Talk people through the process
Holdren was fortunate enough to play a round of golf in Florida with Jack Nicklaus awhile back, and he picked up a tip. Surprisingly, that tip had nothing to do with his short game. A third man playing with them was a bit older, and he shared his thoughts on doing good business.
“He said, ‘Son, whenever you do a deal or whenever you’re dealing with any person or any matter or any contract or anything, when you shake hands with someone, it’s your word. Make sure that both parties feel like they were treated fairly in any negotiations, that no one feels that they won or lost,’” Holdren says.
And while Holdren still brags that he came pretty close to Nicklaus’ score that day, he holds onto that advice even more dearly.
“First and foremost, people have to believe that you’re trustworthy,” he says. “If people don’t believe they can trust your word and they don’t think that you care about them and that you’re only in it for the money, that’s really a slippery slope.”
Part of building that is a simple philosophy Holdren has: “Don’t say something you just think they want to hear.” He lived that when he had to tell people that the bonus structure would be different for 2009.
“We recently had a conversation about bonuses, and I think it might have missed people’s expectations, but I think they appreciated the honesty and the candor,” he says.
In order to keep that candor, be present when the big announcements are made. In fact, Holdren addressed a new class of employees toward the end of 2008 because their starting day had been delayed by a few weeks.
“I went out and told all of them why they started late, why we decided to do what we did, what had happened to Huron,” he says. “And in some ways, it would have been easy to just say we’re not going to honor our commitment to you, we could have just not hired them and it would have been easy. So I told them what happened to the business, why it slipped a little bit, why we had to defer the hiring, why college hiring wasn’t going to be as much this year and how we’re going to sort of lean on employees and bonuses might not be as good. I told them the things that I suffer with every day as a CEO, and people appreciate that.”
Being present for those types of announcements helps humanize the tough decisions you have to make. It won’t always have employees doing cartwheels about cutbacks, but it will allow them to see you as an honest leader doing the best you can. To Holdren, living by those principles is what will make your long-term success as a leader.
“You have to be honest, and you have to be principle-based, and you just can’t vary from it,” he says. “It could be bringing someone in and telling them to leave because they’re not performing or making a tough decision that’s principle-based or that’s the right thing to do but that’s maybe not the best financially. If you don’t live by that, then you don’t really have much to live by.”
How to reach: Huron Consulting Group Inc., (312) 583-8700 or www.huronconsultinggroup.com
