Behind my desk at JRM is a large window that runs almost the length of the room. When I look out of it, I do not see the mountains, creeks, or other scenic beauty of my home state of North Carolina; I see a race shop. I see busy mechanics and engineers fine-tuning elite racecars for another weekend on the track. In a way, the shop represents my highest ideal for our company.
In our race shop, everything—and I do mean every little thing, down to thousands of specific nuts, bolts, and other small pieces of hardware—has its place. You could walk into our shop right this minute and ask a crew member for a three-quarter-inch fine-thread bolt, and he could find it immediately. One of my goals for our organization is to be like the race shop—with every component in its proper place so we can function at our optimum.
Think about it this way: if someone uses a screw that is just one-sixteenth of an inch too small to attach parts to a racecar, big trouble—even disaster—could result. Just as the wrong screw in the wrong place could cause problems for a car on a track, a poorly placed employee can cause trouble in an organization. People who are not in the right places tend to be less engaged and productive, and they make more mistakes than those who are more engaged.
As a business owner, my components are not nuts and bolts; they’re people. Part of my job is to make sure each person in our organization is in the right place—the place where they can thrive, operate out of their strengths, and be most productive as one element of the whole of our business. Ensuring that this happens is one way I can best position our company to accomplish what we need to do.
At JRM, as in many organizations, we have limited resources. One of my responsibilities is to be efficient with the resources available to me and to maximize the productivity of each one. For example, I have to cap our head count at a certain number in order to stay fiscally responsible. To use those resources efficiently, we need the best people working in the best places. Some companies have so many workers that they can overlook a few weaknesses in employees who do not carry their share of the load, but we can’t do that. I need to know about those who don’t fulfill their obligations or pull their weight, because I can’t allow someone who is only doing a portion of a job to continue without demonstrating the will and ability to improve. I need every person on our team to be firing on all eight cylinders—maximum capacity—just like our racecars.
Achieving success is difficult if we’ve hired someone who simply is not right for a certain role. When team members are out of place, they tend to make mistakes and become inefficient because they find their jobs challenging or overwhelming instead of enjoyable. When that happens, other well-placed staff members almost always end up picking up the slack, and trust between colleagues begins to erode because someone cannot be counted on. Eventually, morale begins to suffer. Everyone ends up focusing on what’s going wrong instead of building on what’s going right. As a result, the manager spends too much time fixing situations that should not be broken.
I want a team in which every member is confident that the other members will do their parts to contribute to the success of the entire company and that they will do it with excellence. I want them to be empowered to think more about solutions than problems. Having the right people in the right places creates the efficient, productive, well-oiled machine that causes any business to thrive.
START EARLY
Putting the right people in the right places, positioning them for success, cannot start too soon. In fact, I began doing it before Dale and I officially left DEI. There was a lot I didn’t know when I began building a viable business entity for my brother, but I did know I needed a solid plan. I didn’t want to announce our new venture and then figure it out; I wanted to be ready to move full speed ahead the minute our plans became known. So as soon as I was certain of what we were going to do, I began speaking confidentially with the smartest people in our sport, people I identified because of their longevity and history of success.
What mattered greatly to me was not where these people were, but where they were not. I had to proceed carefully and discreetly. I couldn’t talk to anyone employed by DEI, which eliminated some very knowledgeable people who could have provided important business insights they had learned from my dad.
Because I had developed relationships in NASCAR apart from Dad, and also because he enjoyed widespread admiration across the industry, I knew whom I could turn to for counsel regarding my new venture with Dale. There were enough people I trusted—and who understood the challenges Dale and I faced at DEI—for me to have a solid group of advisors to count on. Many of them had worked with my dad previously. They knew so much more than I did. I had a hunch they would be happy and eager to help us, and they were.
One of the first people I called was my boss at Sports Image, Joe Mattes. He is the man I consider to be the most knowledgeable person in NASCAR licensing. My initial conversation with Joe about an independent JRM took place during a meeting in March 2007, before Dale and I announced that we were leaving DEI. I tried to subtly let Joe know what we were thinking, so I asked him, “Do you know a VP of licensing who would want to work for me?”
