Global employment agency exec dishes on how to develop a team of superstars

Art Atkinson recalls a time, several decades ago, where he got a new boss at the employment agency worked for. He had been working on a project and sent some of his work updates to a previous manager at the company. But not all of the materials filtered down to the new person. One included a question about an expense account. Atkinson thought the previous people with the project were still working it — not the new person.

But the new boss soon stunned Atkinson — and not in a good way. He sent Atkinson a stern email: “Art,” the note said. “What do you not understand about me being your boss?”

In one sense, the note worked, in that Atkinson never made a mistake like that again with that boss, honest or otherwise. It also taught Atkinson a valuable lesson in leadership, in who he didn’t want to be. “I thought, ‘is that how you should manage people? Is that how you should lead people?’ 

Photo by EXPRESS PROS

Atkinson decided the answer to those questions was no. And he’s spent most of his career since, almost all of it with the training and development arm of Express Employment Professionals, teaching a varied curriculum of leadership topics. He’s been with the Oklahoma City-based company since 1983. Since then he’s trained more than 6,000 new franchisees and staff members, and taught some 3,000 small business training seminars. Now a vice president emeritus for Express University, Atkinson travels the country with the curriculum.

He made a stop in the area in late October, at the Sarasota Yacht Club, for a training session titled Holding People Accountable. (Atkinson commented several times, at the session and a phone interview after it, how beautiful Sarasota was, mentioning his next stop was North Dakota before going back home to Oklahoma.) The 3.5-hour session was hosted by the Sarasota franchise of Express Employment Professionals. 

A core goal of the session, Atkinson told the audience of about 100 people, was to teach effective and productive methods of holding people accountable — not a punitive approach, like the boss he encountered a generation ago. 

All together

The importance of recognizing and acting upon the difference between supportive and punitive accountability, Atkinson says, has changed over time. For example, the walk-around the office or manufacturing floor kind of leader was once lauded for being in touch with the workplace. But, warns Atkinson, doing that isn’t permission to be “a seagull manager. Don’t be the one who flies in, craps all over everybody and leaves. You don’t want to be that kind of leader.”

Another leadership style to avoid, he says, when holding people accountable: the kind who says “do your freaking job or get fired” and leads through fear and intimidation. Any short-term wins there will be eroded over time.

Instead, Atkinson says, the No. 1 goal of any leader should be to get the individuals on his or her team performing at their best on a consistent basis. “I don’t know of a higher motivation than developing your people,” he says. “What can be more powerful than developing every person on your team to become a superstar?”

That sounds obvious and he quickly adds: the real question is how do we get them to desire to do it? (And hold them accountable to it in a supportive way?) 

Step one, Atkinson says, is to determine if you and each person on your team has goal alignment.

On this step, Atkinson teased an interesting exercise. He asked for volunteers in the audience — made up mostly of small business owners, HR executives and others leading teams — if they would be OK, on the spot, calling someone on their team and asking them to publicly talk about the company or division’s purpose and vision. Would it be the same as yours? Having a mere two volunteers and seeing a few others squirm in their seats, Atkinson confirmed that it’s not easy. 

To determine if you have goal alignment with your team, Atkinson suggested a three-pronged approach:

1. What is your long-term vision for your team? Why is that your vision? 

How well do you articulate it on scale of 1-10? 

How well can your staff articulate your vision on a scale of 1-10? 

And how well have you defined the production goals for each team member on a scale of 1-10?

2. Next, look at each team member’s individual goals. What is their reason for working at your company or in your department? What are their business/career goals? What are their personal goals?

3. Then find the goals that mesh together with the company and your department’s vision. Those are the goals that you can then push. Lastly, you need to meet — consistently, with purpose — to make sure the individual is on track on his or her goals.

Climb the hill

Atkinson leaned on Express Employment Professionals as an example of goal alignment. All the people who work on all the teams in the $3.7 billion, franchised-based company, in some 870 offices from New Mexico to New Zealand, should know, he says, that the company’s big, hairy audacious goal is to create one million jobs in one calendar year. It’s reached about 600,000 companywide this year, he says, adding “we know it’ll take 10 to 15 years.” 

Once goal alignment is established, Atkinson says the next step in holding people accountable is to discover the reasons the goals aren’t being met. You need to determine, he says, if it is a skill, will or hill issue. “It’s going to be one of those three,” Atkinson says in a phone interview after the event.

• Starting with skill allows the leader to assess if the hang-up is training or another issue. “As a leader,” says Atkinson, “you have to tell if your team is properly trained.”
• Will is next. Atkinson suggests a series of questions to assess if the employee has the desire to do the tasks at a high level. Those include:

How do they feel about doing the task?

What is keeping them from doing it?

Do they see that doing it will help them reach their own personal goals?

After those queries, a leader needs to explain why the task is so important, Atkinson says, and then end with, “are they willing to do it?” 

• The final hill is an actual hill. If they have the skill and will, what are the outside forces that have become a too-tall hill to overcome? That requires a deep dive into understanding those issues: is it personal or family or something more fixable, such as outdated technology? Atkinson says a good leader should approach these conversations with the end in mind. “Your job as a leader,” he says, “is to remove obstacles and barriers to get the job done.”

Atkinson, in general, recommends leaders keep things simple, from assignments to assessments. His tact is similarly simple with regard to the importance of good leadership in an organization. (Another session he teaches is on what he calls a leadership must-do: how to hold impactful one-on-one sessions with each team member once a week.) 

“Businesses succeed or fail on leadership,” he says. “If you have good leadership, you will have a good company. If you have bad leadership, you will have a bad company.”