Smart Business Magazine, Sept 2012

September 2012 Smart Business Florida 17 They can say Hey listen Im not going to contribute to this meeting so I dont need to be here DiBenedetto says Its not looked upon as a bad thing The culture of the company is not just to meet for meetings sake The bottom line is that you dont want to shackle people with endless meetings or ask them to check in constantly about their progress This defeats the purpose of pushing out decisions in the first place Once you give people power over decisions you also need to give them the freedom to succeed or fail I cant come back later and constantly start micromanaging he says So part of it is a leadership point that youve got to allow the decision and the success or failure to happen If it doesnt happen then nobody learns from it So after any big decision is made at Tribridge whatever group that is involved in that area of the business whether it is a client a region or the entire company is also involved in a debriefing process This step reinforces that every decision good or bad is a learning experience for your business and your employees and the key to continuous improvement If the decision was good ask why was it good How could an OK decision have been better And what went wrong with the bad ones You have to be able to keep learning from it DiBenedetto says Its a skill set So you get better at making decisions the more decisions you make The fact that we have these hundreds of thousands decisions being made every day means our people are better decision makers than if they worked somewhere else Empower the right people In the tech business where youve got to be rapidly changing and adapting your business all the time you cant afford to have a culture that puts individuals on pedestals DiBenedetto says When you trust people to make important decisions that impact your customers you need to feel confident theyre focused on helping the customers not themselves Thats why DiBenedetto prioritizes a persons cultural fit over his or her resume when he hires someone for a position of authority at Tribridge Specifically he looks for whether the person has the trait of entrepreneurism The first thing we tell people who come to work here is that when we say Think like an entrepreneur there are two elements of that DiBenedetto says One keep improving Tribridge two really on an everyday basis when youre working for a customer pretend that youre one of their shareholders When youre thinking like a shareholder for them youre making the best decision in their interest Hiring for entrepreneurism doesnt mean you only want people who plan to start their own companies or create new products Instead it defines a persons willingness to The DiBenedetto File NAME Tony DiBenedetto TITLE Co founder chairman and CEO COMPANY Tribridge Born Brooklyn NY Education Florida State University What was your first job Paper route What is one part of your daily routine that you wouldnt change Waking up my daughter What would your friends be surprised to find out about you I write a lot especially poetry Whats the biggest challenge in the future growth of Tribridge The strategy for us to get to the next level has been built around something we call Concerto which conceptually is the brand that weve coined for the business weve moved to the cloud If you think about Tribridge we do services for customers and we use a lot of different technology Weve built a private cloud and were offering this technology thats some Tribridge intellectual property as well as Microsofts applications Weve integrated that and offered it to our customers The next five years if I look at tremendous growth that is it With that comes some opportunities and challenges One is where are the next 500 consultants going to come from Weve got to find the next 500 team members What trait does a leader need to be successful in todays business environment With the really turbulent economic times weve had the last 10 years were lacking the thinking big blind confidence Were lacking the ability for our leaders to think bigger Because its humbling to know that things are unpredictable we all get stifled in our decision making Thinking bigger is something I see as an attribute that allows people to fight through the stifling news that you get from watching or reading the news Weve got to ignore that keep thinking big expect more Expecting more is really about How can I make this better How can I keep getting better So if Im thinking big and expecting more at the same time thats just driving success