He had no idea where I wanted to take the conversation, so after he made small talk about various licensing VPs he thought might be interested, I said, “Joe, let me be more clear about this. I’m not going public with this yet, but Dale and I are leaving DEI. We want everything buttoned up and ready to go before we announce it. We’re going to bring all of his business in-house and build his brand. Are you interested in being our VP of licensing?”
“Yeah, I might be interested.”
He then asked me about the timing, and I said, “Before the end of the year.”
I called Joe several weeks after that conversation and officially asked him to come to work for us. He started in July 2007.
Joe gives me a lot of credit for setting the business up well, but one reason I was able to do that was that good people—such as Joe, Rick Hendrick, and others—were willing to help and support me from the start.
Joe recalled:
Kelley had the foresight to be prepared and to set everything up right from the very beginning. Back then—and to this day—she wants to know, “How do we do this right?” This is because she and Dale are proud of being the third generation of Earnhardt racers. It’s a privilege and a responsibility they don’t take lightly. The planning that took place before they launched JR Motorsports as a separate business entity was amazing. Kelley built a team that positioned us to succeed before we really got started. She had everything and everybody in place.
When she and Dale left DEI, all of NASCAR was shocked. When they announced it, it was like Kelley’s coming-out party. She had driven a stake in the ground and said to everyone, “We got this.” She wasn’t cocky. She was just confident that she and Dale could build a better mousetrap, so to speak. And she had reason to be confident. She had surrounded herself with great people. She had done her homework. It was a daunting task, but she did it and she was ready.1
One of the best lessons I learned during this time was that I didn’t have to know everything. I had to figure out what was truly important for me to know and what I could entrust to others. I maintain strong, open communication with the people I trust, and I can count on them to tell me what I need to know in order to run our organization most effectively. That has taken a great deal of pressure off of me as the person in charge. It has also helped free time and energy for me to focus on my family and other interests.
HIRE WISELY, TRAIN WELL
Not everyone has a chance to start their path toward winning in business early. Often, only those who begin a new business have a chance to craft it from its inception. Others inherit their companies, either literally, as in the case of family businesses, or because a previous leader has left the organization. Those who may not be able to start early can always apply the next lesson I have learned about positioning people to succeed, which is to develop good hiring and training practices.
Good hiring processes will enable you to select the candidate most closely matched with the job—not just in terms of that person’s skill set but also in terms of personality, temperament, and attitude. When we interview candidates for open positions at JRM, we listen carefully for clues and insights into their personalities, work ethics, and other relevant qualities. Asking about various challenges or opportunities they could encounter and how they would handle those situations is very important. In addition, I ask them to give me real-world examples of circumstances they’ve dealt with in their previous employment. This gives me a good sense of what kind of person they are and helps me assess whether they can handle the role for which I am considering them.
Some of our best staff members are people I worked with before we started JRM. The reason I hired them is that I knew so much about them and their work ethics, their dedication, and their skills. Obviously, those hires were easy, and those people have been loyal, long-term members of our team.
Hiring from a pool of candidates I have never met is more difficult than choosing from a group of people I know. The interview process is crucial to making a great decision, so I have trained myself to focus on making sure I ask candidates the right open-ended questions—instead of yes or no questions—to get them talking as much as possible. For example, instead of asking, “Have you ever had a situation in which such-and-such happened?” I say, “Tell me about a situation in which such-and-such happened.” I don’t ask a potential human resources employee if he or she has ever fired someone; I say, “How have you handled situations in which you’ve had to fire someone?” That helps me sift through the typical “good interviewees” and get to the hard workers with a skill set matched to the open position.
One hire that has worked out especially well is our accounting manager. The previous manager had been with us for ten years, and she still works off-site part-time as our tax accountant. She had a wealth of knowledge because of her longtime experience in the job—knowledge and insight that would not be transferrable to a new hire. Her position was a big role for me to fill.
During the interview process, what drew me to the candidate I chose for the role was her personality. She had a good skill set, but I felt she “fit” our organization in a way no other candidate did. She was outgoing, a little feisty, and fairly confident. She had also worked for other motorsports organizations, and I was able to get good, honest referrals from people in the industry.
