Take control of the huddle
When things were at their ugliest at Inter/Media, Yallen turned to the people he trusted most in his company and in the outside world for comfort. You don’t want to get your people too worked up, so save the worst for closed doors.
“It’s difficult at best, and what you need to do is surround yourself with your top people and any of your outside advisers and have them work with you and work with them on maintaining calmness,” he says.
Those outside advisers weren’t just business associates, by the way.
“My wife, I consider her my partner, and she was instrumental at the time and just sharing everything with her and relying on her and getting her input,” Yallen says.
The idea isn’t to hide bad times from your people, but Yallen wanted to keep any elements of panic away from the public eye. In order to maintain business, you have to be sure people believe in you and the company. That means that even when you share the bad news with internal and external people, you don’t have a shaky voice.
“We wanted to eliminate panic among our team members, and we also wanted to avoid building bad will with our vendors,” Yallen says.
It was an extreme case, so Yallen and his father both did that by doing something extreme: They cut both of their salaries and injected money from their own pockets into the company. That money was used not just to provide a little bit of daily capital but also to give out the annual bonuses that employees had grown used to. So while employees knew things were rough, they also saw the company was trying to fix its problems without hurting employee checkbooks.
“We made sure that our employees knew most of what was going on, and remember we were a much, much smaller company then, but even that year we gave out bonuses,” he says. “We still had to reward our people.”
Yallen is not saying to give away money from your pocket, but that moment was about instilling confidence. After saving the roughest times for those he trusted most, the outer employees were told of the hardship but also saw that leadership believed they could turn things around.
“It helped tremendously because we showed that we believed in the company in two respects,” Yallen says. “One, cutting our salaries, and two, putting money into the company, and I think probably putting money into the company showed the most. I don’t know how much it transcended down to the ranks, but we obviously felt comfortable, and that probably showed with our staff that, by doing this, we were somewhat calm.”
