Learn me Roger Penske business management style.

At work our leadership is goofy thus leading to general knuckleheadness and bad attitudes and poor performance.  Does Roger Penske or that Virgin Airlines guy really run tight ships that drive excellence?

We beat down and burn people out all day long - finding people is a challenge.  Or is this a general reflection of our society?

It’s not just running tight ships, it’s also the attitudes and how companies work to create the attitude. 

If you google “employee engagement” you’ll find a lot of info on how employers are looking to improve employee attitude and avoid the burnout and high turnover that can come from just pushing harder and harder. 

I see successful leaders focus on a clearly defined structure of the organization, investing in their own employees/promoting from within, and creating a culture that revolves around helping customers and prioritizing the needs of the team/organization above individual needs.

It's a lot easier to stay with a job if you think that the processes being used will put you in a position to succeed, and that you'll be rewarded or recognized for those successes.

Datsun310Guy said:

At work our leadership is goofy thus leading to general knuckleheadness and bad attitudes and poor performance.  Does Roger Penske or that Virgin Airlines guy really run tight ships that drive excellence?

We beat down and burn people out all day long - finding people is a challenge.  Or is this a general reflection of our society?

Even IF it were a reflection of general society, that just mean that management has to adjust to that reflection.  If they don't, they will find themselves in the position that you are in.  The fact that its hard to find people to work there should tell your management that there are better places to work...  They need to understand why.

You have to learn to work with what you have and can get.  And treat people like humans.   Average humans, at that- some people will be workaholic while others will just work hard enough.  Honestly, the person working just hard enough may be a lot more productive than the workaholic- one can't generalize based on how people work.

Its all about how you present the Kool-Aid.

You need to have a leader/owner with a vision that is clearly communicated. The leader can be seen as authoritarian like Penske or benevolent such as Gates,  does not really matter as long as people buy in to the vision.  Each worker needs to know that by excelling they are helping to move towards that goal. There has to be some form of reward for excelling versus just showing up. The leader also need to present feedback showing that they are in fact making progress towards the goal.

This is why start-ups are so fun to work for. You have a strong  unifying vision and everyone on the team KNOWS that they will take over the world (or the market) if only they work 90 hours a week.  Hard to sustain past the second year though.

Pete

Hire good people.  Tell them what their job is.  Give them the tools and knowledge to perform their job well.  Let them do the job without excessive oversight.  If they do it well, reward them.  If they do it poorly, understand why they did it poorly, and help them do it better.  If they can't do it better, find a different thing they can do well.  If they won't do it better, get rid of them, so their coworkers CAN do it properly.

I don't know Roger, never read anything much about him, but the above is the impression I get from guys like him and Rick Hendrick.

I imagine they work different than our place. We’ve be asked to stop putting “dying in my sleep” as a goal in our annual reviews.  

My dad was a long time higher up manager at Hertz truck rental.  About 6 months after it was bought and renamed Penske, my dad quit.  Been a home improvement contractor ever since.  He is in his mid 70s now and still loves going to work every day.  He, to this day, has nothing good to say about Roger Penske.  He always was and still is a work-a-holic.  How do you make someone like that want to quit their job?

In reply to tr8todd :

You have to try very hard.  

Actually, you don't have to try very hard at all.  You just have to make the workaholic understand that everything he instinctively does while he's at work has to change to fit the new owner's procedures, even if they make no sense, and you do it with no tact and no consideration.  Make sure he understands that, where the former company valued his contributions as a person, you "value" his contributions only as a cog in a machine.  After all, you don't actually need him, because you already have a district manager (or whatever) who can already do that job your way.  It's much cheaper for you if he quits rather than making you fire him with a severance package.

In reply to Wally :

Annual reviews. IMO - the bane of corporate life...  My yearly goal is to completely ignore it if I can get away with it and if I can't to answer all questions as sarcastically as possible. I'm almost 50 effing years old. I don't have "career goals" anymore. Right now, my only goal is to have major projects completed and enough money saved up that I can retire in 2030 when I turn 60. 

I was self employed for 30 years. The economic downturn got me, and I have worked for several other companies since. 

What a rude awakening. 

This thread is enlightening. 

In reply to Datsun310Guy :

I learned to appreciate the way the Navy treated people. They took whoever showed up, tested them the next day to find out what they were capable of.  Assigned them training according to the Navy’s needs and the ability of people to fill those.  

Told them what they were training them for and why with every class/ session/ event.  Tested how well they learned. Used that information to improve each class/ session/ training event.  

Nothing dragged on, as quickly as people could learn they moved on.  No regular meetings, focus on the goal and the individual.  Promotions were based on testing, quarterly evaluations, seniority, and the needs of the Navy.  

No coasting, two opportunities for promotion, fail the second one and your career was over.  Everybody was evaluated both up and down.  That means they judged those of higher rank as well as those of lower rank. 

Pettiness and back stabbing quickly was revealed and dealt with accordingly.  

Judge for yourself the effectiveness  of the Results. 

My current belief about employment/management in the United States is that companies still want to treat employees with the austerity that came out of the financial crisis, but also grow at the pace the market has been seeing since then.  I find these goals to be somewhat at odds with each other in the absence of  some grand vision that is easily understood at every level of the organization.  NOHOME explained this well.

