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Personnel Best
By Donna Fenn, contributing
editor at Inc.
In a tedious, unglamorous business,
Paula Lawlor has found the secret to bringing out the best
in the people who work for her
When she was
six, Paula LaSala (now Lawlor) mortified the nuns at her Catholic
school by pilfering funeral flowers from the garbage cans
outside the chapel and selling them to her friends for a nickel
each. When confronted by the priest, she remained incredulous.
"I didn't get it," she recalls. "They were just throwing them
away." Even then, the enterprising youngster had what today's
trendy therapists refer to as "bad boundaries." Now, on any
given day, Lawlor might sweep into the office wearing track
pants and Nikes, announcing that everyone must exercise. She's
likely to regale you with a sidesplitting account of a recent
conversation with her dead grandmother. And she's been known
to freely discuss the miracles of Prozac, the agony of alcoholism,
and the benefits of therapy. "There are companies that don't
want people to talk about their personal lives," she says.
"But I say, 'Bring it on.' If people can get something off
their chests for an hour, then I've got them for the next
10."
All that, of
course, is in addition to her obsession with her company,
MediHealth Outsourcing (#87 on the 1999 Inc. 500 list).
"My goal is grow, grow, grow, and no is not in the
vocabulary," she declares. "At work I'm at the outer limits
of my personality." Her sisters, both in the business, describe
her as a tornado. "She can't stand to see anything calm for
too long," says Carole Gammarino, five years Lawlor's junior.
"She has to stir things up." Mary LaSala, the soft-spoken
middle sibling, notes that "Paula pushes people. She pushes
them out the door or up the corporate ladder. And there are
days when you hate her and days when you love her."
Her other employees
seem to feel the same way. There is, they say, no one quite
as charming or as demanding as Lawlor, whose booming voice
and flashing smile give definition to a physically nondescript
company in a low-glam industry. MediHealth is a medical-records-outsourcing
company, which is to say that it helps hospitals and other
health-care facilities sort through reams of patient records,
organize their accreditation processes, and abstract documents
for inclusion in national databases. Only 12 of her 175 employees
are based at her headquarters, in King of Prussia, Pa. Silicon
Valley it isn't. Competitive and fast growing it is. On average,
MediHealth might add 50 to 75 long- and short-term accounts
to its client roster each year. Which is why Lawlor has to
work so hard to hire, motivate, and retain employees by creating
an environment that's a magnet for talented, hardworking people.
Managers run their divisions with maximum autonomy, hourly
workers have the opportunity to become salaried consultants,
and all employees have the freedom to move around the company
until they find their niche, often racking up training costs
that some company owners might find excessive. Lawlor also
goes to great lengths to accommodate her employees' personal
lives. One of her top managers works out of her home in Cleveland,
employees are allowed to bring their kids to work and to arrange
their schedules around their families' needs, and anyone at
all can take a three-month leave of absence without risking
job security. As if to prove a point, Lawlor took off much
of last summer to spend time with her family at the New Jersey
shore. Bad boundaries? No boundaries is more like it.
Curiously, though,
that is exactly the reason that Lawlor and her partner and
husband, Ron Lawlor, have been able to grow their company
to $7.5 million in revenues in just seven years. MediHealth
looks chaotic, and Lawlor seems more like your crazy Aunt
Paula than the president of a fast-growth company, but behind
the mayhem is a system of accountability that serves as the
most effective kind of insurance policy. Lawlor doesn't really
care how or when her employees get their work done, but if
they don't meet their goals and their deadlines, they've got
some explaining to do. She doesn't tell them how to manage
their work or their lives; instead she gives them the freedom
to manage both on their own. And she seems to understand intuitively
that creativity and innovation are as easily stifled by rigidity
as by anarchy. The trick is to maintain balance. It's not
as easy as Lawlor makes it look.
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