Learn your lessons
More than two years after the merger and initialization of the cultural rebuild, ProQuest is a healthy company with 2008 revenues of $365 million and more than 1,400 employees systemwide.
In the time since his first turbulent months on the job, Kahn has had a chance to reflect on the lessons he has learned. Many of the lessons keep coming back to the same common theme: Communication is critical during a time of change.
“I was more worried about communicating than any other part of my job,” Kahn says. “That’s what we spent most of our time thinking about. The day the merger was going to be announced, we had checklists of who we had to call — lenders, partners, competitors — who was going to call whom and at what time. After the announcement, my No. 1 priority was to get around and start communicating with our employees and partners. On any given day, getting out to our locations was my highest priority.
“The answer to communication is that you can only do it right if you put it before everything else. I attend to communication before I attend to budgets. I have other people to worry about those things.”
But you also need people who focus on communication — internal communication in particular. Kahn says that as your company grows, you need to hire and develop employees with the sole responsibility of handling communication throughout the company.
“First off, as a CEO, you can’t think that you can manage the communication process yourself,” he says. “Make sure you have someone or some group whose primary responsibility is employee communication.
“Secondly, employee communication is different from customer communication. Employee communication covers different subjects, and it needs to be more candid. It shouldn’t be handled by the marketing people. Marketing handles customer communication; human resources should handle employee communication.
“The third lesson about communication is honesty, honesty, honesty. If you become just a cheerleader, you lose credibility. You have to give people the straight story, even if the news isn’t positive. Then tell them why you’re doing the things you are doing. People might not like it, but they’ll respect you and will appreciate the fact that you’re telling them the truth.
“If you tell people the truth, I don’t think you’re going to damage morale. People want to know when management is telling the truth and behaving responsibly. They want to know that we as leaders are doing the right thing, even if the right thing necessitates that we take difficult actions.”
How to reach: ProQuest LLC, (734) 761-4700 or www.proquest.com