My human resources director and I debated between this candidate and another person. I went with the one we hired, Denise, because the other candidate had the skills needed but her personality was a bit drier. Denise started with us in 2016 and is doing a great job. Sometimes we have to work to rein in the feistiness that drew me to her, but she is dedicated, gets the job done, and works to be the best. She is a good fit for us and an asset to our company.
I haven’t always followed my instinct, put so much weight on personality, or heeded my intuition about how someone will fit into our organization. That’s something I had to learn. I have definitely made a few hiring “fails” by choosing candidates with the most experience and good interview skills instead of taking risks on people with less experience but with a positive attitude and willingness to learn. In one situation, the candidate I chose lasted just one year; after that I hired the person I should have hired to begin with.
Once a candidate has been hired, offering a quality training process is vital to his or her success. This includes in-house training, but you should also make additional resources or classes available to help new hires perform better in their roles. This in-house training process usually involves sitting down with various departments and understanding what they do, how they work within the company, and how they interact with the team as a whole.
As I’ve mentioned, I think one of the most important qualities a person needs to succeed is a positive attitude and a willingness to work. Skills can be taught, but those attributes cannot. If I see a positive attitude and a strong work ethic, I’m comfortable sending people to classes and providing additional training to help them gain the skills they need or understand why their role is valuable to the organization.
The right training can take an employee’s performance and contribution to the company to a new level. For example, just recently we needed to find a new manager for the Dale Jr. Foundation. Because I was aware of some changes coming in another area of our business, I knew the employees in that department would be looking for jobs. One of those employees had been with us for twelve years, and because of her tenure and dedication, I wanted to try to find a position for her under the JRM umbrella.
Her skills were solidly in the area of marketing, and she had no experience with nonprofit endeavors. But she knew the ins and outs of our company, and she also understood Dale’s brand, so I felt she would be a great fit to lead the foundation. Still, she needed to learn more about nonprofits and why they operate the way they do, and she needed to understand the regulations that govern them. I found a good place to send her for training, and I spoke with her about my commitment to get her the help she needed to succeed in a new role. It has been a good fit. I’m glad I took the chance to use her skill set to benefit our foundation.
Both in the hiring process and in subsequent training, one of the most important things I can do is to honestly assess people’s strengths and weaknesses—and, as in the case of our foundation manager, their potential. It’s important to do this regularly to determine if people’s strengths outweigh their weaknesses to the point that your organization gets what it needs from them.
Just as the needs of certain positions and job assignments change over time, people evolve too. Some people grow quickly as employees and can fill a variety of positions of increasing authority and responsibility, while others are better suited to stay in a certain role for an extended period of time or even for the duration of their work life. While upward mobility is generally positive, there is also something good to be said for an employee with great depth of experience and corporate history, one who loves the job and is faithful to it day in and day out. For example, we have all heard stories about engineers who thrive on hands-on work, then are promoted to management and find it stressful and unfulfilling. Once they leave that so-called promotion and get back to their old jobs, they’re happy again. Climbing the career ladder is desirable for many people, but there will also always be a few who do best right where they are. Honest assessment will determine whom to move and where to move them but also whom to leave alone.
Being aware of people’s strengths and weaknesses helps them utilize their skill sets to increase personal productivity and to benefit an entire department. I encourage managers to use every tool available to evaluate the people who keep their companies going each day.
At JRM, we use a program called “Management by Strengths” (MBS). According to their website, this is a program designed to help companies increase their productivity and “improve customer satisfaction and employee morale through an improved understanding of how to work more effectively together.”2 The test assigns people a certain color according to their dominant traits—directness (red), extroversion (green), pace (blue), and structure (yellow). By knowing a person’s color and the colors of others they work with, we can better understand our employees. If we hit a roadblock, the program helps us identify why people operate the way they do and how we can approach or manage them differently to get the best results.
In our race shop hangs a whiteboard. Everyone who works for us, including me, has a colored line on this board that identifies his or her temperament, so it’s easy to get a sense of who each employee is. For example, the program identifies me as a “high direct” person. I am straightforward and to the point, and I want results! When everyone on the team knows how to best communicate with one another, we work together more effectively to get the best results. When all the individual relationships run smoothly, the whole organization is better.
