Identify talent
Taking part in a turnaround is not for the weak of heart. Because of the challenges you face, it’s also not something you want to do alone.
“You really need to be able to deal with a lot of adversity and not let that adversity deter the goals that you are trying to accomplish,” he says. “You can’t expect that when you walk into a turnaround situation — this company, for example, that had been around for 80 years — you can’t expect that everybody in that organization is just going to jump behind your vision and be part of your team.
“Because, you are bringing in a bunch of different concepts and ideas. They’re all nervous. They are worried about what is going to happen and they are worried about their jobs.”
That’s when you have to look for talent to help you deal with those obstacles that you will face.
“You need to put a strong team around you that shares your vision and understands a turnaround,” he says. “Those people don’t need to necessarily come from the outside. You may find them on the inside, but you need to have that small team that can stay focused and really just execute a plan and deal with that adversity and measure success in small increments.”
D’Angelo brought in some of his own people but also found Dick Corp. employees he could trust. He needed the strong performers who were doing good work to help stabilize the company and finish projects.
If a project manager and a superintendent were doing a good job on a project, he wanted to keep that team together and also provide them with that safety net so they could focus on the task at hand and not on whether they were going to have a job tomorrow.
“You need to take the key individuals that you need to finish projects and you need to run the business and you need to give them maybe a contract,” he says. “Give them some type of a retention bonus if they stay through the contract, and if it accomplishes A, B, C or D, you’ll earn a retention bonus,” he says. “Or if something happens, if the company is sold, you’ll be given this severance package.”
You also want to look for the employees who handle adversity well. If they are coming to you with a problem, you want them to stick around at the company rather than someone who recognizes a problem and says nothing about it.
“A lot of it depends on how those individuals react to the situation or how they react to bad news,” he says. “Do they turn around and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a problem here and we need to get together and fix it,’ or, ‘Do we ignore that problem until it’s too late to be resolved.’“
Finding out who can be trusted won’t happen right away, but you have to be patient and tap into those current employees for information.
“Turning the company around, you can’t do it without the people in the organization,” he says. “They understand
the organization better than anybody.”
