Business Time with the LaSalle Network

Tom Gimbel, President and CEO of The LaSalle
Network, a professional services firm in Chicago.
(photo courtesy of The LaSalle Network)

Business Time is a weekly Q+A featuring insights and advice from knowledgeable Chicago business owners.

Tell us who you are and what you do.

Tom Gimbel, President and CEO of the LaSalle Network in Chicago. The LaSalle Network is a professional services firm which specializes in staffing and recruiting. We have several different business units -- accounting, finance, technology, human resources, administrative and call center. We do executive search as well as entry level and staff positions, both on a temporary basis and contract basis. We also do permanent search.

How many years have you been in business?

Eleven years this August.

Congratulations! Tell us something you've learned through business ownership.

A CEO of another company once said, "There are no mistakes, there are just very expensive learning opportunities," and I think that to be a very accurate comment.

I'd say the biggest thing in 20/20 hindsight for me, is running the company the way I wanted people to respond instead of running the company the way people do respond.

People need structure. People desire structure. In an effort to retain staff when you start a company, you sometimes bend over backwards to accommodate them, and what ends up happening is the lack of structure causes more problems than the benefits you gain.

Can you give us an example of how that played out?

Yes. I had some people who had early success with us and I took that to be the "rule" rather than the exception. I gave them enough rope when managing their day, their week, their month... and what happened was people got too confident in their own abilities, and didn't do enough to continue that success, and what happened was we lost revenue and we lost clients because our follow up and an our execution wasn't what we were selling.

What was the takeaway from that?

In the interviewing and hiring and management game, the taboo phrase is "micromanaging." The problem is their are managers who do that just for the sake of doing it, but for the most part, people do it because they’re unsure of what the work product will be. I’m a firm believer that in order to have good results, you need to micromanage somebody until the results prove out you don't need to anymore. When I say "micromanage' I don't mean "every second of every day" but several times a day, or once a day over a course of weeks, to get feedback on what people are doing, to make sure they are actually executing what you've told you're clients they will.

You mean like check-ins?

Exactly. Where employees tend to feel micromanagement is a negative is usually because they aren't communicating enough with their managers to begin with.

The main takeaway for me was, communication is very much a two-way street. As a manager you need to make yourself accessible, to your employees, so that they don't feel inhibited coming to talk to you, yet as employees, you need to make sure that they know that they’re expected to communicate with you on regular basis--where they are, status.

Knowing what you know now, would you have done anything differently?

...We went through a phase at the early part of the decade (the end of the dot-com era) where in order to make our people not entertain offers from other companies, we instituted a 4-day work week, and what ended up happening was, people who were really dedicated to their jobs, all of a sudden became" "4-day work week" people. As soon as the four days were over, they were done, and on the 5th day, there was no involvement whatsoever.

We actually lost commitment from people. So we were keeping people, yet they weren't as committed to what we were trying to do. It was a really ironic situation.

So would you have done something differently?

Absolutely. I would have set up standard expectations and structure, even as a company with no base starting out, I would've set out what the expectations are for people. What happens is, you create excuses when there is a new situation. Everyone's starting from scratch and doesn't know what's going on.

You also have to create an environment when you're starting out, because there are no job descriptions -- unless you have huge, huge money behind you -- when you're starting out, everybody’s got to do a little of everything. 

We refer to it as the "entrepreneur's dilemma." You need everybody to do everything, yet they need the structure in order to be successful.

Good stuff. Please tell us a business book you recommend.

The E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish.