Philip Koen knew employees at SAVVIS Inc. were going through a tough time after losing their leader in a controversial departure just a few months earlier. Now Koen was being asked to step in and turn things around.
But it wasn’t doubt he saw in the eyes of his employees as he prepared to speak to them for the first time.
“What just shot at me was this was a group of individuals who wanted this company to succeed,” Koen says. “They wanted to be part of a winning organization. They had all the tools and capability. But fundamentally, the trust element had been ruptured.”
Koen was appointed CEO of the IT service provider in March 2006 following an investigation into a claim brought by American Express against SAVVIS. It concerned disputed charges made more than two years earlier on an American Express card issued to former CEO Robert A. McCormick.
“We had gone through a pretty tough time as everyone knows, and it was very visible,” Koen says. “What I’ve always tried to do is be realistic. You never want to insult the intelligence of your team. They know the facts. To stand up in front of a group and say everything is rosy, I can’t think of a better way to foster distrust and fracture an organization.”
Koen scrapped the rah-rah speech. He stood at the doorway to the meeting hall and greeted each employee with a welcoming handshake as he or she entered the room.
“I told them I was new, and I was interested in hearing from them,” Koen says. “I think that took a lot of people aback. That was a small symbolic thing I tried to do to set the tone.”
Koen talked about aspects of his personal life in that initial meeting with employees, and he addressed the challenges that employees had concerns about in an open and honest manner. He acknowledged the past and laid out his plan for the future of the 2,200-employee company. It centered around three elements: rebuilding trust, encouraging constructive debate on how to help the company succeed, and engaging the passion and commitment of everyone in the organization to make it all happen.
“All a company really is is a group of individuals that have come together for a collective purpose,” Koen says. “If you’re in that position of leadership or trying to help that group pave the way, the first thing you really need to make certain that people understand is, ‘What’s the thing you’re trying to accomplish?’
“There is nothing more powerful than getting a group of individuals that opt into a particular thought or movement or goal. It’s that process of getting people to opt in to that common view that’s the glue factor upon which everything else is built.”
Here’s how Koen applied the glue and got his employees to believe in the company again.
