Communicate, then buy some pudding
As the situation surrounding the upper management team began to stabilize, Higgins began to turn his attention toward communicating with the rest of the employees throughout the company.
While communication with managers, directors and stakeholders in a time of transition needs to be intensive and detailed, you need to take a different approach when mass communicating your message to hundreds or thousands of employees.
At Ligand, Higgins communicated with straightforward language and chocolate-flavored foodstuffs.
Employees want straight talk that centers on where the company is going and how it will affect their jobs. That is exactly what Higgins gave to his employees as he began to rebuild Ligand.
“Just by nature I’m a very straight shooter and a very candid person,” he says. “I told employees that what they should expect from me is some very direct perspectives on their business — what I like and what excites me, and frankly some things I found troubling. I shared with them my view for why this company should be proud and why it will continue to have reasons to be proud.”
Higgins encouraged feedback through the provided channels, such as e-mail and through the managerial chain of command.
“We really had an open dialogue, and I would challenge employees by asking for their thoughts and input, so they realized that everybody has a voice and can be a leader in their own way,” he says. “But I also told them, ‘If you bring me a problem, you need to bring me a solution. I’m not looking for people to just complain or tell me what they think is wrong. I’m looking for constructive participants.”
Open and candid communication, even when communicating bad news, is key to building and maintaining trust with employees. Your employees will likely handle bad news, delivered in a straightforward manner, a lot better than they’ll handle silence or vague sound bites from management.
But Higgins wanted a little more message reinforcement for his employees. He wanted them to realize that he was serious about the company’s new direction and serious about the need for everyone’s involvement — as well as an acknowledgement that trust and total unity wasn’t going to happen between employees and management overnight.
“I went to the local grocery store and picked up a whole shopping cart of chocolate pudding along with a note that outlined some of the messages from the meetings we had,” Higgins says. “I wanted them to see that the proof is in the pudding; that I don’t expect you to be with me today or right this moment, but if you generally understand what we’re talking about and the path forward, I invited them to come along for the ride and start to see evidence of how this company will transform itself.”
