Stephanie Smith: Hi. It's Stephanie Smith, Highway to Health. I'm your herbal industry specialist here at 1110AM WTBQ Radio. Today we have an expert in the field of business planning. His name is Richard Syrek. Richard is the President and CEO of Mentor Management, LLC. Rich, I'd like to say "Hello" to you and welcome you to our show, Highway to Health.

Richard Syrek: Hi Stephanie. It's great to be here.

SS: Richard, we've had a few conversations about what exactly it is you do in your field of business planning and your expertise in business. Tell us a little bit about what happens when you go into a company.

RS: Well, obviously when things aren't going quite right it is a stressful situation for the management of a company. When I go in I'm usually asked to find out what the problem is. The way it's presented most often is really a symptom, not the real problem. What I find is when things are not going quite right, the management really works very hard to try to resolve things and sometimes they're working on symptoms. They try to fix the symptoms and it keeps coming back at them, which raises the stress level again. So what I do is, because of my experience, I am able to look at the business as a whole entity and figure out what's really the problem. Where is this coming from and where do we really need to spend our time to work? Just by setting direction and setting awareness, I can visually see the stress level change. Because, you know, there's nothing worse than working on something and not being able to resolve it. Everything just changes when there's a confidence that the work is going to bring good results.

SS: And so I can imagine that these people really appreciate you coming in, because the productivity level must go up and of course, my focus is really about health, so I'm thinking people aren't calling in sick as much. People call in sick because they're physically sick and people call in sick because they're so emotionally wrung out and stressed out that they just don't want to show up for work.

RS: Right. That's physically sick, too.

SS: Exactly. And it will lead to bigger physical sickness. So what do you do for instance, if that's going on? How do you address those health issues and stress issues?

RS: The name of my company is Mentor Management on purpose. I use a mentoring style. It's a very low-key style that tends to bring people on the team. I make myself part of the team. I'm not a threat when I walk into a business; I'm a partner when I walk into a business. That helps lower that stress level, because whenever an expert comes in or a consultant comes into a business, we all know there's that stigma attached to it, that this is someone who's going to come in and shake everything up. I avoid that as much as possible coming into a business. What I do is use an interview technique to just talk about what's going on in the business. The most successful thing that can happen during our conversation is that we uncover what the real problem is and my client tells me what to do about it. All of a sudden they've figured it out. So what I try to do is create this understanding of where energy needs to be spent and what change really needs to take place, and get them to buy into that process, become part of the process.

SS: How would somebody find you? For instance, say there's a company and they have maybe 100 employees, productivity is low, morale is low. How would they know they had a problem and how would they know that you are the person that they were going to call upon to come in and look at them?

RS: All business owners have a vision for their business, whether it's written or just between their ears, they have a vision of their business. The thing that raises the stress level is when they sit home at night thinking, "It's not going quite the way I'd like it to go. There's something that's not right here." That's when you know you have a problem. What happens is, everyone that starts a business has a core competency. They grow their business around this competency. Whether it's a product or a service doesn't really matter. It's the key thing that they started the business with. After a while businesses - and when they're successful businesses grow to a point where they start to take on employees, they start to venture into other areas that takes their attention away from their core competency. And when things start going not quite right, they delve into their core competency. They go after their core competency and that might not be the source of the problem. So that's how you know you have a problem. And how do they know that I'm there and who I am? I write. I'm published in local periodicals here. I have a website that people can look me up on.

SS: What's your website, Rich?

RS: It's MentorManagementLLC.com. It talks a little bit about me. I also teach at Rockland Community College. I'm around, I'm involved with Chambers, and I'm involved in different clubs to just be out there and be visible.

SS: I know that your background in business led you to this. I know that - just thinking of myself, how my background in health led me to make some decisions because I just didn't feel that I could maintain my integrity as a person that was working in the health care field and continue to work where I was working. In conversations with you I began to understand that that was something that led you out of say, traditional business practices in big companies into developing your own philosophy and your own way of thinking about how things could be done better and in keeping with your values and your integrity. So could you tell us a little bit more about that? I think it's really interesting and important in terms of ethics.

RS: All of us perform better when we're comfortable within ourselves. The minute we start to act and try to be like somebody else, we are affected. That happened to me in my business world. I have a vision for what a business can do. I've seen so much energy and progress lost because people are playing politics, because people are playing these little games they play in business. I have this knack to see quickly what the problem really is in the business. I look at it from the forest standpoint. Everyone talks about the forest - you can't see the forest for the trees. I come into a situation from the forest. I may be the only one that's doing that, including the owner of business. The owner of the business may be stuck in one of the trees, not being able to see what's really going on. I can bring that - that's also part of my style and my approach with my clients - I really respect the culture of my clients. I think that the answer is not in changing the whole culture. The answer lies in enhancing the culture - building on what's strong in the culture and changing what is not strong within that culture. To use the strength in the culture to help develop change and make change happen.

SS: Great. I'd like to go on with that part of the conversation. I want to hear a little bit more about what happens when you go into a company - because I've seen this happen in hospitals - people will come in - experts, outside experts come into the hospital and they say, "Everybody's very unhappy, morale's low, this is bad, everybody's got all these complaints." And what they find out is it's the boss and the CEO of the company that actually owns the thing that's really the source of the problem.

SS: Hi it's Stephanie Smith, your herbal industry specialist. I'm back with you here on AM 1110 WTBQ. This program is sponsored by Medicine Plants that brings you Herbs that Work. Today we're talking to Rich Syrek. Rich is an expert in the field of transforming and helping companies change to become more productive, to reduce stress, to reduce their health care costs and just to generally make the workplace a really extraordinary place to work, where people want to go to work. Rich has been doing this for a long time. His background is in education and in running businesses and working in businesses. He's seen the down side and the up side of it. And these are the kind of people that you want to go to. When you're looking to make changes in your company, you want to go to people that really have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. Rich Syrek certainly knows that. We were just talking, before we went to a break, about - Rich, you go into a company and you say, "OK, guys, what's the problem here?" And they come to you with grumbles and complaints and blah blah, and they're out sick and this guy doesn't do his job and blah blah … And all of a sudden you find out there's something about the boss here. So this is the guy that's paying you to come in, for your expertise, how do you handle that kind of thing?

RS: First of all, in my contacts - it's very important, as an expert and as a consultant that I be clear and forthright in the advice that I give. There's nothing worse than spending a lot of money on somebody like me and then not having change happen or not having good things happen. What I do is, just in my style, I create an atmosphere with my client - with the boss - that allows me to speak frankly and openly in a nice way. There are times when the problem is the boss. And I sit there and I say, "I think I've figured out what's going on and it has something to do with what you're doing. You need to make change here." It's really very interesting. Because I'm not an employee, I'm an expert that's hired, I have license to say things that an employee can't say. The reaction that I get when I make a statement like that is one of gratitude. "Gee, thanks for telling me that. I'm really glad there's somebody that can say that to me."

SS: Because they generally know that they've got that issue?

RS: Well, sometimes. We're all people and we all have our own set of securities and insecurities. Anyone that honestly wants to be successful in life will keep their ears open for advice from people that can really help them. I have really never found a CEO that didn't like me to say to them that I think they're the problem.

SS: Well, you have a nice way about you. I know - I've known you for some time and I know that we've had conversations about various issues, gone in different directions. We've talked about health care, we've talked about business, and you just have a really nice way of connecting thoughts and ideas. I can imagine it's very non-threatening for a potentially really threatening situation for a company. What would your vision be for a company that just was not growing, that was staying the same; the culture was supporting, actually, non-productivity?

RS: What I would do is try to find the root of that. If that is the vision of the owner of that business and that's the kind of business that person wants to have, then there isn't anything I can really do about that. That would be a situation where I would go to the owner and say, "You're the problem because you are making this atmosphere what it is." I would try to demonstrate what could be with a change in that atmosphere in some modeling technique or some mathematical technique, because all of this is an investment in growing your business and there needs to be a desire to grow the business and a desire to do things better. If I generate that desire, I do it in a way that makes it almost fun to do and make change happen. My whole concept here is to reduce stress, to make growth happen, to - there's nothing like working in a company where you think things are happening and it's growing and it's exciting and it's a great place. You wake up in the morning and you say, "I want to be there because it's a great place to be." There's nothing like being in a company where the opposite is happening you just don't want to get up in the morning. Part of what I want to do is transform "I don't want to get up in the morning," to "I can't wait to get up in the morning."

