Communicate
Whenever you’ve got so many major changes going on in an organization, it’s critical that you keep all the affected parties in the loop about what’s happening.
“You spend a lot of time developing a clear communication strategy, and make it clear and as direct as you can in what we are going to do,” Belluzzo says.
He spent a lot of his time visiting his teams all over the world during this process to make sure he was telling them what his plan was and what the decisions were.
“We used the traditional broad communication around employee meetings, but in addition to that, [there was] a lot of face time in front of groups. I know shortly after the launch, I flew around the world and visited almost every site to tell them what we were going to do, what the implications were, to stay very close with people through that process,” he says.
One of the challenges in communicating such a large-scale plan to such a large group of people is ensuring that what you say doesn’t get ignored.
“I don’t know if you know that immediately, but you keep following through and reinforcing the message and expect people to come on board,” Belluzzo says. “We try to make it clear that this is where we’re going, and we need you to be with us, and you can take some time to sort it out, but ultimately you have to get on board.”
You have to make the judgment call as to when people need to get on board.
“There’s no formula for that,” he says. “It depends on the person and the areas they’re in and how critical they are, but you can’t give it very much time.”
Some people self-selected out by saying that the new direction wasn’t what they wanted to do, and he was OK with that.
“You ask, ‘What are some of the success factors?’ and it’s to get a team that has the skills and believes in the future and can work together collectively to take on the challenges that are ahead,” he says.
Between what you’ve created and who’s stayed, you should be on the right path.
“You get it mostly right, but there’s subsequent changes that you inevitably need to make because it doesn’t quite work,” he says. “It is a challenge, because when you go through transformation like this, especially for us, we were de-emphasizing certain skills in the company, certain technical skills in the company, and we were embracing new things, and there are a lot of people who feel threatened by all of that. They used to do a particular thing well, and we just said, ‘We’re not going to do that anymore.’ That’s hard.”
