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| Joachim De Posada |
By Joachim De Posada
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Difficult decisions: Letting go of executives and
managers that can’t do the job.
The great
football coach and motivational speaker Vince Lombardi said:
“If you are
not fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm”.
That my
friends should be a mantra in every organization. Every job, whether you deal
with the public or you are hidden in a corner office needs enthusiasm to
perform at the level needed today to be successful.
Vince was
right. In today’s world with the amount of competition and much more
sophisticated clients, companies need people that love their jobs, that feel
passion for what they are doing, and that demonstrate great enthusiasm and a
positive attitude when they are at work.
A man named
Bill Zollars, who used to work for Ryder Trucks in Miami, Florida and left that
company to become CEO of Yellow Corporation at a time when that company was on
the verge of bankruptcy, had to face the Board of Directors on his first day on
the job.
The first
question they asked of him was: “What do you think this company needs more than
anything else?”
Do you know
what he answered? His answer will shock
most of you as it did me:
“Public
Hangings!”
Recalling
the moment in an interview with Jason Jennings, Zollars said that he perceived
panic in the room and a collective gasp. Everybody in the room probably had at
that moment, one question in their minds, “Who have we hired to lead this
company?”
Well, as it
turned out, they had hired the right executive to head the company. Taking a
company that was very close to closing its doors and letting go of thousands of
employees, in a few years he achieved dramatic results in all measures of
productivity in the freight business including: Customer satisfaction which was
at a very low level, on time service,
dock bills per hour, and tons per tractor per year. Today, Yellow is close to reaching $4 billion
dollars a year with much higher annual revenue than most companies in that
industry.
Zollars
management theory, very important to understand in today’s business climate, is
that a new CEO or President or even a manager in a department, committed to
improving a business needs to send a loud signal to everyone in the
organization that things will never be as they were and that they will change
fast.
His vivid “public hangings” metaphor definitely
conveyed that message I would say in a very clear manner. Bill Zollars believes
that since people are such an important part of the equation for a company to
be successful, you must keep the executives that will help the company achieve
its goals and the people who don’t fit into your new paradigm move them out of
the company as soon as possible, meaning very fast.
It has been
said that Lee Iacocca who used to head Chrysler Corporation during very
challenging times and who was very successful in turning it around, had a sign
behind his desk that read: THE FLOGGINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES.
It was
probably a joke but that is what he believed in, very much like Mr. Zollars.
What he was
trying to communicate is that you better get with the program or you are out.
Business
leaders have no control over weather, natural disasters, the economy, interest
rates or what competitors do; yet thinking or worrying about these issues often
takes up much of their day.
What a
leader can control is who joins or leaves the team and how to develop and train
those on board.
Unfortunately,
most leaders make poor use of this freedom. To fix, build, or take an
organization to a higher level, a leader must exercise one of leaderships
greatest privileges proactive and aggressively, deciding whom to keep and whom
to fire.
We all know
that our culture in Puerto Rico and other Hispanic countries with the “hay
bendito” makes it extremely difficult to do this but if you look at it from a
different point of view, you will soon realize that if you keep someone that
doesn’t have the talent or the motivation to hold a specific job, you are not
doing that person a favor.
There is a reason that he or she is not
performing and it could very well be that the person is not pursuing his or her
passion and sooner or later it will catch up and it is much better to find out
sooner than later. Everyone should have fun and make money doing what they love
to do. Spending eight hours a day, one third of your life stuck in a job you
don’t enjoy doing is a tragedy.
We must face
the fact that in Puerto Rico with expensive labor and high wages, there is a
need for effective executives and committed employees that will lead a team to
high levels of productivity. Those executives or employees that can’t do that should
not be working in the organization.
Otherwise we have no chance competing against
countries with much lower wages than us.
If you are
in a situation in which you must make a company more productive, besides hiring
capable consultants (there aren’t many), you must ask yourself a few key
questions:
What do I
really want for the future of this company and what strategy will I implement
to make it happen?
Do I have
the right people to implement the new strategy?
Do I have
the resources needed to accomplish our goals and objectives?
What
processes will need to be put in place to turn out a quality product or
service?
Will I have
measurement systems to track our progress?
Yes, there
are other important questions but these are enough to steer you in the right
track.
