Rick Campbell says that companies don’t have to choose between focusing on numbers or people. With the right systems in place, they can strike the perfect balance.

What do 800,000 pounds of bricks, a water theme park, and a life-saving medical device called the Berlin Heart have in common? They have all been transported by Icat Logistics, one of the world’s leading providers of specialty transportation and logistics solutions.

Icat doesn’t own its own fleet of tractor trailer trucks, steam ships, or airplanes to get its clients’ goods from point A to point B.

Instead, it consults with clients on the best mode of transportation to suit their needs and then coordinates the transportation of goods through a network of hundreds of freight transportation companies and airlines in 165 countries.

According to Rick Campbell, founder and CEO of Icat, transporting cargo from, say, Baltimore to Malaysia involves as many as half a dozen companies—one to retrieve the cargo from the client, another to repackage it, and another to deliver it to the airport. At that point, one airline transports it to Los Angeles, while another airline flies it to Malaysia. But it’s not over yet—another company has to pick up the cargo at the airport, while another delivers it to its final destination. “And that is a relatively simple transaction,” said Campbell. “The market has become so fragmented and specialized that it requires multiple transactions to complete one order.”

Icat holds fast to its mission statement: to help all those it touches grow more profitably. Of course, that means helping customers grow more profitable by creating a seamless, reliable, and efficient source of transportation, but it also means helping employees head down an appropriate and bountiful career path.

Idealistic endeavor
Present CEO Rick Campbell formed Icat Logistics in 1993, partly out of intolerance for standard business practices, and—according to him—partly out of immaturity. “I was young and wanted to run a people-oriented business. In my experience working for CF Air Freight and American Airlines, I noticed that companies are too often focused on numbers—and it wasn’t long before I realized why: they have to survive. We are not unique in that we wanted to care about people, because most organizations start that way. The trick is to strike a perfect balance between numbers and people.”

And that is exactly what Icat has done. Campbell came to realize that compensation, although important, was not the employees’ number one priority. Surprisingly, inclusion, recognition, acknowledgement, challenge, and respect ranked higher than pay more often than not. So, he designed his company around those key factors.

To start, every employee fills out a “career grid” that tracks their overall career goals, specific job goals, and personal goals over a period of three months, six months, one year, two years, and five years. “We want people to tell us what they want to be when they grow up,” said Campbell, adding that many times, employees go about their jobs, never truly articulating their desires to their employer and then become unsatisfied when they aren’t challenged enough or don’t see opportunities for advancement. “We want to prevent that by creating a career map for every employee so they always have something to work toward.”

Sometimes, creating a career map requires a dose of harsh reality. Icat’s HR team will direct employees toward other goals if their aspirations don’t match their talents. “We can’t support your efforts to lead the accounting department if math is not your strong suit. We help council people appropriately with facts. It’s hard, but sometimes those conversations are needed if you truly care about the person and his or her career.”

Matching talents to tasks
To ensure each employee is doing the job s/he is best suited for, Icat’s HR team takes a page from Marcus Buckingham’s and Curt Coffman’s First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. The authors describe how companies across the country spend more time telling their employees what they are doing wrong rather than focusing on what they are doing right.

“Think about your yearly review,” said Campbell. “If it’s an hour long, your boss probably spends 10 minutes praising you. The next 50 are spent telling you what and how you should improve.”

To that end, Icat has stopped trying to squeeze people into highly defined job descriptions. In fact, it has thrown job descriptions to the wind, instead defining what specific characteristics and talents are required to perform a particular function and recruiting individuals who meet those criteria.

Icat also performs a series of learning-style tests to determine whether candidates are concrete learners, flexible/dynamic learners, or complex/analytic learners. In a constantly changing and growing environment, Icat has learned to only hire individuals who fall in the last two categories. “Concrete learners need a highly structured environment, and we can’t provide that. It doesn’t make them unimportant or ineffective, but they aren’t going to work well here.”

According to Campbell, when it comes to hiring, Icat has transitioned from an opportunistic company to a strategic one. “In the old days, we’d say, ‘We need to generate sales in this market—let’s hire a sales guy.’ And we’d hire someone who had experience with tasks A, B, and C. But it didn’t always work out because that individual’s perception of the job description differed from what we actually needed.”

Campbell cited its accounting department as a vivid example of how Icat matches individual talents to job descriptions. When the company first started, individuals in the accounting department split their days between accounts payable and accounts receivable. “We thought we were doing the right thing by breaking up the monotony,” he said. But the company soon came to realize that some people were better at paying bills (an analytical task), while others were better at collecting funds (an interpersonal task), and divided its accounting department into two groups.

“Later, we learned that some people were better at closing a transaction but not necessarily harnessing a long-term relationship, and visa versa, so we subdivided the department further by putting our best people on the phone with our best customers,” said Campbell. “We identified individuals who did an exceptional job with a specific part of a job and let them handle more of that. They are happier and more productive, and so are we as an enterprise.”