Paul Tremont on leadership: Know your strengths and weaknesses to build a stronger team

Paul Tremont is president and chief executive officer of SRC Inc.

The company started at Syracuse University in 1957 as Syracuse University Research Corp. SU spun it off as an independent entity in the mid-1970s.

Since then, the company, headquartered in Cicero, has grown in a variety of defense, environment, intelligence, and related high-tech fields with offices and support locations in the U.S. and Australia.

About 800 of its 1,200 employees are based in Central New York. Over the next five years, the company expects to nearly double, hiring 1,000 people, many of them scientists and engineers.

A lot of people recommended I talk to you –  

I’m reluctant. Not because I don’t value the perspective of leaders and reading about them in your column. It’s just not about me. It’s about the corporation and what the corporation does. If I could sum it up real nicely for you: Don’t focus it on Paul Tremont.

Leaders often are reluctant to be in the spotlight.  

It’s a quality of a good leader – being humble. The leader wants the team to have the credit, because they’re the ones that do the job.

OK, tell me about SRC, the elevator speech.  

We’re a not-for-profit, and that not-for-profit status is a unique attribute. It’s a foundation of our culture. It makes SRC tick – it makes our employees passionate about what they do.

Our mission is to help keep America and its allies safe and strong. We provide integrated solutions to protecting America’s people, environment, and way of life.

That drives everything we do. Everything we do is to fulfill that mission. We do that by focusing on three things we believe are very important:

People. We’re not going to be successful without great people.

Innovation. We’re not going to be successful if we don’t keep innovating, year after year after year.

And we’re not going to be successful if we don’t have high customer satisfaction.

What advice would you give to be a good leader, especially to a new leader or someone aspiring to take on that responsibility?  

One of the first things I would tell them: Make sure you know yourself. Have strong emotional intelligence. Know what makes you tick. Know your strengths; know your weaknesses. That allows you to surround yourself with people who don’t think like you. You don’t want people who all think like you.

If you know yourself and you know your strengths and weaknesses, you can build a stronger team.

Number 2 is: You need good business acumen. Understand the business. Understand what makes the business tick and what is needed to improve the business.

How do you roll the financial numbers up in a really high manner and determine what they mean and where you need improvement?

I’ll give you an example. When I started as the executive vice president of operations 11, 12 years ago, I saw that we were very strong technically. We’re a company of innovators. But we needed to educate more of our people on other aspects – business acumen and emotional intelligence. Then they’d even be stronger.

We started what we call a leadership development curriculum. We developed our own curriculum that over a hundred employees have gone through. It taught them about SRC finances, about what emotional intelligence is, how to have crucial conversations, how to know more about themselves, how to know more about their co-workers.

We wanted to build leaders that can connect the dots between innovation, good technology, and the opportunities that we must capture to continue to be successful.

If a leader doesn’t do that, don’t expect employees to do that.

You have to be optimistic. You have to be courageous. You have to be willing to take risk.

If you’re going to list the qualities of effective leadership, of a leader you admire, what would they be?  

It’s the things we were talking about – the business acumen details, the emotional intelligence part of the business.

Make sure you understand the business and what employees do.

Good leaders connect with employees. Good leaders inspire employees.

How do you connect? How do you inspire?  

My approach is pretty simple. I have a strong, consistent message. I focus on our mission and what’s important to SRC. Then, I talk to employees. I learn about what they do. I go to every building, and I learn about a different project and what the engineers do.

Now, sometimes it’s way over my head. But I’ve acquired enough business sense to be able to connect the dots because I talk to them. Then, I turn it from a technical conversation to a business-opportunity conversation. They enjoy that; they see that I’m involved and that I’m interested in what they do.

It makes me aware of where our business is and where it may have to go, so I can weigh in on that.

What are attributes of ineffective leadership? Of someone you’d never want to work for?  

It’s somebody who has a tremendous ego. Somebody who thinks they have all the answers. It basically shuts people down. You’re not listening to people.

It’s people who don’t practice those values, those qualities I talked about. Who don’t really respect anybody’s decision. Who surround themselves with people just like them. You don’t want to do that. You want people who think differently than you.

If I’m strong in one subject matter – if I’m strong in finance or I’m strong in communication, I want somebody who will complement me there. Because they’re going to think differently about how we go about doing things.

