Break down walls
Before Leparulo could turn around Novatel, he had to turn around its culture. That meant breaking down the old culture and the alliances that held it in place. Leparulo needed to reorganize the power structure of the company around the centralized authority of himself and his management team.
“We centralized decision-making down to an autocratic level and then that decision-making would radiate out as a web over the entire company,” he says.
To begin the process, Leparulo gave a series of speeches that reached everyone in the company. Through those speeches, he quickly set the ground rules of how he would lead the company in the future.
“I went around and told everyone that the company was not going to be led by committee,” he says. “I told everyone that we would go out with a clearly defined vision upfront, unleash that vision, communicate it to everybody and persuade people that was the right vision. Then we’d move to giving feedback and instilling more of a task-based culture, rather than a person-based culture.”
Leparulo says task-based cultures are driven by accomplishing goals, by putting the right people in the right places to get the job done. A person-based culture places individual agendas ahead of organizational goals.
Once employees at Novatel were given authority based on their ability to do their jobs instead of who they knew, the new culture began to take root.
“When we started giving authority based on someone’s expertise at solving a given problem, instead of having a culture where people were superior to the organization, that started to break down the barriers where people were not working cross-functionally,” Leparulo says. “And we very much focused the top management group on showing that to everyone in the company. Whatever we were asking of employees, we were asking of top management first. That greatly helped in breaking down the divides among people and ensured that people were allowed to make decisions based on their expertise.
“In the end, you need to tie results to the people who have the responsibility and authority to achieve those results. In our organization, those had been decoupled.”
Even though Leparulo made it very clear from the outset that the new culture was here to stay, focusing a company of hundreds in a new direction is a difficult task. Leparulo and his leadership team did meet some resistance, and in some cases, they needed to part ways with dissenters.
“We did need to use some sacrificial lambs, so to speak, to show that we meant business and we were not going to tolerate the old politics,” Leparulo says. “But we did give everyone a chance to get on board. For individuals who didn’t get on board right away, we set up a series of goals for them; then we’d communicate how those goals were going to be measured. We then would revisit them, and if someone wasn’t hitting their goals, either the goal was unachievable or we might be asking something of someone that they simply aren’t able to do. As the leader, your job is to either change the person or change the goal.”
Leparulo and his leadership team also set the pace for change by setting an example with their actions.
“When we were performing the turnaround, we also asked employees to take pay cuts, but we as a management team took pay cuts first. Management was first in the office each morning and last to leave the office each evening. On every level, we wanted every person in the company to see that there was commitment to this new culture all the way to the top level.”
The commitment can’t start in any other place. If employees don’t see the commitment from management to live the new culture, it will never take root.
“When you’re trying to change things in such a transformative way and do it very quickly, people generally look at the landscape around them, see how things are around the company, how people are interacting,” Leparulo says. “Then, they generally model what the top management is doing.
“When you have to move a company very quickly and do it from apex to base, management has to be the first to commit to the change, the first to give others in the company the confidence to believe in this new direction. It allows you to persuade individuals to want to be led in this direction, while still operating in an entrepreneurial environment.”