Developing Key Employees

The skilled labor market couldn't be tighter, yet Steve Zimmer is doing something that he recognizes could “wreck” an employee who most remodelers would kill to have: Greg Kelly, a lead carpenter who has been with Zimmer since his first summer in business, back in 1981.

Kelly is “an excellent, excellent employee,” Zimmer says, and one of just four employees at Steve Zimmer Remodeling, Cincinnati. “He's the kind of carpenter I can hand a production package, give the address for a job, and literally let him go,” he adds. Reliable, too, and loyal. Kelly has “probably taken fewer than 10 sick days” in 24 years, Zimmer says.

So why is Zimmer trying to turn this dream of a lead carpenter into an estimator, even at the risk of “forcing a square peg into a round hole”? For two reasons.

One, Zimmer wants to grow his company, a goal he acknowledges he can't accomplish while wearing so many hats, including those of salesman, estimator, and construction manager. With the help of his Remodelers Advantage Roundtable, Zimmer says he realized that “my own bottleneck was one of the worst things we had going here,” and it was now or never to escape “that pitfall of believing that nobody can do things as well as you can do them.”

Two, Kelly is no longer the young athlete who joined Zimmer in 1981, but a 48-year-old man who has pounded tens of thousands of nails, fallen off roofs, broken wrists, and developed signs of arthritis. “He's looking at his future and wanting to do something that doesn't take such a physical toll,” Zimmer says. Estimating happens to be one of the functions he enjoys least, but Kelly is eager to learn. “I think estimating is something I can get into,” says Kelly, who identifies with the laser-like focus of the position. Plus, he says he's “ready to get away from some of the more mundane physical stuff” of carpentry. “I'm good at what I do, but looking forward to moving on to something else.”

So it's not that Zimmer is trying to wreck a key employee. He's trying to develop one, for the good of the employee and his company alike.

Tom Riggs of Riggs Construction, St. Louis, believes that “every employee has the potential to become a key employee. No one employee is integral to our success, but the team as a whole succeeds or fails,” says Riggs, whose father founded the 20-person company in 1959. To that end, he has implemented systems that help employees understand how all the positions do, in fact, work together as a whole, and ways in which they can contribute most.

For instance, each new Riggs employee receives two training sessions in every aspect of the business, including office procedures, management systems, sales and estimating, production management, marketing, technology, client role-playing, and fieldwork. The program, developed by management consultant Joe Zanola, follows a simple grid. (See “Good Form,” page 68.)

Among other benefits of cross-functional training, the program prevents logjams; if one employee's absence or busy workload threatens to hold things up, another can always step in to fill the breach. It also mitigates generational and other misunderstandings. For example, “when you've got a grizzly old production foreman, and a selections manager comes in,” Riggs says, “and he's like, ‘Well, what the hell does she do?'”

The whole-team understanding broadens horizons as well, sometimes developing an employee into a position that better suits his or her temperament and talents. This engenders remarkable loyalty. Riggs' production manager started as an apprentice carpenter 27 years ago, and his sales manager began as receptionist 10 years ago. Hired as a production coordinator, Riggs says his current estimator worked with him “for 6 years in a variety of roles before he found his calling.”

A smaller remodeling company with a similar outlook on employee development is James P. D'Alessio Inc., an 11-employee design/build firm in Brentwood, N.H. This spring, founder Jim D'Alessio died of cancer at the age of 52, dealing a devastating blow that his company might not have survived had he not put into place systems that support cross-functional training and employee development.

A former teacher of building trades, D'Alessio carried his love of education into his career as a remodeler, and encouraged employees to teach among themselves, says Mark Randlett, the company's new president. Another legacy is the quarterly company meeting. All employees attend the half- to full-day meetings, which cover company policies, project updates, and training in a focused area, often provided by a supplier. “We want to make sure our standards and methods are consistent,” Randlett says, whether they involve how to measure, order, and install windows or how to answer the phone.

D'Alessio's jobsite handoff package also goes a long way toward developing employees. This binder (largely duplicated in the company's computer system) contains information about every stage of a project, including the detailed proposal and schedule, and information about subcontractors, selections, prices, and purchase orders. Any employee can easily check the status of an item or see how projects are designed and sold. As a result, Randlett says, field staff better produce the work as it was sold and can offer feedback for improving the sales process.

“Nobody feels like an isolated entity,” Randlett explains. Every employee sees their potential progression and knows they can “prove themselves and move to the next level. We don't hire anybody just to be a laborer,” he says. Randlett should know: He was a design/sales associate for four years prior to D'Alessio's death.

