Ken Rees of Think Finance, on Leading a Growing Company This interview with Ken Rees, president and chief executive of Think Finance, a developer of financial products, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant. Q. You worked for many years as a management consultant. How did that help you prepare for a C.E.O. role? A. As a consultant, I learned that you really have to listen to the lowest-level people in a company, because that's where the answers are - with people who are interfacing with the customers. A lot of what consultants do is stuff that senior management ought to be doing, which is really communicating effectively at all levels and putting those ideas together. That's a big part of my approach as a C.E.O. I find that hierarchy's a killer, particularly in a fast-paced company. You have to go out of your way to keep ripping out those levels and barriers between people. Q. How do you do that? A. Some of it, frankly, is a bit corny. I have "Cookies With Ken" every couple of weeks, and we bring in about a dozen employees from across the company and talk about what's going on. At the end, I always ask, "Tell me one thing you really like about the company and one thing that frustrates you about the company." I always come out with at least one thing that is eye-opening. We also have a quarterly town hall meeting where everybody in the company gets together. We walk through all the financials - the good, the bad and the ugly. Then, each quarter, we have five things that we're focused on doing, and we get that widely communicated. At the end of the quarter, we discuss how we did, and we grade ourselves. Q. How has your leadership style evolved as the company has grown? A. As a start-up C.E.O. without a lot of resources, you're involved in the details of everything. As we grew, I was lucky enough to bring in a really talented executive team. And, candidly, I was driving them crazy, because the things I was doing that were working really well as a small-company C.E.O. were hurting my ability to be successful as a larger-company C.E.O. We brought in an executive coach to work with us. We discussed how I was being a bulldozer and I needed to be more of a bus driver. We also made a big deal of that insight and created a Bulldozer Award. The person who wins it each quarter gets a big plastic bulldozer that makes noises. We wanted to recognize people who are pushing things forward, which allowed me to really step back. The executive team also gets together every day to review our performance so that there aren't any surprises. That's also helped me work better as a larger-company C.E.O., because no C.E.O. wants to be surprised. We have also recently added the Bus Driver Award. We're moving into the stage where we're big enough that we're using a lot of cross-functional teams and initiatives. We wanted to recognize people who do a really good job of putting together effective teams. We have another set of awards that are all bottom-up, and those are linked to our cultural values. Q. And what are your company's values? A. Well, the first ones I developed myself. But four months later, I said: "That really isn't the way you create cultural values. Let's do this in a more broad-based fashion. So we opened it up, and we had the whole company talking about this, with a lot of very detailed discussions about every word. We created six cultural values: Always improve. Play nice. Meet the numbers. Respect the customer. Think big. Do the right thing. Q. What made you decide that you had to hit the reset button on your values? A. I think a good C.E.O. should have a certain level of insecurity about whether they really get it. Nobody wants to be the pointy-haired boss from "Dilbert." And it just came to me: "My gosh, I came up with these cultural values. Does everyone agree with them? They tell me they do. But I don't know if it's really representative. So let me push this out, and make sure that we get those ideas straight from the horse's mouth. Q. Is there anything unusual about how you run meetings with your executive team? A. We do a daily huddle, and we always start out with good news. If you're trying to change a lot of things, and you've got challenges, sometimes people can get pretty beaten down. So we do try to start things off with one piece of good news from each person. And there's always one person who says, "I can't think of any good news." And we say, "No, you've got to come up with some good news." Q. How does that help the meeting dynamic? A. If there's one thing that personally I'd like to be better at, it's celebrating success. In an environment that's changing as quickly as ours, there are so many things to be worried about. It's easy to get focused on the fact that you're not where you want to be, as opposed to all that you've accomplished. So taking a moment to talk about good news just keeps things more upbeat than they otherwise would be. For a lot of C.E.O."s, I think, we're so focused on where we need to be that we don't necessarily have the fun we need to have along the way. Q. Let's shift to hiring. How do you do it? What questions do you ask? A. What's worked best for me is trying to get job candidates to tell a story about themselves. I ask for two stories - "Tell me about the time in your professional career when you were the most charged up and passionate and happiest about what you were doing. And then, tell me about the time that you were most frustrated. Q. What else is unusual about the way you run your company? A. We started something called Think Tank to reward that rarefied group of people who make such a difference in the organization that you can't pay them enough, they're just that valuable. If you lost them, it would be devastating. So we created this team. They're now part of our executive off-sites, so that they understand how important they are. And we also carve off a piece of our earnings for the group that vests over three years. It's a cool program to let people really understand their value, and give them an ownership in the company.