Chapter 3

Earn Your Employees’ Trust

by Jim Dougherty

When I took over as CEO of Intralinks, a company that provides secure Web-based electronic deal rooms, the company was hemorrhaging so much cash that its survival was at stake. The service was going down three times per week; we were in violation of the contract with our largest client; our chief administrative officer had just been demoted, and so on.

So what did I do on my first day? I spent more than four hours listening to client support calls at the call center. I shared headsets with many of the team, moving from desk to desk to speak to the reps. To say they were surprised is an understatement: Many CEOs never visit the call center, and virtually none do it on their first afternoon ...

Get Performance Reviews and Coaching: The Performance Management Collection (5 Books) now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.