Take stock of the situation
To this day, Donnelly keeps in his office
a reminder of his first days on the job.
It’s a box of Domino sugar.
“It’s how I described this situation to
many of my employees,” he says. “In life,
sometimes you get faced with a challenge, sort of like having lemons, but our
goal was to make lemonade and have something positive come out of this.
“So after I said that, one of my employees sent me a box of Domino sugar,
which I still have in my office, along with
a note she wrote that said, ‘Let’s just
make sure the lemonade is sweet, so I’m
sending you some sugar.’”
But in order to turn lemons into lemonade, Donnelly had to gauge just how
sour his employees were on the situation. To make any go-forward plan work,
he needed buy-in from as many employees as possible, but they weren’t going to
buy in without assurance from management that their trust would be rewarded.
“You can imagine that in a time like
that, there are lots of different emotions
with your employee base and probably
with your customer base,” he says.
“Emotions like anger, anxiety, wondering what is going to happen with the
company, is it going to fall apart, all of
those things. We needed to deal with a
variety of those emotions and keep
everyone focused on what needed to be
done. Also, I guess in many ways I
thought of myself as a cheerleader, getting everyone to believe in us, that we
had a plan. One of our constraints was
time, and our customer base was looking
to see how long it was going to take for
us to execute our plan and so forth.”
PMA Capital’s leaders were working
with legal counsel, financial managers
and other groups to begin formulating
the initial steps in the company’s
rebound, but employees who aren’t
directly involved in that process aren’t
going to be as concerned with the nuts
and bolts of the situation. They’re going
to be concerned with knowing that the
company will remain healthy enough to
keep them employed.
That is where trust comes in, and that
is where communication becomes one
of a leader’s most important jobs.
