As seen in The Huffington Post.
If you’ve ever been a part of a growing company, you know that growth is a challenging and inevitable phase of the company’s journey to success. There are many actions to take, and there’s usually just a small pool of resources. In addition, the company must offer a great product that solves a problem and serves a certain need, gain market attention, have amazing managing and sales teams, and so on. Management guides the company toward safer and more profitable shores. If you’ve been there, you know that it ain’t easy! But we can always learn from others’ journeys.
Recently I got to know Skech, an award-winning company that designs and manufactures unique and cost-effective accessories for smartphones and tablets. Skech is mostly known for bringing perfectly crafted products to the market and leading trends in design, functionality, and material. In 2012, this company had a mission: to penetrate the American market. As you can imagine, this isn’t an easy task… this market is saturated and highly competitive. The “privilege” of getting a new unknown company noticed is saved for the best, most creative, and smartest marketers.
Skech had a secret weapon: its operations manager (COO) and brand strategist Avishag Ravid, who accepted the challenge. She got Skech into the market by putting a team together in Southern California and working to sell the product they believed in. Slowly but surely, they built their brand and credibility and have reached thousands of retail locations across the Americas and are working with leading distributors and carriers such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and large retailers including Best Buy and Office Depot.
Yes, it was teamwork that brought the company to success so fast, but it wouldn’t have happened without the right guidance. What is it about Avishag Ravid that enabled her to drive the company’s employees to remarkable results during their period of growth? Ravid, a 30-year-old woman, has an interesting life story: She was born in Israel and grew up in Belgium and San Francisco’s Bay Area before serving in the Israeli army and completing her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in San Diego. Throughout her life journeys and professional career experience, she has always been guided by her strong values of respecting others and giving and working from the heart.
I sat with Avishag to learn how she manages her employees in a way that brought the company to a financial and market breakthrough so quickly. Apparently, it all comes down to providing empowering management experience to her employees. These are the main practices she shared:
Providing employees with the freedom to try
Trial and error is being embraced more and more as companies understand that it’s an important practice that stretches their employees’ abilities toward effectiveness, professionalism, and personal satisfaction. As a manager in a fast-growing company, Avishag puts great importance on empowering her employees to overcome challenges in their daily work through trial and error. She gives them constant guidance, inquiring “What did you do today?” ”What challenges did you come across?” She keeps her employees focused on their main goals, making them feel they can succeed and letting them solve problems on their own. Ultimately, this approach trains the employees to think critically and creatively and make wiser decisions, eventually increasing their satisfaction, and giving a sense of meaning to their work. “It contributes to the individual and the company as a whole,” Avishag said. Giving your employees the freedom to try and letting them come up with solutions by themselves has a profound impact on everyone involved.
Strengthen their strengths
In recent years, business and sociology studies and books such as “Now Discover Your Strength” by Marcus Buckingham favor strengthening employees’ strengths as the right way to reach excellence, as opposed to strengthening their weaknesses. When a new candidate comes for an interview, Avishag looks for one powerful trait first: how much he or she wants to succeed, and how much passion they have to make a big thing happen! That’s a strength that her employees share, and that’s what makes her company great. Then, Avishag learns their strengths through working with them. Every now and again she adjust people’s roles and gives them new responsibilities to allow them to better use their skill set. As a manager, Avishag takes the responsibility for bringing out the best in her employees. The employees feel cared for and feel that their manager is a partner in making them great at what they do. That creates employees who enjoy their work, and as Avishag says: “They share the vision of the company and are invested in making it happen.”
Caring for others
As someone who specializes in consumer behavior and experience, Avishag understands that the managerial experience she provides to her employees internally will influence their productivity and will be projected to the people they work with. In order to spread the company’s values, Avishag engages the company in all sorts of activities that have a positive influence on her employees, such as collective volunteer days where the entire office helps the local community. She also makes small and impactful gestures like cheering someone up, listening to others, and being there for them. Avishag acts as a role model for the company’s social values, which her employees then tend to follow. Those values are translated in many areas: for example, when working with clients, their main focal point is making customers happy and satisfied in any way. Caring for others and providing them with a good experience is a main value across all of Skech’s divisions. That cultivates positivity and excitement in Skech’s everyday work.
One thing that really impresses me about Avishag is the fact that everything she does comes from understanding the responsibility she has as a leader for other people’s lives and happiness. In the heart of building a business, she says, “A leader should acknowledge his influence on other people’s lives and provide value to anyone he comes across, whether it’s his employees, clients, or suppliers.” She shows that when you give yourself in every aspect of the business, you share your light with one person, and he or she shines it on to another, and another, eventually building an entirely “lighted” culture. That is what makes Skech a unified company: as it grows, it makes a difference for its employees and for anybody who engages with it.