SS: Oh, that's great. So, as long as you've made those distinctions in terms of a company that "I don't want to go to work there this morning. I think I've got a cold again," and to a company where you just get out of bed and you're lit up and you're excited about - you know, you hit the floor running kind of thing. I know that sounds really way beyond anybody's expectations, but I in fact, know that you can affect that kind of transformation. Could you make a distinction about some of the characteristics in a company that's not - it's kind of running along mediocre OK, and a company that's extraordinary?

RS: There are examples all over the place. If you just read Fortune magazine. They always have the best-loved companies and the worst loved companies. You can just imagine if you were an employee at Enron today, how would you feel about getting up in the morning? And if you were an employee of GE today, how would you feel about getting up in the morning?

SS: Not …

RS: … GE's great. People that work for GE, they're working for a great company. It's a growing company. It's very respected. People working for Enron right now probably are not feeling so good about what they're doing. Or Arthur Andersen, you know, some of these other things that we've heard about in the news today. Well, there are lots of companies in this area that have that same kind of thing. And if you just take the vision of, "I want to be proud of the company I work for," - and when you're really proud of the company you work for, it really makes a difference in what you do.

SS: So it would be pride and morale. People would be proud of where they were going. Would their activities at work carry over into their private life in a company that was functioning well? Would that be necessary or not?

RS: No, not really. It's not something I really focus on. I do know from personal experience that when the stress is there, it does go into people's personal lives. People tend to wake up at four o'clock in the morning and can't get back to sleep again because they're worried about what's going on at work. And you know that that's affecting their family and their private life. But that's not something that I focus on. I just know that that's there.

SS: We're going to come back. We're going to talk a little bit more about stress in the workplace and the differences in companies. What really is the distinction between companies that are running well and companies that aren't.

SS: Hi, it's Stephanie Smith. We're speaking with Rich Syrek. Rich is with Mentor Management. He's an expert in the field of business management and he goes into companies and mentors companies that feel that they're having problems with business maybe not being as productive as they'd like to be. Maybe people aren't quite so lit up about going to work. And this is your life, so you really want to be lit up about what you do and you want to be living a life that you love. And Rich actually goes into companies and actually helps that happen - that kind of transformation happen. What we were talking about before was really the symptoms that show up in the company and the stress level that shows up. I know I had breakfast with some people this morning that were just so stressed out before they went to work. One of them was complaining about their department manager, the other one got a phone call from work before she got there, and neither of them were very happy about it. They looked stressed out. And they were going away for the weekend. They were going to Rhode Island to have a great time, and I thought, "Oh, this is incredible." So, what other kinds of symptoms do you see when you go into these companies, Rich and just describe them - what an outsider would see coming in.

RS: Well, there are some interesting things. First of all, body language is really obvious. You can see when the boss walks into the room people's body language change. Typically, in a high stress company, you get really no discussion and no response and people tend not to talk and they get nervous. In a low stress company, people tend to feel part of the company and speak up and there's a high regard for people's expertise. You can just feel that. You can just feel the difference in the two types of companies. One great measure of stress in a company is looking at the internal email. And if you see an email going around with 78 answers back and forth, that means a lot of people are covering their you know what ...

SS: Oh interesting …

RS: … that's a real good sign of stress within a company.

SS: A lot of emails. So, for instance if a memo went out, a lot of people would respond to that? Would they feel free to respond to it? Or are they complaining response?

RS: Well usually that's a sign that the spoken word isn't good enough, so that they need to have something in writing. Emails going back and forth …

SS: … Oh I see …

RS: … creates a trail in writing of what was said and what needs to be done.

SS: But - so that's going on on one hand, but really, their vitality and self-expression is really squashed.

