom Murphy, the regional manager in Rochester, and John Berry Jr., the vice president of the east region and the grandson of the company’s founder.
They were both consistent in their opinion that while I was relentless in pursuit of results, I had created an environment in which our employees felt under-appreciated and disrespected. In short, I was hurting the people I cared about the most!
This devastated me. The good news was both John and Tom offered their support and confidence and they allowed me to be the one who fixed the problem. I went back to Buffalo, humbled but determined to earn back the trust and loyalty of my colleagues.
Upon return, I did something I had never done before. I stood in front of all one hundred and seven people, with a deep sense of contrition, and said I was sorry. There were a lot of tears in that room, mostly mine. I promised them that while we were still expected to make sales quotas and meet New York Telephone’s expectations, it would never be at the expense of each other’s dignity.
Solving life’s problems is a two-part process. First, you must realize you’ve got a problem. Second, you’ve got to figure out how to correct it. While the problem was obvious, the solution was not.
Bill Tripp, our vice president of HR and a mentor to me, suggested that I spend some time at the Center for Values Research in Dallas. The Berry Company had employed CVR as consultants to administer our attitude surveys and consult on other HR issues.
Central to my journey were Vince Flowers and Charley Hughes, partners at the Center. Both of them were heavily influenced in their practice by Dr. Clare Graves, a renowned psychologist who had done extensive research in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s on value systems.
So I spent a week with them in Dallas. The short version of what they said to me was
I needed to go back to Buffalo and create a behavior-driven organization rather than a sales-driven one.
When I arrived back in Buffalo, I gathered all my managers in my office on a Sunday night and told them I’ve been to the mountain and found the solution. That is how our leadership journey began in earnest.
CHAPTER TWO
Leaders Know the Value of Good People
When we began our journey, we asked ourselves the first critical question: “If we’re serious about finding a better way, where do we start?”
Leaders know the one constant in business and life is people. It’s ludicrous that people can too often be ignored or overlooked. How can achieving success in every organization not focus on its most critical asset—its people?
Whether an organization succeeds or fails is determined by the people who show up for work every day. It is the people with whom the customers interact who make a difference. In fact, when your company’s name is mentioned, it is the faces and performances of your people that your customers remember.
To help us with our business transformation, we hearkened back to our founder, Mr. L.M. Berry, a truly extraordinary man. L.M. came to Dayton in 1910 and started selling advertising on the back of train schedules. Eventually, he approached Dayton Home Telephone Company and offered to sell advertising in their phone number guides to help defray the cost of printing. It was this concept that led L.M. Berry to become one of the first creators of the yellow pages concept as we know it today.
Back in the ’30s and ’40s, Mr. Berry traveled the country by train, relentlessly calling up more telephone companies to sign up their yellow page directory business. By the late ’50s, L.M. Berry and Company had become the country’s largest independent yellow page advertising agency in the United States.
I was blessed with the opportunity to know L.M. for the last ten years of his life, and I heard him say many times that he named his company L.M. Berry and Company because he was L.M. Berry, but more importantly, his people were his company. Although the name was changed to The Berry Company in 1992 to become more contemporary, his belief that our people represent our primary asset continues to serve as its guiding principle.
There is a valuable lesson here for all of us. When you feel you or your company has veered off course or is searching for new identity, think back to your, or the company’s, original intentions, which tend to be straightforward, focused, and strong. Businesses can drift away from these benchmarks as the years go by.
It’s not easy for many organizations to weave together the past, the present, and the future. Kathy Geiger-Schwab, the current executive vice president for The Berry Company, created a phrase that became part of our everyday business vocabulary: “Old Values, New Ideas.” “Old Values” represented the culture that defined The Berry Company’s legacy, reminding us how critical it was that we retain what made us unique by recognizing that we could not create the future by recreating the past. “New Ideas” represented the go-forward strategy based upon creativity, imagination, ingenuity and courage. I believe that this balance must be reached if organizations are going to be competitive going forward regardless of their pursuit.
It is of utmost importance, both in today’s global economy as well as our local communities, to find talented performers. Although much has been written about the need for hiring quality employees, it’s obvious that much is lost in execution. During the last several years, I have been associated with over a hundred different organizations, and I’m shocked at the lack of emphasis on recruiting, hiring, finding, and keeping good people. I’m even more surprised at the lack of participation of senior management in this most critical function. Finding and keeping good people must be the number one priority for all organizations!
Not long ago, I had the opportunity to address a large group of human resource senior executives. I asked the audience, “How much time do you spend in the recruiting phase of your job?” Their responses both surprised and disappointed me. By their own admission, they spend most of their HR time getting non-productive, disgruntled employees out of their respective organizations. As the dismissal process becomes more complex, messy, and costly, the solution is clear: Why not spend more time up front on selecting the right employees?
In 2006, we surveyed the more than fifteen hundred executives who attended the Center for Leadership & Executive Development programs over the previous six years. They said their number one concern in the upcoming year was the hiring and retention of talent. Your strategic and operational priorities must center on getting the best people to work with you. If this isn’t senior management’s primary goal, then the company will falter and personnel will not be a priority for the rest of the organization. As president/CEO of The Berry Company, I spent at least thirty percent of my time involved in selection and retention strategies and personnel engagement.
Finding and keeping good people must be a personal priority for every individual in the organization.
I once asked a large group of first- and second-level sales managers at The Berry Company how many of them had personally recruited a salesperson, just one, over the last twelve months. The question produced a paltry twenty-five percent show of hands. The truth is, even in companies where hiring and retaining good people is the number one priority, this focus can still slip away in the hectic pace of business if it is not constantly reinforced.