Eliassen
by Margaret Heffernan

Asked to define a great leader, one quality almost always cited is energy. Leading an organization, even a small one, is hard work and most of us throw time and effort at the problems that confront us. But Mona Eliassen can’t do that. She suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome.

“The disease is really a double-edged sword,” says Mona Eliassen. “There have been times I’ve been sleeping twelve, fourteen hours a day. There was a time when I couldn’t read for six months. But the good part of this is that it has really made me focus and it’s made me delegate. The beauty of that is – it’s made the company worth more.”

Mona’s company, the Eliassen Group, is a software consulting firm, which means that it recruits and hires out engineers to companies with big IT projects. It’s really a high tech talent agency so much of its success hinges critically on strong relationship building between recruiters and engineers, engineers and sales people, salespeople and clients. If any link in this chain of relationships is compromised by office politics, the whole business suffers. You would expect a strong leader to expend a lot of energy making sure everyone plays nice together.

But because she can’t be there all the time, Mona can’t count on her brains and her personality to hold the whole thing together. So instead she’s worked hard on building a management team that’s truly collaborative. They meet weekly without her. And they meet monthly with her – but even then she doesn’t chair her own management meeting. What that means is that she is not the focus of attention. People don’t position themselves for her approval – because she isn’t running the meeting. Instead, the meetings are run by Ken Dreyer, who started as Mona’s coach and now works for the company as a facilitator. So the meetings are run by some one who has no power to make decisions. Instead, decisions are reached by everyone struggling to define a passionate consensus. The result has been an organization free of politics. For many of us, that’s a holy grain.

At first, when Mona’s managers told me about this, I didn’t believe them. No company, I thought, could really be devoid of politics. I’d certainly never seen it before. But as I quizzed and interrogated further, I learned a lot and changed my tune.

“We all have SMART goals,” says Mona. “SMART stands for Smart, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. We come up with them together. There are so many dependencies in this business. So we have to come up with goals as a team – and help each other to achieve them. Everyone’s accountable for their own but it’s important that everybody knows what everyone else is trying to achieve. And that they’re accountable – to each other.” Compensation is based on everyone achieving the goals that, together, they’ve set for the business. They stand or fall by helping each other succeed.

Mona’s managers keep their SMART goals up on their walls where everybody can see them. That helps their decisions to make sense to their teams: how tactics fit into strategy is plain for everyone to see or to ask about. And they hit their goals, with monotonous regularity. Some of this is driven by attractive bonuses (which last year included a trip, with family, to the Caribbean) but driven also by a desire not to let their fellow managers down. What Mona’s style of leadership has shown them, which the goals reinforce, is: we stand or fall together.

That Mona isn’t in the office all the time reinforces that mutual dependency. But that doesn’t mean she’s abdicated. Every time I’ve ever asked her about numbers or progress, she knows exactly where the business stands to the day. Her managers know that she knows and, because they respect her, they are devoted to not letting her down. This doesn’t mean that the company hasn’t been through some hard times. In 2002, Eliassen had its share of lay offs – but everyone knew where they stood and what drove the tough decisions that had to be made.

This kind of leadership only works when it cuts both ways. Eliassen executives respect Mona – and she respects them. Although she owns 100 percent of the business, she has always maintained that she would never sell it without their consent. She’s had plenty of suitors, of course. Who wouldn’t want an expanding, lucrative, profitable business that’s also functional? It’s more than many energetic whizzkids achieve in a lifetime.

© Margaret Heffernan

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