From Dan Oswald: As a way to honor the individuals who have taught me critical life lessons about people and business, I’ve invited several to write guest columns to run in this space over the next few weeks. Today’s voice of experience is provided by a mentor whose business acumen and people skills have guided me for the past quarter century. John Marozsan is the former president and CEO of publishing giant CCH, Inc., a Wolters Kluwer Company worth nearly $1 billion when he retired in 1999. As John will explain, however, when we met, our circumstances were quite a bit more spartan.
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by John Marozsan
When I met Dan Oswald about 25 years ago, he was working for a small company in the far northwestern corner of Iowa, about as far up as you could go without leaving the state. My company, Aspen Publishers, had just purchased the company that employed Dan. He was in his early 20s, and the company was small, but it turned out to be a key step in helping Aspen grow substantially—and I don’t mean just financially.
As president and CEO of Aspen, I was on the hunt for smart and talented people to help us integrate and take the company to the next level. With Dan’s knack for marketing and his dedicated work ethic, he clearly fit the bill. The only real challenge was convincing Dan’s wife, Bobbi, to move with him and their young son to the East Coast. The rest, as they say, is history.
When I look back at this event, I see a management practice that has served me (and many other people) well over the years: Always hire the smartest people you can find who are emotionally intelligent, are critical thinkers, and can both move outside the box and work within a team structure. The correct people must be in the right places within your organization. It’s essential to have a coherent, loyal team made up of disparate talents and people all aimed at success for the company and for themselves.
The management and leadership skills and practices I learned mostly on the job at Aspen were tested again and again in the following years, and I would soon discover those skills worked regardless of company size.
In 1978, an early version of Wolters Kluwer (WK) purchased Aspen, and I would remain with the WK organization for the rest of my career. As a member of the WK U.S. board, I managed the 1995 acquisition and integration of Commerce Clearing House (CCH) into WK. In 1996, I became the CEO of CCH, a nearly $1 billion company. The good news is we were able to transform CCH both organizationally and structurally from a 100-year-old company that operated under family management to a company that would be competitive in the already increasingly digital climate that existed in the late 1990s.
Along the way, I’ve tried to hire the smartest people and then let them do their thing. Dan and many others have proved me right and helped our companies be successful. But sometimes no matter how instinctive we are about other people, we can be wrong. Which leads me to these additional pieces of advice:
- Communicate clear goals and targets with expected results.
- Secure buy-in from your direct reports. Delegate authority, and agree on how results and expected outcomes will be measured.
- Monitor and communicate results on an ongoing basis to all relevant parties, and challenge them at every opportunity to do their best.
- Operate under a “no surprises” environment.
- Encourage everyone to anticipate problems before they get out of hand (preferably before they occur), and report deviations as soon as identified.
- Own up to failures, and seek resolution, revision, or abandonment as appropriate.
Recruiting and maintaining a great team is like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle. If someone’s performance isn’t meeting expectations, managers must address the matter early in the process. Occasionally, the top leader is one of the last people to realize that someone isn’t performing well, which can create issues within the organization and cause employees to question management. So it’s very important to take early and appropriate action on performance that isn’t meeting standards.
When things are going well, you’ll know it. Building trust, loyalty, and dedication will help create an environment that allows feedback and fosters the openness required to build and lead a successful team.
Good leaders never take credit for success; they give credit where it’s due. They listen to the ideas and recommendations of others before offering their own opinions or implementing a plan. They don’t tip their hand on critical decisions before understanding and testing all the alternatives presented. They demand excellence at every turn and never tolerate “yes” men or women.
Most of these concepts are well known—certainly not invented by me. The challenge is to implement the thinking and processes behind the concepts in a manner that fosters the loyalty and hard work required to build a successful company.