Leadership
Dollars and sense
How MB Financial’s Mitchell Feiger uses the candid truth to keep his 1,400 employees working hard through a tough economy
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Chicago | April 2009
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The next time you’re feeling a bit blue, don’t call Mitchell Feiger if all you want is to be cheered up.
Feiger is going to tell you the truth about what’s going on — even if that truth is quite bleak.
He’s not doing it to bring you down. In fact, he’ll be sure to put it in the appropriate context for you so that you understand where things have to be done and why. Take his feelings on the problems many businesses have in a down economy: “The mistake that a lot of small or midsized business owners make is they don’t reduce expenses fast enough when sales decline,” says Feiger, who is president and CEO of MB Financial Inc. “I understand, you’ve got a business, you’ve got 42 people working at your company … you know their families and now sales go down 25 percent and you’re losing money and your capital cushion is being eroded, and yet, you don’t want to release people. But they’re your biggest expense, so it’s really important to face reality and protect your company.”
It might be painful, but he says you have to own up to a resolution.
“I don’t think you do anybody a favor by keeping them on the payroll when you can’t afford it,” he says. “That may mean eight people out of that 42 you really can’t afford to have anymore, but if you decide for whatever reason you’re just going to keep them on and hope that something else comes along … well, what you’ve done is you’ve risked the jobs of the other 34 people.”
Partly because of that honesty, Feiger hasn’t had to deal with anything that drastic with his 1,400 employees at MB Financial, the holding company with $8.6 billion in assets that’s parent to MB Financial Bank N.A. MB Financial is holding strong — it reported net income from continuing operations of $15.4 million for 2008 — and Feiger is happy to share all the good and bad with his people. To him, it’s all about managing your company through communications. If you help employees understand where they can help the company, Feiger says they will.
Here are a few tips from Feiger on how to open up candid communications to push your company through good times and bad.
