by Margaret Heffernan - Thursday, 6th September 2007 -

Running a company is hard work, and most of us react to problems by throwing in more time and effort. But Mona Eliassen can’t do that. She suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome.

“The disease is really a double- edged sword,” says Mona. “There have been times I’ve been sleeping 12, 14 hours a day. There was a time when I couldn’t read for six months.

"But the good part of this is that it has really made me focus and it’s made me delegate. The beauty of that is it’s made the company worth more.”

Mona’s company, the Eliassen Group, recruits and hires out engineers to companies with big IT projects.

It’s really a hightech talent agency, so much of its success hinges on relationship building between recruiters, engineers, salespeople and clients. If any link in this chain is compromised by office politics, the whole business suffers.

But because she can’t be there all the time, Mona can’t count on her brains and her personality to hold the whole thing together.

Instead she’s worked hard on building a management team that’s truly collaborative. They meet weekly without her and monthly with her – but even then she doesn’t chair the management meeting.

What that means is that she is not the focus of attention. People don’t position themselves for her approval, because she isn’t running the meeting. Instead, meetings are run by Ken Dreyer, who started as Mona’s coach and now works for the company as a facilitator.

He has no power to make decisions. Instead, decisions are made by everyone struggling to reach a consensus. The result has been an organisation free of politics.

At first, when Mona’s managers told me about this, I didn’t believe them. No company, I thought, could really be devoid of politics. I’d certainly never seen it before. But as I interrogated further, I learned a lot and changed my tune.

“We all have SMART goals,” says Mona. “SMART stands for smart, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely.

"We come up with them together. There are so many dependencies in this business we have to come up with goals as a team – and help each other to achieve them.

"Everyone’s accountable for their own, but it’s important that everybody knows what everyone else is trying to achieve. And that they’re accountable to each other.”

Compensation is based on everyone achieving the goals that they’ve set for the business.

Mona’s managers keep their SMART goals where everybody can see them. That helps their decisions to make sense to their teams: how tactics fit into strategy is plain for everyone to see or to ask about.

And they hit their goals, with monotonous regularity. It’s driven by attractive bonuses (which last year included a trip, with family, to the Caribbean) but also by a desire not to let their fellow managers down.

What Mona’s style of leadership has shown them, which the goals reinforce, is: we stand or fall together.

That Mona isn’t in the office all the time reinforces that mutual dependency. But that doesn’t mean she’s abdicated.

Every time I’ve ever asked her about numbers or progress, she knows exactly where the business stands to the day. Her managers know that she knows and, because they respect her, they are devoted to not letting her down.

This doesn’t mean the company hasn’t been through some hard times. In 2002, it had its share of lay-offs – but everyone knew where they stood and what drove the tough decisions that had to be made.

This kind of leadership only works when it cuts both ways. Company executives respect Mona – and she respects them.

Although she owns 100 per cent of the business, she has always maintained she would never sell it without their consent.

She has had plenty of suitors, of course. Who wouldn’t want an expanding, lucrative, profitable business that’s also functional? It’s more than many energetic whizz kids achieve in a lifetime.