Examine your data
If the data had shown Modany that ITT wasn’t capable of footing the bill for student education, he would have had to come up with another option to get the company through the recession. It’s why he needed to keep a close watch on everyone’s progress in addressing the student financing problem.
“You set up a process to ensure that you regularly sit down with those individuals and you review on a frequency that makes sense,” Modany says. “It might be weekly. It might be monthly or it might be biweekly. You review with them. Where are you at? What is the number? What is it versus the target? What actions are you taking? What’s working? What’s not working?”
When you’re working to solve a problem, you need to have checkpoints along the way to see how you’re doing.
“We all need to know where we’re going and we need to have the directions to get there and then we need to make sure we’re checking those directions frequently so that we don’t get off track,” Modany says.
Make sure your people are clear about what the final result looks like and understand that this outcome is how they will be judged.
“I’m going to help you, coach you, train you and mentor you, and make sure you have the resources you need,” Modany says. “But at the end of the day, you have to get the job done. It’s going to be based upon the scoreboard that I hand you. That sheet has those goals and objectives. They all link together and they all come up together and there’s one document at the end with five or six organizational goals or objectives that we all want to achieve that we are defining as success.”
It shouldn’t take a crisis for you to clearly identify your expectations for your employees.
“A lot of it starts in the interview,” Modany says. “Before I hire you, I have to let you know what’s expected, what our culture is, how we operate and how we measure ourselves. Getting overly complicated is not very helpful for our employees. It doesn’t help them achieve their objectives and it just makes things overly complicated for the organization as a whole.”
By taking a clear and focused approach and helping his people to understand exactly what he expected, ITT was able to weather the storm. Shareholders saw their earnings per share increase from $5.18 in 2008 to $8.01 in 2009.
“We had an interim solution we put in place and then the team went to work on the objective of a long-term solution and we were able to come up with a longer-term solution that fits our needs,” Modany says.
Students also came out in good shape, as evidenced by an increase in enrollment from 65,620 in March 2009 to 84,555 in March 2010.
“The rest of the organization stayed focused on students and employers and we’ve had very solid, very good operating results while at the same time working through a mission-critical issue that could have been a big distraction but wasn’t,” Modany says.
How to reach: ITT Educational Services Inc., (800) 488-8324 or http://www.ittesi.com/
