Paul Greenland, Atalian Global Services' senior vice president of sales and marketing for the U.S., knows a thing or two about leadership. Actually, he's pretty much an expert. A past president of BSCAI, he was the winner of the 2016 James E. Purcell Leadership Award. He's still glowing from the honor, in fact. "That was the culmination of a 30-year career in this industry," he says. "It was everything from doing volunteer work for the association to running supervision seminars 20 years ago to my term as president a couple of years ago."

He credits his time at the helm of BSCAI with giving him a much broader view of the industry, both in the United States and abroad. "It gave me a much better understanding of the direction the contract service industry is headed," he says. "Individually, it gave me a much better view of leadership; how to manage other leaders; how to work with a combination of officers of the board, members of the board, as well as the professional staff of BSCAI; and how to run a non-profit organization."

Greenland would characterize his leadership style as pretty straight-forward. In his view, a leader's most basic task is to set the goals of "where we're going to go." After that, it’s all about the parameters for how the organization is going to achieve those goals. Last, but most important, hire the best people to run the game plan.

He adds, "A good leader knows that it's important to hire people who are smarter than [he or she is] in all of the functional positions. I am not a CPA. So, I hired someone who is phenomenal at finance to run our finance department. I know some things about HR, but I am not an HR professional. So, I hired somebody better than me and smarter than me. I also try and hire people who have the skill sets to manage the company tomorrow as much as today."

Atalian Global Services is a $2.5 billion French company with more than 100,000 employees around the world. Greenland's role is to oversee all sales and marketing for what is currently a $250 million U.S. operation.

Those numbers are big, even daunting for some. But, again, Greenland keeps it simple. "I had a boss I worked for in my first job in the industry," he recalls. "He's long retired. But he said to me, 'Management is a sandwich. Paul, tell me about a sandwich.' So, I said, 'Well, there's bread, there's meat.' And he asked, 'What's the part you really want to get to?' The meat, of course. And then he said, 'That is management! You sandwich the thing you want between two slices of nice bread. The meat may not be the nicest thing they're going to get. But if it's made correctly, the sandwich works and it's great!'"

It helps that Greenland is a people person and keeps his day-to-day focus squarely on those he manages. "I love helping people be successful," he stated. "I can only be successful if the people who work with me are successful. The salespeople, the marketing people, the management people … their successes become my successes."

"The challenge is still finding the exact right people to put on the bus,” he says. “You have to get the right people in the right seats on the bus. So many times in business, we try and put a round peg in a square hole. That can be done as long as you've got glue and cement to fit around the round peg in the square hole. At the same time, it's easy to get more focused on someone's personality instead of their skill sets. Or, you can get focused on their intentions as opposed to their outcomes. We really need to be focused on outcomes."

Looking ahead, Greenland expects to see a lot more consolidation in the building services industry. The business will also see a fairly large number of owners who are baby boomers approaching retirement and looking for opportunities to sell their firms. "That's going to create all sorts of interesting opportunities for companies in our industry," he says, "both from a merger/acquisition standpoint as well from a marketplace perspective. That's where the opportunities will be for some young, smaller, newer and energetic contracting companies."