Take action
Ousley made it a point to quickly respond to each group after he had met with them and explain to them what he had taken from their meetings and discussions about the state of sales and marketing at Savvis.
“I try to crystallize it down to a few key messages that I heard,” Ousley says. “So maybe one or two, three maximum. I go back and I will send a note back to that group saying, ‘Here’s what I’ve done about this. Here’s who I have talked to.’ They have to see some visible business results if it’s something that’s important to them.”
You can’t afford to talk to every last person and group in your company, and then figure out what to do about it.
“You have to have some impact in the first six to 12 months or the organization just doesn’t believe you are going to have any impact,” Ousley says. “They just don’t believe.”
As Ousley began to get a clearer picture of what was happening at Savvis, he decided that some personnel changes needed to be made.
“We had to make some changes in the sales management both at the top as well as down,” Ousley says. “The first-level sales management is really critical in any company. They are the ones touching customers and prospects at the very first level of sales support people. We really looked very hard at the talent at the very first level of sales management and made a fair amount of changes. We did some extensive training and put some new training programs in place to educate the ones we felt did have the potential to excel.”
Ousley did make a change at the top of the sales department. But for the most part, you as the CEO should not be deciding who stays and who goes, no matter how thorough you were in your information-gathering sessions.
“You’re not that close to it down in the organization,” Ousley says. “If I’m getting e-mails from people complaining about this or clients saying we have quality problems or a service problem or a sales problem, I’m going to look at the quantitative data. I’m going to talk to people and talk to different support organizations and then tell the leadership, ‘We have some issues that need to be fixed. You need to tell me how you’re going to fix them.’”
One thing you do need to be sure of, however, is that a person who is taking a new position is better and more qualified than the person he or she is replacing.
“They have to be replaced by somebody that is perceived by the organization as better,” Ousley says. “If you have to let a district sales manager go and you replace him or her with someone that is perceived as better, the fear goes away. If you put someone in there who is perceived as not as good as the one you just terminated, then you get lots of fear and concern and frustration.”
Explain yourself
It’s not always easy when you’re making changes to say, “Here’s where it starts and here’s where it’s going to end.” But you do owe it to your people to make sure they aren’t caught off-guard and that they understand when and why changes are being made.
“If you can communicate effectively why change needs to take place, then in general, people will say, ‘OK, I understand. That’s obvious. We had to do that. That person wasn’t part of the mission here,’” Ousley says. “It’s all about communication. If you can communicate why you’re changing this, the ones who want to understand it will. There will always be naysayers, and you can’t ever dispel all the fears. If you can communicate why things are being done, people can buy in to it.”
You also need to continue to show that there are open lines of communication between you and your employees and that the feedback they provided to you wasn’t for naught. They need to know that you’re using that feedback as changes are enacted.
“One of the things that became obvious to me in all these small group discussions was everybody was disgruntled over the lack of any merit increases for several years driven by the recession,” Ousley says.
Ousley felt like merit increases would accomplish at least two good things: They would show that he had heard employee concerns and was responding. They would also be perceived as a sign to employees that, “Hey, you’re part of our future. And here’s a bump in pay to prove it.”
“They are going to be rewarded for their energies,” Ousley says. “Then people have to look at themselves in the mirror. If I didn’t get a merit increase, why is that? That doesn’t make them any happier, of course, but if they are honest with themselves, it does have some impact.”
Ousley wanted employees to know that he didn’t view the changes he had led and implemented as the cure for everything that had been a problem at Savvis. So when employee surveys were conducted and revealed that some people still felt like there wasn’t enough communication, he openly talked about it.
“We had an employee meeting that I led and we showed the good, the bad and the ugly,” Ousley says. “Then I basically said, ‘We’re going to work on these three or four areas.’ That message gets across that, ‘OK, they are listening and they are going to do something about it. I can give my input.’”
As Savvis moves into 2011, the company is showing signs it’s on the right track. After posting $874 million in fiscal 2009 revenue, the company is on pace to build on that figure in fiscal 2010.
“The management team we put in place is leading this organization very effectively now, or much more effectively than in the past,” Ousley says. “So the changes we made in some of the senior leadership are working, so I feel good about that.”
Ousley says professional leadership training is one of the most important changes and will help maintain a culture focused on growing the business.
“You have to go listen to people and then you have to go do something,” Ousley says. “You have to show something visibly, show that you’re changing something. Those are a couple of the front-end leadership things that are pretty tried-and-true and work pretty effectively.”
How to reach: Savvis Inc., (800) 728-8471 or www.savvis.net
