Build a team
You can grow a change-embracing mindset in the employees already on the payroll. But to help sustain the new culture and direction of your company, you also need to hire new employees who are willing to embrace change, as well.
At Valassis, that process starts with the human resources department. As Valassis grew and evolved, Schultz realized that the company, like many others, hired according to a certain set of criteria. The company’s hiring process was systematically preventing Valassis from hiring employees who could bring different perspectives to the company.
“You start by reviewing existing hiring practices,” Schultz says. “You’ll likely find that most companies have a mold they like to fit when hiring people. So the first thing you have to do is look at your hiring practices, policies, procedures and your interviewing techniques. Then, you have to pull out anything that has a bias against people who are different. You have to pull that out of the interviewing process and the decision-making process so that you can give opportunities to people who you might have excluded in the past.
It helps if you can first hire and develop human resources employees who are open to different perspectives.
“You need to bring people in to your human resources area with a more diverse, innovative background,” Schultz says. “They are going to be more amenable to people who have a creative slant. If your human resources area is made up of people who all fit the same mold, they’ll continue to hire other people who fit that mold.
“In our hiring practice, if someone changed jobs every 18 months for the first six years of their career, we’d say they’re an unstable person and we wouldn’t want to hire them. But really, they could just be a creative person who likes to do different things. Their time at different jobs might have given them phenomenal experience. Our old hiring policy said you don’t even consider those people. Those people would send in resumes and not even get an interview.”
Today, after a remake of its culture, Valassis is now a company with an innovative work force and a diverse product line. From annual revenue of around $600 million when Schultz took over, the company’s revenue exceeded $2.2 billion in 2007. That’s in spite of a reduced advertising insert business, Valassis’ core business that took a hit when Rupert Murdoch arrived on the scene.
But change doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen without the guidance of a goal-oriented leader.
“It is the CEO’s job to make the case for change,” Schultz says. “Once you make the case for change, then people start to get on board with you, and it starts to take on a life of its own. Once it takes on a life of its own, you start to move pretty quickly. But up until then, it’s a lot of heavy lifting for everyone.
“As the CEO, you can make a case for change, but a lot of the work to make that change happen will be done by someone else.”
How to reach: Valassis Communications Inc., (734) 591-3000 or www.valassis.com
