From Derrow’s point of view, there’s nothing more rewarding than watching others succeed — people he’s worked with for many years who can grab an opportunity and run with it.
Decentralization and empowering those closest to the challenge seems natural.
“I never wanted to be ‘the guy’ in that regard, because when all decisions come to a central point, that’s the bottleneck, and the last thing I want to be is a bottleneck in taking care of people,” Derrow says.
Weather the storm
Speed is always critical in business, but never more so than during a crisis. Quickly changing conditions require a swift response. For example, many of Ohio Transmission Corp.’s customers hadn’t shut down yet, but within a matter of seven to 10 days, the company lost its ability to access customer facilities beyond service technicians repairing equipment in essential businesses.
Knowing what to do isn’t always simple, and failure is an inevitable consequence of taking actions over time. Derrow says that, ideally, you want to ensure your mistakes aren’t severe enough to be noteworthy, while also considering how things could be handled differently.
In addition, it’s important to remember that not every place is the same, especially in a large business like Ohio Transmission Corp., which has 47 locations.
“It’s easy to think that, from an efficiency point of view, we need to do the same thing everywhere as it relates to employees, but that would be a colossal mistake for us,” Derrow says.
Even just looking at Ohio, locations that are doing exceptionally well shouldn’t be treated the same as others that aren’t as fortunate.
In a crisis like this, you have make sure you know what’s going on in a specific location — as much as you can — and then respond, plan and act accordingly, he says.
Sort through the variables
The bigger challenge, though, is maintaining a level of optimism, while still being realistic about the way you manage the expense side of the business, Derrow says. Employees are working less, so how do you take the lead on that and try to retain your team?
“There are so many unknowns,” he says. “We don’t know when business will recover. We don’t know where it will recover. We don’t know to what levels it will recover, or how fast. There’s a lot we don’t know.”
Derrow expects the upcoming slowdown to rival or surpass the depth of the 2008 recession, with the quickness of the conditions after 9/11.