I’ve seen corporations with leaders who just surround themselves with people who think like themselves. They stagnate.

A leader has to want to be challenged. I want to be challenged. I don’t have all the answers. No one has all the answers. The answers come in pieces, they come from people who think differently about challenges put in front of us.

Most definitely.

Some of the qualities of leadership are inherent to your upbringing. Other qualities of how to communicate, how to be inspirational, how to be optimistic, I believe can be taught. I think I’m an example. I learned from a lot of people. They gave me advice.

In college (SUNY-ESF), I didn’t know what business acumen was. I didn’t even know what an MBA was.

A Weyerhaeuser executive came to talk to us in our junior year. The executive said: You guys know all about trees, but if you want to be a leader, you have to know the business side of it. You need to be balanced.

That’s obviously stuck with me. That’s what first made me go pursue my MBA right out of college (at Virginia Tech).

In my MBA program, a marketing professor told me: Make sure you know what’s behind the numbers, because they can hide things. If you want to be a good leader, make sure you understand how numbers are calculated and their true meaning.

I worked in Brazil after college. It was a forestry project – I was a forest economist. When I came back, I had a job in Rome, N.Y., where I learned how to be a communicator. I worked for an individual who was well versed in the softer skills – presenting, doing concept development, marketing. I learned a tremendous amount from him.

So, if you want to be an effective leader, you need to learn, observe, and stay open to advice?  

For sure. It’s an ongoing learning process.

Were you in leadership roles growing up?  

When I think about my childhood and growing up, I was never in any formal leadership roles, but I was always the one that organized activities. Pickup baseball in the park. Playing games at someone’s house. I was always planning activities.

And I always had a job. I think I was employed since about 8 years old. Delivering newspapers. The grocery store. Summer jobs. Painting houses. In every one of those jobs, I always thought: How can I be more successful doing it? How can I take the next step? If it was a paper route, how can I add more customers?

That attitude was a great foundation when I entered my professional career, to get into formal leadership positions.

Where was this?  

I grew up in Syracuse.

I grew up in the Kirk Park area, the South Side. I went to St. Anthony’s, at Midland and Colvin. Then I went to Bishop Ludden High School (class of 1974). I worked at Green Hills Farm. I had a paper route for the Herald-Journal, and I switched to The Post-Standard when I went to high school, because I wasn’t home early enough to do the Herald.

There are many.

My parents (Samuel and Rose) instilled in me the work ethic that I have: You’ve got to work hard to succeed. They also instilled in me a virtue of respecting everyone and caring. That’s important as a leader. Another attribute they instilled: Put others first. Make other people happy and successful and you’ll be happy and successful in life.

Maybe I shouldn’t bring up my mother here, but she’s 93, and she still has that attitude. Everywhere she goes, they know Rose Tremont. She is loved. I find that fantastic. I’m very proud.

I have three older brothers and one younger brother. The three older brothers were great role models. They all worked hard. They all went to college. They all got jobs. I had to have a lot of initiative to keep up with them.

Once I entered my career, there were numerous supervisors, bosses, co-workers, peers that taught me the lessons of leadership. How to be empathetic. How to be transparent. How to communicate. How to respect everybody. How to present yourself. All those values I’ve been taught, and I’ve acquired. It’s not just supervisors. It’s peers, and it’s co-workers.

I’m blessed that I have an open mind. I’m blessed that I’m willing to listen to others, that I respect others’ opinions. It’s made me a better leader.

I think part of being an innovation company is failure. You’re going to fail. Not everything is going to be a tremendous success.

You need to evaluate what went wrong and what you could have done differently. You need to learn lessons from that. I think we do that well here. I can’t say it any more simply than that.

We invest a tremendous amount back into the corporation as far as technology investment and innovation. Not all that innovation is a success. But when it fails, we don’t say: Hey, it’s your fault.

I had a boss like that once. He said: Well, when we invest in here, who’s gonna be held accountable for that?

I said: Me.

I just raised my hand. To me, that was wrong. If we had that mentality, we’re not going to be innovators, we’re not going to take chances, we’re not going to take risk.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If an individual keeps repeating, repeating, repeating a mistake, then something’s got to be corrected.

That’s more incompetence, than risk-taking.

But we gotta take risks.