One of the best things I’ve done along these lines in my personal life is to study the book The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, with L.W. We discovered that my love languages are gifts and acts of service, while his is affection. Because we know this, he understands that birthday gifts and Christmas presents are important to me, as is making my coffee in the morning. I know that he feels loved when I give him hug, an unexpected kiss, or a meaningful touch.
Making the effort to understand people so we can better relate to them—both at work and in our personal lives—benefits everyone.
BE OPEN TO NEW IDEAS
The final key point I want to mention about positioning for success is to be open to new ideas, things that have never been tried in your organization—or at least not tried in a long time.
If there was ever anyone who might be considered the right person in the right place, it’s my brother Dale. After all, our father and grandfather were racers. Dale is not only my dad’s namesake but also seemed to be the natural heir to everything my dad built in professional sports. People think my dad groomed Dale to become a professional racecar driver and to carry on his legacy. They believe that from the time Dale was born, he was destined to win NASCAR races.
But as I noted earlier, when Dale and I were young, Dad never seemed to want him to drive, and he didn’t train or encourage him to become the next great Earnhardt racecar driver. Nevertheless, Dale started racing Late Model cars in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in 1991. He completed 159 races and won only 4. Dad never went to see him drive, never asked about his races, and never offered any direction or encouragement to help Dale perform better.
At the end of 1997, Dale ran out of money and thought his racing career was finished. He walked into one of Dad’s shops one day and saw what we would now call an Xfinity Series car with his name painted on it. Thinking people were playing a mean joke on him, he was angry. He knew that if Dad had decided to let him race for DEI, he would have told him, right?
Well, Dad did choose to put Dale behind the wheel, but it wasn’t his idea, and he didn’t tell him. One of my dad’s crew chiefs at DEI was also one of his best friends—my mom’s brother, our uncle Tony, known to us as Tony Sr. Putting Dale in that car was Tony Sr.’s idea. He basically said to my dad one day, “You’re spending a lot of money putting young guys in your cars. Why don’t you invest some of it in your own son?”
The right person to carry on Dad’s racing legacy—his own son—was right in front of him for years, yet Dad could not see it. In order to get Dale in the right place, Dad had to open his mind to the idea that Dale could drive. Thankfully, he did, and the guys in the shop prepared the car for Dale. Dale walked into the shop and saw the car before Dad ever said anything about it. When he realized it was not a joke, he was beyond excited.
Dale finally found his niche when he started driving in the Xfinity Series. He was the right person in the right place, and he won the championship in 1998 and again in 1999.
Dale says his relationship with our dad changed immediately when he began driving for DEI. They did begin talking more about racing then, but they also began to engage with each other personally, and the father-son bond Dale always longed for began to take shape. For the two of them, Dale remembered, “Those three years—1998, 1999 and 2000—were as good as it could get.”3
Once my brother got into the right place, there was no stopping him. Until he retired in 2017, the right place for Dale Earnhardt Jr. was behind the wheel of a racecar. I wish my dad had figured that out sooner and encouraged him to be a racer earlier in his life. Had Dad done that when Dale was a child and a teenager, the two of them could have had more time to enjoy a better relationship. We had no way of knowing that their time as father and son would be cut short. The synergy between them, which was in its infancy when our dad died, could have become truly amazing, not only for my dad and Dale but for NASCAR and fans all over the world.
Be diligent about putting the right people in the right places. Sometimes that comes easily. You can interview a candidate and sense intuitively how that person will fit into your company. You know where he or she belongs, and you feel certain that having that individual in place will be positive for the company. Other times, something tells you a candidate is capable of grasping the corporate vision and could quickly become an asset. That’s when you get creative about looking for a place for that potential employee—perhaps as a special assistant to a department manager, as an independent contractor, or as a part-time employee until a full-time position becomes available.
I’m thankful that today Dale and I are both in the right places where our strengths are maximized. We are happier, and so is our entire team. In the same way, whatever you have to do to get the right people in the right places so they and your organization can succeed, do it. The benefits will put you in the winner’s circle every time.