RS: It's all affected. I always feel that - and if you have to be a superman or a superwoman to succeed in your company, that's a problem. Because none of us is superman or superwoman. We're all people and we need to succeed in spite of that. We need to break down what's causing that.

SS: And what would be the cause of that?

RS: Well, it could be politics. It could be lack of trust. It could be that people sometimes have agendas that don't quite match the corporate agenda. There's lots of ways that that can manifest itself.

SS: So that almost used to be the way - I mean, speaking - I'm coming from health care - but I remember my job was always to get to the next position, get the more powerful position supposedly, when actually that's not really what happens. The further up the ladder you climb, the less you have to do with what is really happening. But that kind of thing - is that something of the past?

RS: What always disturbs me is when I see somebody who is a great salesman, let's say, get promoted to sales manager and they're not selling anymore. So you take a happy, productive employee that's successful and really feels good about him or herself, and make them a manager and make them do a job they don't know how to do. And all of a sudden, they're not happy any more. So what have you done? What's the benefit of promoting somebody outside of their major skill area, when they could be much happier doing a thing they do well? That can be addressed in other ways. That can be addressed in pay and salary and benefits in a way where you don't have to have that title to get the benefit of your expertise.

SS: Very interesting. You said something so interesting yesterday. You were talking about silos, and being less productive in one area would actually increase overall productivity?

RS: Yes.

SS: Do you - talk a little bit about that.

RS: Sure. I call that "sub-optimize the parts to optimize the total."

SS: That's an MBA word?

RS: No, it's something I learned somewhere along the way. But the idea is that for any one department - if you think of departments in a company - shipping is a "silo," accounting is a "silo," production is a "silo." Think of each of the departments as "silos." If you maximize any one of those "silos" to its fullest potential, it would mean that you would have to "sub-optimize" the other ones. They would have to give up something in order to maximize the one. So the organization only is as good as its weakest "silo." So the question is, maybe it's not worth maximizing that "silo." You should "sub-optimize" that "silo" so that the other "silos" can increase in their effectiveness.

SS: So for instance, the accounting department might be full of these extraordinarily hard working people and they are just producing way above what the rest of the company is …

RS: … or let's say the accounting department requires certain paperwork to be done, which prevents orders from going out of the house, because of the way that the paperwork has to be done. Maybe that paperwork could be changed so it's a little less onerous and more orders can get out of the house. So, what's good for the overall company? To have perfect paperwork, you know, or to get more orders out of the house?

SS: Great …

RS: … and maybe you can strike a balance so that you get the needs of both of those "silos" and increase the orders going out of the house.

SS: And this is something that you really just began to observe visually over time …

RS: … oh I've seen it, yes …

SS: … seen it so many times that you just know this is so.

RS: This is not a new concept. This is something that's been written about and I just call it "sub-optimizing the parts to optimize the whole." That's just something I started saying a few years ago, and it's part of what I do, what I look at when I come into a company.

SS: We're speaking with Richard Syrek. He's with Mentor Management. Richard's phone number is 914-715-1911. You have a website. Give us that website address again, because it's on the bottom of my pile of papers here.

RS: It's MentorManagementLLC.com.

SS: Great. And people can call you. You're an expert in the field. I would say you're an expert in the field of "business everything." Your background was - we were talking a little bit about it before. You really didn't feel very self-expressed in what you were doing and it sounds like that's what led you out of it and into this field. So, what you seem to be doing is creating the possibility for other people to be extraordinary and self-expressed in their businesses.

RS: I've had thirty years in a manufacturing business of consumer products. I've had some great successes along the way, and I know what worked. I've also had things that didn't quite work the way I wanted them to, and I know why they didn't work, and that's literally part of my background and what drives me in my new business.

SS: Yeah. So, it takes the good and the bad. It takes failure. It takes success. It takes risk. It takes - what would you say would be one of the more extraordinary and outstanding characteristics of people who succeed in businesses?

RS: I think they're open and they listen to those around them. You know, if there are experts around them, they really listen to them. They don't play the ego game. They're people that really understand that the best way to do something is not necessarily what you invent. There may be a better way.

SS: So they're teachable?

RS: Yes.