Jeff Margolis knows his place. As the CEO of a public company, he learned that leaders belong below employees, customers and shareholders on the totem pole.
So his priorities were already aligned when he took The TriZetto Group Inc. private — it was just more of the same philosophy.
“You’ve got to put yourself last,” says Margolis, who founded the health care IT solutions provider in 1997 and has served as chairman and CEO ever since. “You have to put your shareholders’, your employees’ and your customers’ needs ahead of your own.”
Ironically, putting constituents’ needs ahead of yours means getting out in front of them.
“When you’re going through change, you need to have a very strong vision of the company that gets communicated [and the] ability to express that in the context each of your different constituencies will understand,” he says.
For TriZetto, that vision was to optimize benefits and care for consumers by providing integrated health care management solutions. Although the half-billion-dollar company was doing well, the board decided — in light of the economic climate — to consider unsolicited bids.
Ultimately, that led to Apax Partners’ acquisition of TriZetto in August 2008. And that meant that Margolis had to keep communicating what the vision meant and how the company was progressing toward it.
He created a master work plan to guide every aspect of that communication, including what messages needed to be delivered to whom, by whom, how and when. He had to develop relevant messages for each constituency and make sure they were rolled out. To maintain consistency, every key message was vetted through Margolis, his head of human capital management and his chief legal officer.
“What we then did was continuously communicated that messaging to our customers on a business-as-normal basis,” he says. “It’s important not to deviate from a business-as-usual basis when you’re undergoing a change of control.
“Basically, you are doing almost all the same things you’re doing when you’re running the business as usual, except you’re better at pointing out what business as usual means,” Margolis says. “Ironically, it becomes more important in times of change to emphasize what is normal and what’s going on on a regular basis.”
Here’s how Margolis broke down his message to maintain business as usual during a change.