| As Told to Leigh Buchanan

The Way I Work: Kim Kleeman of ShakespeareSquared

 

We hold weekly staff meetings. Also managers' meetings, departmental meetings, and project team meetings. I try not to meet with individuals except about very sensitive issues. One-on-one meetings always seem inefficient to me, and I can't afford inefficiency. The only way I can work reasonable hours is to keep moving bam-bam-bam through the day. Frequently I'll get together with three or four people in my office, where I've set up two clusters of chairs. I hate talking to people from across a desk. I think it makes you look self-important and officious.

Virtually all my employees are former teachers, so I bring the business perspective to most conversations. They know content and editing and project management. I know how to price and sell and when projects make sense and when they don't. We're an all-women company except for one man I hired a few months ago, and that presents some management challenges. At other companies people try to pass the buck. Here, everyone blames herself: It was my fault. No, it was my fault. I have to make them see that fault doesn't matter. It's about learning from mistakes and moving on. Also, they're too eager to smooth things over. We lost money on one project, and when we were considering accepting a similar project I asked them if it would mean additional staffing. They said, no, everything is fine. I sometimes have to be hard on them because I need them to realize that everything can't be fine all the time.

Stress is a huge issue. We handle five or six projects at a time--up to 10,000 pages of material--and some have to be completed in a month. We're also launching a new company that will publish educational materials under our own brand and sell proprietary educational editing tools. There's a lot of pressure. The question I always ask people at interviews is, do you know how you handle stress? Do you lock yourself in the bathroom and cry? Do you take a day off? I don't care how you cope. But I want to know that you've thought about it because I don't want to find the answer when we're on a tight deadline and you freeze up and I'm screwed. I do spend time talking people off the ledge. I'm very good at it. I also put in an antistress room with music and candles and books where people can go when they're overwhelmed. I don't use it much because I figure the boss's presence defeats the purpose. When I'm personally on the ledge, I call my director of human resources, who is also my best friend since high school. I say, "Katie, I need to go for a drive." She comes down and we drive around for a while and I vent.

I usually take working lunches at my desk. On Wednesdays I eat with my sister Terese, who works for me remotely as a project coordinator but comes in for staff meetings. We're both doing Weight Watchers, so we close the door, weigh ourselves, and enter the data into the Weight Watchers website. I'm very open with employees about most things, but we're kind of private about this.

I don't have time for a lot of chitchat, but I want to keep up with people. So I purposely chose to have my office right at the entrance. It has three windows: I can see people coming in and out the front door, people coming in and out of the bathroom, people coming in and out of the break room. And if I have a minute, I will pop out and have a quick, pleasant, personal exchange before the employee returns to her desk. The trick is to catch someone in transit. It keeps the conversation short. That's something I learned as a teacher when I had to grab students and convey information in the five minutes between classes.

Right before I leave, at 5:30, I sit down at the PC, pay all my bills, and take care of personal business. I don't want anything to distract me when I'm home. The kids have missed me all day; it would be lousy to keep working around them. Even if it's family business, not business-business, all they know is that mom isn't paying attention. I leave my BlackBerry in the car overnight; no one from work knows my home number except my mother, Terese, and Katie. I grew up with my father running a 24-7 business. I can't tell you the number of times the phone rang in the middle of the night, waking everyone up, and my dad had to go in to work. I never want to live that life. My managers deal with emergencies.

Three or four times a week we eat dinners cooked by my younger brother, Jim, who runs a meal-preparation business out of my parents' house. (Filling out the family circle is my sister Joy, who works in a staffing company and supplies me with employees.) I hardly ever cook myself. Business books always tell you to do the things you're passionate about and delegate the rest. I don't see why you can't do that at home as well as in the office.

On Wednesday nights I take piano lessons, but most evenings I scrapbook before going to bed. It provides the mental downtime most people get while driving but I miss because everything in my world is just a block or two away. While my hands are busy my mind floats freely: It's my most creative period of the day. I work on a couch next to a PC, and when I come up with an idea or solve a problem I'll jump up and shoot myself an e-mail to read in the office. My husband comes and talks to me too. He doesn't work for ShakespeareSquared, but we started the company together and he's in education. So he has the perfect balance of inside and outside perspective.

We've grown more than 800 percent in the past three years, and we can grow bigger and faster. But I have to keep these boundaries in my life. I have to preserve the relationships--with my family, with my staff, and with my friends. Success doesn't mean anything if you lose people along the way.

 PREV  1 | 2