Throughout her career, Susan Marks, chief executive officer of Pinstripe Inc., a Brookfield-based recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) firm, has learned and demonstrated that the best leadership style does not require a high degree of control over key people. Instead, her company relies on finding and hiring talented, independently minded employees, who are given a large amount of control over how they do their jobs.
“We hire people who don’t want to just follow the rulebook but want to write the rulebook, who like to color outside the lines a little bit,” she said. “One of our sayings is, ‘Risk is the price you pay for opportunity.’ If you’re never making any mistakes, you’re not pushing hard enough. It’s our job as leaders of the company to make sure there are no really big mistakes. But we do want people to try new things and fail forward.”
Pinstripe, which has more than 150 employees, tripled its revenue in 2007 and doubled its revenue in 2008. The company also has won numerous accolades from staffing industry associations.
One of the company’s keys to success has been that “fail forward” philosophy, Marks said, which allows employees to take calculated risks. And even when those risks do not result in phenomenal new programs or products, they still produce viable results, she said.
“What we mean by fail forward is that a mistake is a golden opportunity for real learning,” Marks said. “We learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes. Fail forward means that (failure) is a golden nugget. Why would we want to terminate someone for making a mistake? We’ve just made a big investment in them in their MBA in the school of hard knocks, so to speak.”
Flexibility
Pinstripe and Marks have high expectations of employees, but employees are given a high degree of flexibility to meet the lofty goals set for them.
“We expect people to understand what they need to do to be a good leader to their teams and provide great service to our customers and give them a lot of latitude in doing that,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, we do expect a lot from our people. I’ve been kind of known as a workaholic. But it is important that they have flexibility in when and where they work as long as they’re getting results for their clients within the values of our company.”
Susan Marks
Chief executive officer
Pinstripe Inc.
Industry: Recruitment process outsourcing
Location: 200 S. Executive Drive, Suite 400, Brookfield
Number of employees: More than 150
Leadership moment
One of the business lessons that helped shape Susan Marks’ leadership style came in 1984, while she was a participant in Future Milwaukee (a community leadership program). Ron Franzmeier, former vice president of blood services with the Blood Center of Wisconsin, delivered a lesson on marketing that still resonates with Marks.
“Ron told the story of how he came to the Blood Center of Milwaukee at the time and they were a net importer of blood – they weren’t generating enough donated blood to even service their defined area,” Marks said. “He took them through a strategic planning process, and one of the first questions he asked them was, ‘Who is your customer?’ Everybody said hospitals – the people who they get the blood for. As it turned out, as they went through the process, the light bulb turned on and they realized that the donor is the customer.”
That realization helped change the organization’s name to the Blood Center of Wisconsin, its hours of operation and business model, Marks said. It also made a lasting impression on her.
“I had just started my first business and mortgaged everything I had,” she said. “In my business at the time, which was temporary staffing and more traditional searches, my customer was the potential temporary or contract employee. It’s not the company. That lesson has stuck with me for 25 years.”
