Appealing to employees
Thiry had to draw a line in the sand when forming his plan to rebuild DaVita. He needed to come up with a long-term plan that would make the company prosperous, but not allow
those in the company to get too far ahead of themselves while executing the plan.
Thiry says he acknowledged that there would be far more questions than answers in the early going, and he needed to field those questions regardless of where they came from.
With employees spread across 500 locations, giving them all access to corporate headquarters was a task in and of itself.
“The communication plan had, by necessity, many pieces,” he says. “Most of our teammates didn’t have a phone extension at work, or even a work e-mail address, because they are
hands-on caregivers.”
DaVita started increasing its phone and e-mail network to connect the caregivers.
“We probably increased by 500 percent the number of teammates who were on the voicemail system so we could be communicating with them,” he says.
Thiry also began inviting hundreds of employees to take part in company calls, during which he reported on recent events and took questions.
“We wanted to show everyone that tough questions could be asked,” he says. “Then they got to personally assess whether the answers sounded intelligent, honest and pragmatic.”
The employees weren’t first and foremost interested in the large plan for the future; they simply wanted to know if DaVita — and their jobs — would still exist in six months or a year.
With that in mind, Thiry didn’t paint long-range visions for his employees at first. Instead, he concentrated on the small, incremental victories.
“First, we needed to define what progress was,” he says. “It was clear we weren’t going to be scoring any big touchdowns immediately. So you had to define what was a first down so
that people could feel good, and that while we were still in trouble in those first months, we were unambiguously making progress.”
Thiry says the worst thing you can do when your company is in trouble is to gloss things over. So while he highlighted the initial small victories, he also made it clear to the DaVita team
that the company was not out of the woods.
Employees want to know what is going on, good or bad, and being up-front with them is crucial if you want them to buy in to the company’s rehabilitation. Thiry says he made up his
mind at the outset that it was best to be frank with his workers, even about his own shortcomings.
“Every year, when I give my state of the (company) address, I start by pointing out my failures and areas of underperformance,” he says. “That is not a fun thing to do, but how can I
possibly expect others to have reasonable conversations with me about their mistakes if I don’t start with my own?”
If you don’t have credibility as a CEO, you don’t have much else, at least in the eyes of your employees. That fact is compounded when your company is on shaky ground.
“People can’t work hard, people can’t behave in an apolitical, team-oriented way, people can’t start to be honest about their own weaknesses and failures until they believe senior management demonstrates honesty around tough issues,” he says.