Prioritize problems
When facing a problem as challenging as a reorganization, there will be a number of things calling for your attention. You need to figure out which ones should be dealt with first to give the company the best chance to succeed. For Anderson, one of his top priorities was to develop more of a team atmosphere.
“Express was a very entrepreneurial company,” Anderson says. “With an entrepreneurial company, you have a lot of individual initiative, individual attitudes, and one of the biggest issues was that Express should be about the company, not about the individuals.
“As an organization we had responsibilities to our employees, our vendors, our shareholders and to the public,” says Anderson. “As a result, there were a significant number of changes that occurred early on in the process. Some were painful changes, but we had to say, ‘Although we’re making short-term sacrifices, we know that they will set up the organization for the long run, and we are going to have a solid team that is 100 percent supportive of our organization and materializing our five-year strategic plan.’”
It is critical that executives of companies facing these types of issues communicate each step of the process to create a smoother transition.
“You have to talk to your people,” Anderson says. “You can’t accomplish everything overnight. That is something I personally struggled with, because I’m very driven, very competitive, and there are things that you want to change, things that you want to put in place and things that you know can bring great benefit to your organization. You have to listen to your team around you and as a group decide what are the priorities and remember whatever your horizon is, it’s not all going to be done overnight.
“You cannot overwhelm the organization. You cannot create too much change too fast. What you can do is listen to your organization, listen to your team members and turnaround and act upon what they have said and make sure it’s clearly visible that you have reacted and get their feedback to your reaction. What happens is, the organization realizes that they have a voice and that management is listening to them and management took action and they see a positive behavior. What it breeds is the next initiative or the next decision is that much easier and accepted and before you know it, it becomes an environment, it’s a culture. It’s a culture of getting feedback. It’s a culture of taking that feedback and making the best decision and putting things in action and seeing the success of that.”
