Turn employees into believers
Dutkowsky knew the company had a lot of potential, but he had to get employees to see what he saw to make the game plan work.
“That’s a process that never ends,” he says. “It’s not like you call everybody in a room and say, ‘OK, today we’re here and tomorrow we’re going to be there.’ It doesn’t work that way.”
You have to do that in much smaller baby steps and avoid using brute force to get buy-in
“There are a lot of executives that come in and join companies and make changes with brute force,” he says. “I’m not a big fan of that. You need to get buy-in from the organization as opposed to telling them what to do.”
A better method is to use communication to empower employees and establish buy-in.
“If there’s one place where I tried to go overboard, it would be on the idea of communicating,” he says. “Because, once you communicate to people what you think is important and where you think the company needs to go and where our strengths and weaknesses are, then they begin to see where the out-of-bounds lines and where the goal line are.”
Dutkowsky has an all-employee quarterly meeting where everyone on campus comes in a room and talks about the company’s performance, reviews initiatives and recognizes the best employees of the quarter.
“You figure there are 1,000 people in a room and then at the end of that you say, ‘Now are there any questions?’ and no one is going to ask a question in that an environment,” he says. “But, you reinforce behavior with the way you recognize the employees of the quarter, and you reinforce the importance of execution and diversification in the way you talk about the performance of the company. But then you’ve got to give people the opportunity to talk about it in smaller groups.”
That smaller group meeting doesn’t have to be a formal get-together. Dutkowsky has monthly birthday parties for employees with birthdays in that particular month.
“Now, as opposed to having a meeting of 1,000 people, we have a meeting of maybe 50 or 60,” he says. “In that meeting, there are no flip charts, there are no Pow
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Points. It’s just dialogue, and you try to get people to … ask questions and probe into what they want to know about the way the company is going to work. And again, it’s a great opportunity to reinforce what’s important in the company, what the strategy is, what the game plan is and where the company is performing well.
“I talk pointedly about our competition and where I think they are outperforming us. I talk about what our customers are saying about us when I talk to our customers in the marketplace, because the vast majority of our employees never talk to a customer. You don’t know what the customer thinks of Tech Data; our salespeople do. But, the average employee doesn’t hear that stuff. So, in small groups, you communicate again about what’s good and bad about the company, you get their feedback and you answer their questions.”
Creating that relaxing environment will allow employees to let their guard down, and ask some questions they wouldn’t in a group of 1,000.
“When you come to a birthday party, we have cake and ice cream, and we sit around and we chit-chat about things a little bit before we get into the business,” he says. “I think the idea is people get more relaxed than if you say, ‘You’re going to have a meeting with the CEO. You better dress right and think of the right questions,’ versus, you come to a birthday party, and it’s much more casual.”
Reiterating your game plan numerous times using different avenues, such as small and large group meetings, is an effective way to get your point across.
“You lay out for the organization what needs to happen for it to be successful, and you try to articulate that in as many different ways as you can think of so it connects with people,” he says. “There’s theory written that a person has to hear something seven times before they comprehend it.”
The same thing happens when it comes to leadership.
“People don’t meet the leader and say, ‘Hey, I buy in to everything that guy says, and for my 40 or 50 hours a week that I’m at Tech Data, I’m just going to put all my energy to what that guy just told me is going to happen.’ It doesn’t work that way,” he says.
“It happens over many touch points. Again, that’s why my belief on communication with the all-hands meetings, the smaller meetings, with video. Every quarter, we record a video that I try to talk in three minutes or less about what went on in the company the last 90 days and what do we need to be focused on as we go forward. You can’t communicate enough as a leader to get people to buy in to where you think the company needs to go.”
Dutkowsky’s game plan took the company from losing $97 million to generating $123.6 million in net income for fiscal 2009.
“I didn’t join the company and say, ‘Hey, you know what, tomorrow, we are going to stop distributing technology and start distributing Wrangler jeans or something,” he says. “It was, ‘We have a set of core competencies, and let’s just make sure those competencies are as effective and efficient as they can be and that the right people were driving the right initiatives around those core competencies.’”
Overall, Dutkowsky says to understand instantly that you are only as good as your team of people.
“Implied in leadership is that there are other people, other individuals, other personalities, other backgrounds that need to be led or asking to be led,” he says. “I think the problem that most senior executives face is they think they are going to do everything on their own and the idea that I’m going to join the company and I’m going to change the company is a fallacy.
“It’s not just one person, even though at the end of the day someone sits at the top of the pyramid. That’s just the way it works. But, the reality of it is a company is only as good as the team of people that comprise the company. The leadership team is only as good as the team of people that comprise that group of leaders. As lame as it sounds, there is no ‘I’ in team. That is my fundamental business belief.”
How to reach: Tech Data Corp., (727) 539-7429 or www.techdata.com