Each remodeler we spoke with discussed employee development in the context of a long-term, transitional relationship, rather than a rapid transformation. Zimmer has mapped out a four-year strategy for helping Kelly develop from lead carpenter to estimator. This year, Kelly will spend 75% of his hours in the field, and 25% on estimating, learning at “opportune times when the production load isn't as heavy,”

Zimmer says. The 2006 plan is for 50/50, and 2007 is for 25/75. Besides letting Kelly learn estimating at a comfortable pace, the incremental approach gives Zimmer time to steadily notch up his sales volume and production capacity.

Ron Trull of Trull Building Co., Newtown Square, Pa., also has a gradual development plan for a longtime lead carpenter. At 64, Trull plans to simultaneously grow his business and start backing out of it, and he wants 23-year carpenter Steve Ciccarelli to eventually take his place. “This guy has shown total dedication to me,” Trull says. “So wouldn't it be nice to hand it off to him?”

Trull's means to this end began last July, when he made Ciccarelli his production manager — a job Trull himself had always filled. Other than providing some basic parameters and the phone numbers of a few production managers, Trull asked the younger man to establish the position for the company. “I just think it's better for someone to invent their own position,” Trull says. “They're going to buy into it much more.”

Trull says Ciccarelli has been on a roll since his first day as production manager. And, with his own time freed up, Trull is more productive. “I'm essentially reinventing my position, too.”

Consultant Zanola advises never taking a key employee for granted or letting them feel underappreciated. “Sometimes you have to be a little more creative with the organizational chart,” he says. “Get them on a special advisory board or something.”

Similarly, don't presume that an employee is developing on his or her own initiative. Jim Strite of Strite Design + Remodel views employee development as the responsibility of the leader. “We see our employees as assets, in the sense that a machine needs to be maintained and respected to run at the highest efficiency,” the Boise, Idaho, remodeler says. Strite wants each of his employees to blossom, and he goes to great lengths to help them understand “where we're going and why we're going there,” and to empower them to turn challenges into opportunities.

Strite holds no quarter for the “victimism” and refusal to take responsibility that he believes plague many remodeling companies. “We're constantly trying to take that mentality and turn it around. ‘You have the ability to respond,'” he tells his employees about run-ins with difficult clients or tradespeople. This boosts accountability, strengthens client/trade relations, and creates a sense of trust that Strite says makes employees feel secure at his company and invested in its success.

This philosophy becomes evident the first time prospective employees visit Strite's office. Upon walking in the door, they are given a notebook outlining some basic expectations, including attending weekly all-staff meetings, reading and discussing business books as a team, and practicing what Strite calls “the 7 habits,” based on Stephen Covey's best-selling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Later steps in the hiring process include an open-ended interview that probes for “confrontational experiences,” personality profiling tests, and having the prospect sit in on a general company meeting. Of his most recent hire, Strite says, “I think it was three months from the time we first met him to when we hired him. You're gonna lose people, but boy, is the screening process worth it.”

Many bosses, Strite believes, focus on what employees do wrong. He advises focusing instead on “what they're doing right and how you can further develop them.”

What about employees who feel they have peaked and have few prospects for growth? Strite says to ask them what they want, because “there's always a learning opportunity.” Strite consultant/salesman Michael Snow joined the company eight years ago after an unhappy stint at an architecture firm. He told Strite that he wanted to develop to the point where he would be paid strictly on commission. “I like the idea of being able to control my future,” Snow says. “I learned from my last job that you can work really, really hard and not be noticed for it.”

Having accomplished his first objective, Snow is now working to be licensed as an architect by the end of the year. To help him reach that goal, he can set his own hours and work at home as needed, even as he continues to finesse his sales skills through Strite's formal development programs and unstructured learning opportunities. Driving back from client meetings, for instance, the two men often conduct postmortems, sometimes troubleshooting, sometimes role-playing, other times just listening to a sales CD. “There's never a wasted moment,” Snow says.

Who's Key?

Joe Zanola, president of consulting, training, and research firm Zanola Co., identifies the most pivotal employees as those with the highest levels of responsibility — typically president/ owner, production manager, sales manager, office manager, and lead carpenter. As the company grows, each key position needs another key person below it. This “duplication” mitigates the risk of being dependent on one person who knows how the shop is organized, for instance, or who knows where a prospect is in the decision-making process.

Zanola helps remodelers understand when they will need to fill key positions, and the skills and attributes of the ideal candidates. First understand your needs, he says, and then develop a really good job description and a rigorous training program. Attitude and potential almost always trump experience, Zanola adds, a sentiment expressed by others interviewed for this article.

Are long-time employees always key? Not necessarily, Zanola says. Although most remodelers need to reduce turnover, “some may not have enough turnover,” he explains. As a business grows, its “fit” may change. Zanola client Tom Riggs says he has let go of two 20-plus-year employees in the past 4 years, including his vice president, “a wonderful salesman,” because they weren't team players.

“The way I look at it,” Zanola says, “is if you had a serious decision to make about the future of the company, positive or negative, who would you want around the table with you?”