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What's the Problem?
For Quintanar, the first step in this process is keeping an open mind about troubled staffers, even when other managers say they should be fired. He recalls an incident more than 10 years ago, when he was a consultant at then-Price Waterhouse in Los Angeles. It started with a call from a young auditor in St. Louis who wanted to apply for an opening on Quintanar's IT consulting team.
Quintanar called the partner in charge of the applicant and got a stern warning. "He said, 'We're getting ready to can this guy. We can't work with him. He doesn't seem to get it.' I said, 'Oh, there's an opportunity. Transfer him to me.'"
As it turns out, like most new recruits at the big consultancies, the young man had been given tedious, unchallenging work as a kind of initiation test. His job was to sort and tag boxes of documents "so someone else could come over and do the smart work," Quintanar says. The dreariness of the assignment had crushed his spirit.
In Los Angeles, Quintanar gave the young consultant the more challenging task of working directly with a client as part of a team. The team helped midmarket companies set up accounting departments and review their infrastructure and platforms. Over time, Quintanar gradually increased the employee's responsibilities; within three months, the newcomer -- at the tender age of 24 -- was running the client's entire accounting team, which included all responsibility for hiring lower-level IT professionals to implement the accounting department's infrastructure and software. The client was so pleased he wanted to hire the young man (though the employee declined the offer). "All it took was for someone to give him a little bit, to empower him," Quintanar says.
In some cases, it's not so obvious that an employee has unused talents. Consider the unhappy desktop technician who came to Juliano's attention last year at Wine Enthusiast. Juliano was hearing complaints about the technician from internal customers. "I was getting calls saying, 'Could you not send him down? He's really dour,'" Juliano recalls.
Juliano likes to spend half an hour or so making the rounds of the office, talking with customers and staff alike. After hearing the complaint, he stopped by the technician's desk. "Is there anything bothering you? Is everything OK?" he asked. "My natural assumption was that something was difficult at home. I try to be bartenderish."
As it turns out, the technician was fuming over what he deemed to be a corporate injustice. In his mind, he had the skills to be a systems administrator. After all, he told Juliano, he knew how to configure Internet protocols. Why, then, was he just a technician? Didn't he deserve the systems administrator title and its higher salary?
As the two talked, Juliano pointed out there were a lot of things the technician didn't understand about the coveted job, like how to configure firewalls. After the conversation, Juliano arranged for the technician to enroll in three days of training a month. The employee could have requested the training but didn't, Juliano says, because he feared appearing unqualified for the systems administrator job after all.
After the technician began his training, internal customers noticed a difference in attitude. "They were complimenting me on his turnaround," Juliano says. Early this year, the man got what he wanted: a promotion to network systems administrator, at higher pay.
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