Know your options
When his human resources department sent him a memo saying that another company had cut executive pay by 10 percent, McAleese vividly remembers thinking it was the stupidest idea in the world.
“I said, ‘Well, that’s a dumb idea. That’s not a very good idea. We’re not going to do that,’” he says.
Coming to terms with your emotions is the first step in putting all of your options on the table.
“You need to get everybody willing to discuss the items, which means that you have to personally get there, too,” he says. “This is not just about managing other people’s emotions. It’s managing your own.”
Seeing his own emotions helped him start the process.
“You have to recognize your personal reaction to those things because these things are very personal,” McAleese says. “They’re very personal for you as an individual, and they’re going to be very personal for all of your employees if you go and decide to do those things.”
You have to know what’s going on in your industry and with the economy.
“You see one person out there doing something like that, you go, ‘That’s not a very good idea,’” he says. “You see two, you go, ‘Well, OK.’ When you see five or six or seven, you say, ‘OK, if other people are doing it, they’re going through the same set of issues we’re going through and they’re looking at the same set of facts, and they’re concluding that that’s a good option.’ I may not initially like it, but that has to be on the list of items we need to discuss.”
While his initial reaction to lowering executive pay was that it was out of the question, he eventually softened, which allowed him to think with an open mind.
“It’s the whole leadership team managing their emotional reactions to that,” McAleese says. “Until we can come to grips with it, we can’t go out and communicate it and execute it properly, so it’s getting us past that emotional hurdle that it’s an acceptable option for the short term — not the long term but for the short term.”
And that’s the key. Things such as pay cuts and furloughs or layoffs weren’t in his line of vision a year ago.
“Those were not things we’d even consider, but when you get in the depth of the economic crisis that our industry is in right now, you have to make sure you have the whole range of options in front of you, so that’s the first thing — making sure you have the whole range of options in front of you.”
