Psychological Resignations from Corporate America have been Around a Long Time
When a local team’s innovation ignited a company.
I was young to be leading the Southeast Area, roughly a $400mm business serving the hospitals and other healthcare providers in the southeastern United States.
We were the leading distributor in the medical products industry. When I was asked early in my career what my ultimate goal was…I pointed to the corner office and said “that job, Area VP.”
So sure enough, there I was at 32 years old in the corner office of our Atlanta facility with the biggest crisis of my career staring me in the face.
It was the summer of 1991 and The Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), the biggest customer in our corporation and in the Southeast Area, was not happy with our company and threatened to cancel their contract. Losing this customer would be a disaster, in fact, fatal to our business in the southeast.
I had hospital CEOs calling my office to get on my schedule so they could tell me how we were sending them products that they didn't need and charging them exorbitant prices. HCA had signed a long-term contract that was nearing its end which had product purchase commitments that needed to be met by the end of 1991. And they were going to miss their target which would then mean financial penalties. It was a huge $$ objective at the time. All of my region managers were being bombarded with calls and questions that they could not answer.
Our corporate office was doing everything in its power to calm the HCA headquarters folks down and my management team and I were scared, stopped in our tracks, and all we could think about was how to solve this problem with our local HCA customers.
I hosted conference calls with my leadership team to consolidate what we were hearing from our customers and to get some creative ideas flowing.
Inundated by customer calls, requests for credits, some hospitals had even threatened to stop buying from us. My team and I were starting to experience the Stockholm Syndrome. “Let’s give them what they want and forgive the volume commitment”. It wasn’t ours to forgive.
We needed to come up with ways to solve this problem on a local basis.
I hosted an in-person meeting with my direct reports to try to figure this out. Over several days we exhaustedly “brainstormed” ideas that we could execute. As we kicked idea after idea around it became clear to several of my leaders that traditional thinking wouldn’t get us anywhere.
One of my leaders either my area operations manager (Rich) or my Nashville Region manager (Dave, who knew the HCA customers the best given their headquarters was there) came up with an idea.
One of them suggested we write, sign and submit a “psychological resignation” to our corporate office and to share this with our HCA customers. We thought it might shock the system and create at least a stir in the market.
The question was asked: “Will our senior leaders in Chicago think we are crazy & serious and “accept” our resignations? Is that a real risk? Who knew?
Was it wise to think the customers would even care if we showed them a paper document (ok nice tan-colored paper, but not even parchment) that we all signed and had submitted to our corporate headquarters? We were becoming desperate.
We called ourselves, “The Southeast Area Board of Directors”. It made us feel like we were empowered owners rather than only employees. And this is what we wrote and committed to.
“It is with great confidence and emotion that we submit our Psychological Resignations as the Southeast Area Management Team.
Through this resignation, we have concluded that we can better function in our capacities and better meet the challenges of our dynamic marketplace and industry by freeing ourselves of the security of old management practices and stagnant thinking.”
We all signed it, including my boss, the General Manager of our $4 billion division as the Honorary Chairman of the Board.
Then, we all took a big deep breath and sighed…now what?
One of my RMs raised the question…“Have any of you seen the new United Airlines commercial? ( It was called “the Speech”). Most of us had, but had not put it into that context. He said “it starts off with Ben(the boss) saying: “I got a phone call this morning, from one of our oldest customers. He fired us, after 20 years, he fired us. He said he didn’t know us anymore.”
So, without the benefit of YouTube or any content from the Internet, he gave us a summary of the commercial. And we decided to follow Ben’s direction and go see every one of the HCA customers in our geography in the coming 4–6 weeks…it wasn’t over 200 cities like the commercial, but it was a ton of customers across our geography. I asked each Region Manager to give me the biggest and/or the most upset customers and I would travel to those meetings with them and their sales rep.
We began to execute in a manner that honored our resignation commitment to free ourselves of old management practices and stagnant thinking. Taking on this challenge in a united and enthusiastic way gave us energy and passion to save this critical customer by looking them in the eye literally, acknowledging, and if possible addressing their concerns.
I do distinctly remember one meeting. The CEO of HCA New Port Richey Hospital in Florida. In his Executive conference room, my region manager, local sales rep, and I sat nervously awaiting the CEO’s entrance. The CEO entered the room, we shook hands, we all sat down. Silence.
Then he said, “Mike, you have been sending me truckloads of products that I don’t need.” The air left the room, my sales rep was sweating…heck, we all were sweating.
Wow! I didn’t know what to say. Silence……
So my glib sense of humor kicked in with a little logic added.
I said to him “I am not sending you anything that you haven’t given me a purchase order for.” Where the hell did that come from?
He looked at his Materials Manager and then at me and all he said was… “good point”.
We had dodged a bullet. The meeting turned civil. We discussed ways that our two companies could get out of this predicament and my team and I got out of that conference room as fast as we could.
As we shared stories about our psychological resignation and the face-to-face meetings with customers in the Southeast, the emotion around the contract began to calm. And negotiations at HCA’s corporate HQ also began to get some momentum.
Our Corporation’s Chief Operating Officer got ahold of the resignation document and shared it with the entire company through his monthly “reverse President’s letter”. We caught a bunch of crap from our colleagues around the country, but all in good spirits.
What might have seemed like a silly idea that was a bit risky, gave us confidence and helped turn a bad situation into some great memories and successes.
Teamwork & Innovation at its finest!
Check out the EQ Growth Solutions website and let’s get connected. https://eqgrowthsolutions.com/
#Listen, #Learn, #Network,#Adapt, #Win
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