Page 99 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

86B RE-ENGAGE

Q: When you started QLI you had no experience in this field.
How did you go about establishing the leadership principles
that QLI started with and has held closely to this day?
Hoogeveen: A mentor of mine arranged a series of interviews with
many of the finest business executives in our area. I listened carefully,
and through those interviews I identified seven leadership principles
that were common to those successful leaders. It was, if you will, a
study of success.

Q: How did this help you?
Hoogeveen: In the beginning I didn’t really know what I was doing;
I was scared, to be honest. I certainly didn’t feel like I was a natural
leader, but I was willing to learn. As a psychologist, I had a lot of
training in understanding how people behave. The leadership prin-
ciples gave me a guide as to how I could help employees be successful
by applying my training in a work setting.

Q: So how did you take those principles and put them to work?
Hoogeveen: That was where I was most concerned. The principles, in
and of themselves, are abstract and open to interpretation. So I cre-
ated a series of what we call “mindsets” around each of the leadership
principles. These mindsets help our staff understand how to put each
principle into action.

Q: How many of these mindsets have you developed?
Hoogeveen: To date, we have 260.

Q: Did you say 260?! That’s an amazing number. Can you give us
an example of how one of the mindsets helps your managers and
staff understand how to put a leadership principle into practice?
Hoogeveen: Our second principle is about helping our team feel proud
of QLI. We want them to feel a great passion for our work. So one of
our mindsets is about when we can begin to help employees feel that
sense of pride, and to us that begins in the preemployment process.
Our employee interview, for example, is 60 percent about them and