Total Teamwork - SEI Investments

Bob Aller, 40, a team leader in the investor-strategy group, says that life here is a world apart from life at Proctor & Gamble, where he worked as a brand manager before joining SEI: "At P&G, the hard part was getting an idea approved. But once you got approval, the resources of the company fell behind you. Here, getting approval is the easy part. The hard part is marshaling the resources. You have to convince people to get involved."

So team leaders at SEI have to be first-class recruiters. "It's up to the recruiter to describe the project in a strategic and enthusiastic way," says Rob Prucnal, 41, a marketing team leader in the asset- management group. "But it's a soft sell. You want people to say, 'That's a team I'd like to be on. It could benefit from my insight.'"

The recruiting challenge applies outside the company as well as inside. SEI has no centralized HR department. Team leaders work with placement agencies to attract applicants. "The biggest hiring criterion is cultural fit," says Dave McLaughlin, 35, a former Navy pilot who runs a team that sells SEI's services to community banks. "Are they confident about their ideas? Are they articulate? Do they respect others and have a drive to succeed?"

Richard Lieb, 50, a former Marine major, joined SEI in 1976 and is now president of investment systems and services. He offers one important corrective to this talk of persuasion and participation. "This team stuff comes across as New Age mumbo jumbo," he says. "It's not. We hit our numbers."

The numbers that matter most to Lieb and his colleagues are EPS and AUM: earnings per share and assets under management. SEI establishes corporate-level targets for both figures and translates the targets into goals for the teams. "Our goals are parsed out to the business units, and they figure out what they have to do to hit them," says Greer. "The unit heads, in turn, survey their teams and ask, 'What can we do to hit that?' Since they're closest to the client, the teams know what they can do to move the ball forward."

People at SEI all act as if they're in charge, because everyone has goals to hit. "I step in when a team needs tools to be productive," says Bob Aller. "Otherwise, I don't have to interfere." Concentrating on a few all-important targets shapes life at the top as well in the trenches. "I don't worry about reports from my teams," says Carmen Romeo, 54, president of SEI's investment-advisory group. "I don't care how many vacation days people take. I worry about one thing - assets under management."

The same goes for CEO Al West. "This style of leadership is better for me," he says. "I lead where I figure it really matters, and I let other people lead where it matters to them. The result is that my top managers are 10 times better as businesspeople than they were a few years ago. And my job is a lot more fun."

Scott Kirsner kirsner@worldnet.att.net writes on business and technology from Boston. He contributes regularly to Fast Company.