Additionally I find that the social contract between employer/employee which was broken in the 1980's has made employers less willing to invest in employees, and employees less willing to endure discomfort for the benefit of the company.

Example:   I recently had a very expensive business class flight (more than two challenge cars more than the coach fare).  I almost booked coach except that I have no reason to believe that sacrificing what company policy said I was due was going to ever benefit me or affect the opinions people have of me (other than perhaps thinking I'm foolish to forfeit that comfort).  It makes me sad.

For the past 5 years or so I've worked for a very small company. Bosses/owners are great. Before that I worked for large companies and was just a cog in the machine. I think a lot of it depends on the size of the company. 

In reply to T.J. :

To me, the size of the company just filters out the management issues.

If you have really good management, a large company will dull that off quite a bit with the large corporate policies- but a small company will be like wonders.

If you have really crappy management, a large company will dull that so it's not the worst thing in the world, but a small company will be like in hell.  And because working for small company hell normally means the company goes under quickly- we don't hear that many stories of it.  But they exist, for sure.  When the owner sees an issue that has to be solved, it will be all hands on deck 24/7 sometimes.  In a big company, rarely will anything be so bad that it's 24/7- if ever.  

Work life balance is easier in a big company vs. a small one.

But management issues are super magnified for small ones.  

I had a been long post worked up, but others have since addressed many of my comments. 

I will say that a company's "establishment" can have pretty large impacts on it's ability to restructure for the benefit of both profits and people. In my industry, PG&E is a good example. I don't work there, but I know what working for a big company with lots of old employees and even older "company culture" can and can't do. Sometimes big companies could use a big house cleaning, and you can't really do that when your local employment market is pretty much all the same people you'd hire back. In a smaller company, especially a younger company that is more fresh, sometimes management can be self-aware enough to realize their employees are telling them something. In a big company? "I've been here 30 years and that's how it's always been done." 

In the case of my company, we're pretty good, but still falls into some oldschool traps - if you know me, I always want more vacation time, although it doesn't need to be paid. Our workforce is dominated by born-and-raised locals who don't demand much vacation. The company wants to attract more young people, but struggles doing so due to lack of work-life balance related benefits (like more vacation.) The workforce would gladly take more money and more 4-10 schedules, but nobody is asking for more vacation. Just part of the established culture. 

I think the culture in the USA is changing a bit too. I talk to so many young people who refuse to work in industries that our country needs for economic vitality, simply because they perceive those industries as being "old school", "good ol boys club" and "boring." I'll admit, I've made it clear that I think some blue-collar jobs are still harsh environments for some people (those of us who aren't early risers), but I also think some of nation's most crucial industries will eventually be dominated by the young people of today who will be a little more understanding of work-life balance, of diversity (races, genders, sexuality, politics), and that a job needs to be interesting, stable and good paying in order to keep good employees around. Or not. Who knows.

What is his managing style? 

I've never really worked for a "small company" I guess. Probably the smallest company I've ever worked for still did $50 million/yr in annual revenue.

State Farm, Dover, L3 Communications, Oracle........I still.work for the last one. The benefits of a large company, and the sometimes confounding decisions, still outweigh the negatives. At least for me.

There is a reason people have turned to the "gig" economy and working for themselves.  Companies suck anymore.  I am retired, did it early with less money than I should have saved because the last few jobs were just more than I could tolerate.  Getting fired so the owner could hire her brother, having another owner go back on his word on something I specified as a requirement, I could go on and many others could also.  

Many current businesses just don't get that good employees are what makes them successful.  People are a dime a dozen and can be replaced is still the standard.  I feel sorry for the younger generations right now.  My advise to them is pick a technical hands on job and suck it up for a few years.  The old farts will retire or die by then and you will have skills that will let you define your future. 

Leadership isn't about a tight ship or not a tight ship..  Leadership is about vision and engagement.  Do you have a good vision and how do you engage your workforce?  How do you motivate them?  How do you give them encouragement?  Do they feel like they belong? 

I worked for a company that was bought by Roger Penske. I got to meet him, that was cool. I didn't see much change to the place after he bought it. But I didn't stick around too much longer after that. 

Unfortunately, we are in the middle of an economic cycle where  companies require wealthy clients and impoverished staff in order for the operation to make a good profit for the owners( aka shareholders). Try and spin a motivating vision around that reality!

Back to Penske...He bought a company with a lot of deadwood. He cleaned house and went to an understaffed but highly motivated by fear organization. The good news for Penske is that fear is easy to politic into "motivation" and he then went on to have financial success.  Being part of a "winning" team then further motivates people even in the absence of financial benefit for themselves. Keep escalating and acquiring...blame and eliminate staff or divisions for what does not work. Stop me when this starts to sound familiar.

Pete

edit:  Been reading Corey Doctorow lately and his stroy is one of the ultimate "Gig" economy in a world of Zotta masters. Cory's books are a good read and pretty much been on track for where we are going as a working society.

In reply to NOHOME :

We're in gilded age 2..  Robber Barrons.. lions tigers... ohh boy.