Cover Story
Deep healing
Smart Business Dallas | July 2009
Page 2 of 3
Get the right peopleFetter’s condition for returning to Tenet was that the chief financial officer and chief operating officer be fired. He also had to recruit new board members and asked 49 of the 50 senior managers to leave. There were now gaping holes on his staff, and it was critical to get the right people on his team to lead the turnaround.
To start, Fetter looked at who he had internally that was capable of leading.
“In a crisis, the best thing to do is assess who you have in the company already,” Fetter says. “Who’s very dedicated? Whose heart is in the right place? And who has the skills and knowledge and continuity? Those people are incredibly key in any sort of turnaround.”
He says to not presume that everyone is guilty or contributed to the problem.
“There are very good people on the inside,” he says. “You need to find them and put them in positions of responsibility.”
Fetter says that the people left in your organization will fall into one of three categories. The first group is a small group in total denial. Most were planning to retire soon, had a lot invested in company stock, and it all fell apart when everything hit the corporate fan.
“There were those who were just stunned and became ineffective by virtue of that,” he says.
Then the second group is made up of those looking to separate themselves from the problems.
“Their first instinct was to present things in a way that would exonerate them from any responsibility for the problem,” Fetter says. “One has to be very wary of and concerned about that as to whether you’re getting the right story or not.”
Then the last group is the one that you really want to help you.
“There’s a group of people that tend to be second- and third-level people in any given function,” Fetter says. “They step forth and they might say, ‘I know all about what happened — either I didn’t realize we were doing the wrong thing, or I thought it was wrong, but that’s what the top management wanted to do, but I’m ready to dig in and really help make this better. It’s a great company, and it deserves to be better.’”
Once you find internal people to guide you out of the abyss, then you have to look externally to fill the remaining gaps. Fetter first turned to connections he already had.
“There’s no substitute for the six degrees of separation, where it’s someone you know, who tells you about somebody they know, who tells you about somebody they know, and it turns out that you know that person in three other ways, too,” he says. “That was a very key part of it.”
During difficult times, you have to pay particular attention to people’s motivations for joining your business.
“When you’re in a free fall, it’s very difficult to attract people,” he says. “Some people are attracted to you for the wrong reasons. They might look at an opportunity to do something spectacular for their own resume and then leave you right away, but others are truly attracted to something that’s a difficult challenge. They may be bored by something that’s stable.”
For example, when recruiting the nonexecutive board chairman, the candidate told Fetter that he liked, what he called the corporate equivalent of whitewater rafting, and that he wanted to add value to the company, so Fetter brought him in to brave the rapids.
Another motivation someone may have is genuinely wanting an opportunity, so look for those people.
“There are other people who are attracted by their perceptions that there is a great opportunity,” he says. “Maybe in their company they were the No. 2 person in their particular function without a clear path to become No. 1, and we offer the opportunity to become No. 1 in that function. That can be very appealing.”
Then lastly, you have to appeal to people’s senses. For example, one Tenet employee used to work with a company that sold women’s shoes. At one point he told Fetter, “The thing is, women don’t necessarily need more shoes, but I feel really good about what we’re doing here.”
You should also use how your business impacts the world to recruit talent.
“This is a business that exists to help other people, and that sounds sappy, but people who are successful in this industry have to, on some level, feel very good about what they do, … ” Fetter says. “For people to really get engaged, they have to feel like there’s a mission and they’re fulfilling a mission that’s really valuable.”
