Setting sail

Michelle Fee was frustrated. Cruise Planners Inc. was created to help people escape on a great vacation to beautiful islands and luxurious tropical resorts. But it seemed like her employees were creating their own islands in the workplace and the escape from each other was causing problems.
“The most difficult challenge is to be able to get all of your departments within your company to communicate,” says Fee, co-founder, president and CEO of the travel agency. “It’s not just about what you’re doing. It’s about how what you’re doing affects others.
“We had a franchise department who was selling people our business in a box, in essence. They didn’t quite understand what some of the business development team was doing or what the marketing team was doing to help the agents grow their business.”
Cruise Planners’ franchisees were therefore getting mixed signals about how to run their part of the business and they were passing them along to clients. Fee knew this lack of a coordinated message would eventually come back to hurt both her and the company’s 40 employees and 800 franchisees.
“It’s essential that everyone is on the same page and everyone buys in to your vision,” Fee says. “Sometimes that’s hard because everybody has a way that they have done business in the past. They want to come in and infuse it with their good ideas, but it has to be what the vision of the entire company is.
“Everybody was running like they were their own island. The attitude was, ‘We’re going to do our job and get it done,’ but it didn’t necessarily work for another department, because at the end of the day, we’re all intertwined. To make it happen, you all have to be one team and not individual teams. Otherwise, you’re playing against each other instead of playing for that same team.”
Fee set out to tear down the silos that had formed at Cruise Planners and build connections and regular interaction between her employees and franchisees. She also needed to deal with resistance to ensure that this important and valuable dialogue was taking place and that the silos didn’t come back.