Marissa Mayer is the high-profile head of Yahoo!, who came to the struggling company after a successful tenure at Google, in which she became one of the highest ranking women in the company’s history. Known for her brash style in her operations at Google, she has brought the same attitude to Yahoo!, where she has sometimes run into tremendous resistance from some of the employees of the company. Mayer understood that Yahoo! had a number of problems, and because of that, she has instituted an approach to change that has been extremely hard-line. She has been successful in some regard, but in other areas, her approach has run into failures.
Mayer has taken a cooperative and long-term approach to change at Yahoo!. She recognized very early that things had to change dramatically, but coming from the outside, she did not want to institute change without having the employees of the company on-board. With that in mind, she ensured that people had a voice in some of the changes that were taking place. She did this by hosting various question and answer sessions where employees could gripe about the company or ask questions about its strategic future. Likewise, she began to provide people with free lunches and new technology, a sign that she wanted her employees to take ownership in the changes happening with the company.
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More than that, her approach was a long-term one. She recognized that she had to change the entire culture at Yahoo! to get them from thinking about the short-term into thinking about the long run. One of the small things she did was take the Yahoo! stock price off of the company’s internal website. This way, the employees would not be thinking about what the stock had done in a single day. Rather, they would be thinking about what the company should be doing over months, years, and even decades. She refused to allow people to focus on the right now, but rather, wanted their focus to be down the road.
Likewise, her approach to change itself was a dramatic one. She did not want to simply ease into change. Rather, she came in and took the company by storm. She began to change the culture dynamic in the company, she hired a new person for PR, and she ensured that people were totally on board with a “new” type of Yahoo!. In essence, she dismantled the old mindsets of the company, not leaving any room for doubters. This can have some downsides. It can create some problems within the employee ranks. For employees who had been a part of the previous dynamic, it can be difficult to see a person completely tear down the work that was accomplished. Likewise, it can be hard for the average employee to learn the lingo and other skills needed to keep up in a new environment. Mayer, it seems, is a special kind of person with special aptitude. She can sometimes fail to understand that the people around her might not have the same levels of aptitude that she has, and this can work against her in critical ways.
The benefits of this kind of change is that it makes things very clear. There is little doubt about the direction of the company and whose approach the company will use. While the workers existing in the company will have to adjust, they will at least know that the company is moving away from old norms and into new ideas. Likewise, it has the potential to create excitement, which can help the company with its momentum.
Mayer has faced significant resistance to change from her employees, even if that resistance has been shown in subtle ways. Employees have expressed a lack of desire to work hard on her behalf because she has shown no willingness to show appreciation for their work. In some respects, she is infamous for this. Rather than appreciating the people around her in a warm way, she tends to think that the best way to institute change is to be hard and unrelenting. This can cause people to simply take a step back and not work as hard. It can also de-motivate them. When there is no positive reinforcement for good performance, employees tend to get disgruntled, even in tech companies like Yahoo!.
Likewise, many have outright quit. In one case, Mayer was so unrelenting and so unyielding in her demands for change that she almost had an entire unit of the company quit on her over a color scheme question. Simply put, those individuals resisted not only the change, but the way the change was communicated to them. In some cases, the inability of Mayer to show respect to her employees has caused them to push back against her initiatives.
In order to deal with the resistance, some simple things are needed. One of the weaknesses of Mayer is her inability to respect the time or contributions of other people. Often, getting people on board requires that a leader show them respect by being on time. It requires that leaders provide warm feedback so that people know they are doing what the new company head wants them to be doing. This makes people feel as if they are on board, and it helps to alleviate the effect where they feel lost in their work with a given company. If she were serious about her change efforts and wanting them to work over the long run, she would adopt these strategies.
