Schoharie -- Former Albany Ladder VP takes a nontraditional approach

Jim Ullery's home is a vision of the pastoral. The back yard of his historic house and barn overlooks a chicken coop, sloping lawn and, farther out, a wide and wooded valley leading to a navigable waterway.

This is Ullery's classroom, a stress-reducing getaway that allows his students to open up to him and to one another. It is the centerpiece of a confidence-building program that Ullery guarantees will lead to positive results.

Ullery, former vice president of sales at Albany Ladder Co. Inc., has struck out on his own as an empathetic consultant who believes that happy employees lead to happy employers and high revenue.

"So many consultants come in and start getting rid of employees,'' Ullery said. "Imagine what that does to those people and their families. My goal is to make more with what they've got, not do more with less.''

Ullery and the former president of Albany Ladder, the late Lester J. Heath III, who died from a brain tumor in 1997, were catalysts in that company's unique, employee-centered culture, which to this day features weeklong retreats, seminars and teamwork training.

Now, Ullery elaborates on the programs he wrote in the '80s to teach companies around the world the benefits of the motivated employee.

When Ullery joined Albany Ladder as a bill collector in 1980, he had just closed a photo studio he owned and was in the midst of personal turmoil. His need for camaraderie paired well with that of Heath, who was in the midst of finding sobriety and enlightenment through Alcoholics Anonymous.

After Ullery conducted a seminar on bill collecting for some of the company's clients, he and Heath began to discuss ways to reach Albany Ladder employees with the inspiration the two of them had come to know.

"(Lester and I) used to have dialogues of exploration that were riddled with troubles -- and we realized the power of love,'' Ullery said. "We tried to figure out how that could be translated into people delivering higher performance at work.''

While Ullery continued to expand Albany Ladder's class offerings, he also began to do outside consulting work, occasionally using outside texts, but mainly relying on his own instincts. He quickly attracted such mammoth area employers as Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. and the state Department of Social Services.

Following Heath's death and the 1998 sale of Albany Ladder to Evanston, Ill.-based National Equipment Service, Ullery was faced with signing a non-compete agreement, meaning he could no longer do the outside consulting work that contributed more to his income than the equipment company did. So he decided to leave Albany Ladder and concentrate solely on consulting.

Today, Ullery has built an eight-unit, three-year curriculum that teaches a high-performance model that builds up from the employees. While Ullery now uses more outside texts, the principles of his courses are still his own.

"The basis of the course is to create a strong sense of community with the goal of developing higher productivity,'' he said. "When people can connect to something larger, they can experience joy in their work.''

One of the first steps Ullery takes is to try to move an organization away from the traditional, autocratic business model. His view is that if employees have more control over their work, they will be more interested in turning out a high-quality product.

"Businesses today are losing out on a great commodity; 10 (percent) to 40 percent of company revenues are lost in terms of opportunities for sales and wasted talent,'' he said. "It's because they are doing things the old way.''

In the spirit of Albany Ladder, Ullery prefers to teach his programs at his idyllic country home or in places such as The Rensselaerville Institute, a 100-acre meetings facility in Albany County, where he can make use of rope courses and canoe outings to punctuate teamwork exercises.

The Gorman Group of Albany, a network of asphalt and road materials companies, recently completed several programs with Ullery, during which it closed out the rest of his schedule for two years. Co-owners Tony and Mark Gorman, who were leading the company through a series of acquisitions, felt Ullery's full-time services were needed to help streamline operations.

"Jim's got a very participatory sense of style and management. He believes you must give employees as much information as possible to do the job,'' said Tony Gorman. "He teaches you to flatten out the routes of communication, so that everyone takes responsibility for their tasks.''

For his services, Ullery makes between $1,000 and $2,500 a day. He usually is involved with five companies at one time and teaches each client one half-day class a month for three years.

Ullery also gives monthly seminars, which he uses to introduce potentially long-term clients to his philosophies. Topics of those seminars, which are held at BFS Catering in Guilderland, include team building, leading through trust and high-performance selling.

Ullery and a group of consultants from around the country have formed 360 Solutions, a Waco, Texas-based company that acts as a clearinghouse for consulting materials and also allows its members to build clients and contacts around the world.

"He is doing what makes sense. He is very experienced, has an electric approach,'' said Roger Allen, an organizational psychologist in Littleton, Colo., who writes some of 360 Solutions' texts. "The benefit for him in partnering with 360 was a better methodology and documented process. But he really knows how to handle difficult and delicate situations.''

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