Communicate why
Chiricosta doesn’t listen to consultants. If he needs a consultant to tell him how your department should be running, then why does he need you to run it?
But there was one piece of consultant advice he did listen to when he first took over: “He told me, ‘Rick, the most important thing for you is to be as visible as you can, and you can never overcommunicate,’” he says. “I tell you, that was unbelievably good advice.”
Because Chiricosta was virtually unknown to most of the company, he needed to earn trust, so he focused on communicating to employees.
“There was a lot of uncertainty of, ‘Who is this guy?’” he says. “I just felt that the more I could communicate with them about two things — the ‘what’ we were going to be doing and, more importantly, the ‘why’ — those were some of the biggest things that I feel strongly about.”
This was crucial because of the changes Chiricosta was trying to make to better position MMO in the downturn.
“You tell your employees, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’” he says. “That’s great, you’ve told them. If you don’t take even more time to tell them why we’re doing it, you’ve made a huge mistake.”
One of the biggest examples of this was his decision to terminate the employee pension plan. Some would gasp or scream or accuse him of being anti-employee, but he had a real reason for doing so.
The pension plan had been frozen back in 2001, so anyone who was hired after Jan. 1, 2002, wasn’t participating in the plan. Anyone, like Chiricosta, who was a participant, hadn’t had anything added to it since that time. Yet, despite that, it was costing MMO money to pay people to handle the benefits it was paying out and to do the required financial reporting for the plan. On top of that, because you’re investing for the long term, the company could be at serious financial risk if the markets tanked.
“I’m sitting there going, ‘You know what? We’re spending all this money on this, the company is at big financial risk, it’s of no value to our employees, and it’s a big distraction because finance people, human resource people, me and a lot of others take a lot of time throughout the year making sure that plan is OK,’” Chiricosta says.
So he decided to terminate the plan and pay employees what they had in it.
“When you explain it to people that way, it has a totally different context, so I stood up in front of the employees and explained to them, ‘Yes, we’re terminating the plan, but (there are) two things you need to know,’” he says.
He went on to explain the administrative toll it was taking on the company and the financial risk it put MMO at. But then he also went on to explain to them why they couldn’t go out and buy a boat with the money they were getting — that they needed to roll it over into another retirement plan because this was their retirement savings and he’d hate for them to not be taken care of when that time came.
“You walk through it, and I think one of the keys, in terms of selling the idea, is there’s nothing like the truth,” he says. … “You tell them the truth. You don’t dance around it, and I think people respond well. They don’t always like it — we have lots of meetings where people walk out and they say, ‘I don’t know if I like what I heard, but I understand it.’”
