Encourage your messengers
As your people move past the initial days of announcements and big meetings, you need to make sure information is still flowing through the organization and some of the questions people had are being answered.
“You’d have to be fairly dense or oblivious to the concerns of your employees or clients not to realize that people are hungry for information and hungry for contact,” Gonsiorowski says. “Just the contact alone can be seen as a positive thing. The failures would be they just don’t reach out and they don’t communicate openly and honestly quickly enough.”
Since you can’t be there to speak personally to everyone in your organization, encourage your other leaders to be more visible.
“It’s about making sure that you’re more visible than you normally would be, that you have more communications rather than less and that you’re as honest as you can be,” Gonsiorowski says. “Visibility and frequency are probably more critical in a high-change environment than less. You start out by saying, ‘We’re going through a period of change and uncertainty and that’s why we’re meeting more often, so that we can have dialogue and discussion of all the aspects of what’s happening.’”
When problems crop up, don’t shy away from them.
“I’m a big proponent of confronting problems head on rather than deferring and delaying and ignoring,” Gonsiorowski says. “I’ve always thought the frontal assault approach to solving problems is usually the most effective.”
Work with your people on dealing with problems and difficulties that they might have in speaking to their direct reports.
“You’d say, ‘Did you think about what you wanted to communicate? Did you realize how painfully uncomfortable you appeared up there? Did you test drive your message before delivering it?’” Gonsiorowski says. “You’d work with them to try to improve it. It’s one of the key jobs that a leader has is coaching and developing the team. Every good CEO has his successor always under management, always being groomed and prepared to take over when necessary. That’s true, and you constantly have to be developing talent and coaching your team.”
Beyond your efforts to coach and train and provide as much information as you can, you just have to hope you’ve done a good job preparing your people to be confident that the cascading of information is taking place.
“Your only true test as to whether you did it well or not is time,” Gonsiorowski says.
With the PNC acquisition of National City, the deal was announced on Oct. 24, 2008, and closed less than three months later on Dec. 31.
Gonsiorowski credits the ability of himself and others in the organization to get information out to the people as a key to the successful transition to become part of the $2.4 billion company.
“I often say my job as president in this market is not to screw it up,” Gonsiorowski says. “I’m delighted to say I haven’t. When you have a great team and they have been in place a long time and their relationships with both their team and their clients is strong, it makes this a lot easier.”
For those who don’t like change and all the work that goes into it, Gonsiorowski can’t offer much in the way of hope.
“Get used to it; it will keep coming at you,” Gonsiorowski says. “We all live in a pretty fast-paced environment. Just recognizing that fact alone can sometimes help you deal with it.”
How to reach: The PNC Financial Services Group Inc., (888) 762-2265 or www.pnc.com