Today’s sharp-elbowed conflict to ascend and remain atop the corporate heap sometimes resembles nothing so much as an all-out hockey brawl. Who better than a Stanley Cup-winning former hockey general manager to give advice to embattled corporate execs on running their businesses and inspiring their workers? First in a regular series.
The turmoil swirling around Corporate America these days is likely to result in a wave of new C.E.O.’s—and for most of them, it will mean taking over a demoralized organization that has been banged around by the outside world.
At Wall Street firms such as Citibank and Merrill Lynch, for instance, Vikram Pandit and John Thain have to figure out a way to rebuild broken organizations while keeping employees from jumping ship or simply going through the motions of the defeated.
In the National Hockey League, there’s plenty of banging and plenty of instances where new bosses (i.e., coaches and general managers) have to find a way to reboot a team’s morale. It’s the situation I found myself in in 1989 when I took over a different sort of legendary New York franchise—the Rangers.
At the time, there was a great deal of angst and worry about the direction the team was headed in since the Rangers hadn’t won a championship since 1940, so I used a five-part strategy to get it moving in the right direction.
The strategy: Evaluate, Eliminate, Reassure, Revitalize and Realign, and Ignite and Win.
EVALUATE
Tell the entire group that everyone will be evaluated fairly and commit to that. You want to take a short amount of time to get to know everyone; you no doubt already have some trusted advisers who can give you a lay of the land. You always know, going in, that there are some people that need to move on and others whose negative attitudes will simply drag the workforce down. Be careful, of course, that those advising you don’t have some personal agenda.
ELIMINATE
I knew enough about the Rangers that I could fairly quickly excise the people that had to be removed. If I hadn’t done so right away, every time I spoke to my employees about the future, I would have been lying to the ones I knew had to leave.
REASSURE
After that "bad egg" period was over, I spent weeks reassuring the rest of the team that we were in it for the long haul together. I didn’t send out a lot of memos during this time; I made the communication personal. With ongoing personal contact, the rest of the staff knew they were valued and started thinking about the future.
REVITALIZE AND REALIGN
There’s a time of fruitful change in filling some of your organization’s open positions with players you’ve developed who eagerly enter with fresh perspectives. When a company or group has spent a lot of time in flux, or in the case of the battered Wall Street giants, have many challenges ahead of them, many employees will adopt a negative attitude.
When I took over the Rangers, one of the veteran employees told me: "You’re my fourth general manager and this will be my seventh coach." He said it in an effort to demonstrate that he was there before me, and would be there after me.
His view was that C.E.O.’s are hired to be fired. A parallel might be drawn here to Yahoo, which has seen a lot of changes at the top. Some employees there might take the attitude of "we’ll see how long you last," and this kind of negativity really weighs on the mission of a company.
Realigning these attitudes so that each employee’s goal is to make new players feel welcome and not curtail the excitement about the changes that are going on is the biggest challenge. You need to inspire young and old players to commit their energies to moving the company forward.
IGNITE AND WIN
In a time when big-time C.E.O.’s can often drop in, grab millions, and then jump to another gig, it’s important your team knows your intention is to run the company for the long haul. If you can convey your passion to them, you will ignite their desire to succeed, whether through reinvention or strengthening of the organization’s core goals. If you gain your team’s trust and help them see your vision for their future and the future of the company, then you will set their energies afire.
When employees know that the big boss isn’t there just to grab a big paycheck or nab stock options, they’ll have a fiery commitment to the organization and be able to make personal commitments to motivate the workforce. Once a leader has done that, the rest will fall into place.
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