Increasing accountability
“My initial assessments of the situation and what to do about
it were somewhat easy to make because I had the benefit of
being with the company for a while,” Klayko says. “I also knew
what my skill sets were, and I wanted to maximize the
strengths that I have as a leader, which are setting direction,
executing consistently, and holding myself and others accountable. Because of the turmoil, I wanted to get everybody on the
same page, and we needed to increase accountability for performance to get the company moving again. You need to have
a shared sense of goals and accountability because you’ll never
get anywhere as an organization with everyone swimming
upstream.
“I kept a high percentage of the management team when I
came into the CEO role because we needed to hit the ground
running. I know that as single individuals, people in a company can’t change things; when we are all united behind the
cause, we can make significant progress.”
Klayko says that he used goal-setting sessions to establish a
common performance framework for Brocade. He placed himself and his direct reports on performance contracts and held
his performance open to scrutiny and comments from his
team.
“I solicited feedback from the employees about how they
wanted to hold me accountable and I combined that with how
I wanted to hold myself accountable. I created a performance
contract for myself and posted it on the intranet for everyone
to review and they could also comment about how I was
doing,” Klayko says. “Performance contract accountability
now cascades down in our organization, and everyone is granular to the same vision, and we all have common financial
goals and objectives.
“I think that this has improved our accountability because
everyone likes to be measured, people like keeping score. The
boundaries are now clear and the staff knows what I’m expecting of them and everybody understands their role in the companywide performance objectives. By posting my performance
goals on the intranet, I am open about what I’m doing and I’m
demonstrating transparency in my communications — which
is helping to build trust.”
