"6) Ask--and meet--the rank and file and get their ideas" 6a: And don't rely on your management to decide who amongst the rank and file talk to you.
I've seen this played out too many times--the new exec comes on board, and wants to talk to rank and file to get an idea how things are. They ask for this at meeting with their VPs. The VP of HR is asked to send out the request to the managers.
Big mistake--what happens here is that management decides that there is *no way* the CEO is going to hear from anyone in their organization unless it's someone personally selected by management who already knows the drill (or can be threated or bribed into knowing the drill real damn quick), and can learn the script for the meeting.
What happens? Well, if the CEO is clever, they're going to have a list of every toadie in the organization, and also know that management needs to be cleaned out. If they aren't clever, they go away possibly wondering why everyone they talked to was either a supervisor or tech lead, and they have some really interesting (ie favoring the manager who sent them) ideas on how to fix the organization.
Guess what happens? Either nothing or decisions are made that make no strategic sense to anyone outside of the company, and the corporation continues down the garden path to being bought out or filing chapter 11. The decisions seem to favor a small group of people, who then make out like bandits.
And that segues into:
7) Don't assume management is on your side. In fact assume that entire layers of management are pretty happy with the way things are, and don't want anything to change.
Yes, even though this seems strange in a company that is bleeding from all pores, there are people in these companies who are running their own game, and as long as their fiefdom is doing fine, they're not interested in anything changing, thanks. These people are usually pretty short-sighted, both from a strategic and time sense: they're not interested in what's going to happen in 12-18 months, because their horizon doesn't extend that far. They don't care about the rest of the corporation, except how it helps them achieve their ends.
A fairly quick way to find out if there's an entire layer of management that's a problem is to play a game I call "chase the meme". Remember the rank and file? Ask them to let you know when the directive arrives.
A good directive is something like "managers are requested to spend all their employee relations budget this quarter, and to ask employees at their department meetings how they should spend it. Please communicate this to your organization.". It's bland, and it asks that it be communicated all the way down.
Now, let it loose. The next exec meeting, ask that this be communicated. Enlist HR to get the directive pushed out to the first layer below the execs.
Now wait. When I took part in this, the company in question had a *10%* rate of the directive making it to the first level managers and their staff. It turned out that the director level managers across the entire company were ether dropping it on the floor or asking the HR manager to *not* communicate it.
Armed with that information, the CEO started poking at the director layer, and found that they had effective set up a communications wall, and were cheerfully running their own organizations to their own benefit. I wish I could say that this was dealt with, but it took two more regime changes before that CEO was able to get rid of the lot of them.
Seriously, you don't want to get there. At that point, it took an amazing amount of luck and hard work to get that company out of its death spiral. Others--not so lucky.
