Communicate
The town-hall meeting in which McAleese was going to communicate his decisions — the next step in leading your business during tough times — honestly wasn’t going to differ from how he had communicated all along.
Even in the good times, he always had five structured town-hall meetings each year to outline what’s happening in the world economy, how it’s impacting Bendix’s industry, how it’s impacting the company and what leadership is doing about those things.
During those meetings, he also shared with his employees the monthly scorecards that he used to monitor each of the initiatives in the company’s goals for that year.
“You need to decide which items that you’re going to communicate on a regular basis, …” McAleese says. “People who haven’t started it can be fearful of it because they complicate it. It’s a very simple thing. Communicating is at the core of our management system. It’s at the core of what’s important. It’s not a tremendous amount of preparation or a tremendous amount of work. You just have to get started.”
Keep your message to no more than an hour. Then give employees about a half an hour to ask questions.
“Once you get past that, people get antsy,” he says. “You got to get them out of there in an hour and a half.”
After each meeting, employees fill out a short survey about how effective and valuable they thought it was and their opinions on company matters, and meeting length was something that came up when he’d go too long.
“When you get into bad times, yeah, you need to communicate, and it’s more important than ever that you communicate in those bad times, but it’s a lot easier process if you started the communication process in the good times,” he says.
When times started to get tough, McAleese then shifted his message from talking about the scorecards half of the time to talking about the economy 80 percent of the time. As he and his team identified options for adapting to the hard times, he would share those with his employees so they knew what could happen in the future. As they made decisions, they communicated those openly in these forums, as well.
“During this time, it’s even more important that we communicate with them and explain where we’re going and what we might do, so we’re very transparent on the range of options, and we’ve tried to continuously communicate to them what’s the economy doing, how that impacts our industry, how the industry impacts our business and what we’re doing,” McAleese says.
He also made sure to talk about how the company was still being successful though.
“It’s very easy to get into these negative thoughts and negative spiral, but we have to recognize that there’s a lot of great things going on in the business,” he says.
So when McAleese and his team needed to lay off some employees and furlough others until the end of the year, he told them in the town hall.
“We had two options — you rush out and eliminate positions and impact people and then in the town hall tell people about it — that’s an option,” he says. “Or do you tell people about it in a town hall — what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, the magnitude of what you’re doing, and then you go and execute it?”
He chose the latter, so he told them what was happening and how many people it would affect — but not who. After the meeting, management spent the next day and a half communicating with the affected individuals. The downside is that it leaves employees in limbo for a day or so, but McAleese says he’d rather do that than not tell people upfront, and then have rumors flying once he started meeting with people because nobody knows what’s going on.
This process happened on a Tuesday and Wednesday, and employees were informed that Friday would be their last day.
“We didn’t march them out of the building when we told them,” he says. “We told them, ‘Friday is your last day, and now it’s up to you what you want to do. If you want to go home now and not come back, that’s fine with us. If you want to go home now, come back tomorrow or Friday to say goodbye to people, that’s fine with us. If you want to stay for the two and a half days, that’s fine with us.’ We let them manage their exit in their own way. I think that added dignity to how they left.”
After you have those conversations, though, there’s still more communication to be had.
“Whenever you go through that, there’s a lot of emotions in the organization — the people that are making the decisions, the people delivering the news, the people that are leaving the organization and then the people who are left behind,” he says. “You have to manage the emotions on all those levels.”
Immediately after those conversations, McAleese walked around to talk to people who had been furloughed and reinforce that he hopes to bring them back in the future.
“As a leader, you need to go out and be visible in the organization,” he says. “You need to walk around and talk to people. It’s not a time to go hide in your office.”
Keep your message consistent with what you’ve already told them. Most people he spoke with were not angry, and while they were disappointed and sad, they understood.
“You have to be willing to be out there and be visible and accept the consequences of the decisions that you made and be out there and talk to people and understand how they’re feeling,” McAleese says.
