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Challenge My name is Bob Holden. I'm in charge of the North American business at eHarmony. Prior to eHarmony, I spent seven years at eBay, four of which I spent in Northern California and three of which I spent in Southern California, where I led www.rent.com. What I inherited when I went down to www.rent.com was pretty surprising to me. I arrive on the job and I find a group that isn't used to actually generating and driving its own innovation and ideas, and they were coming off of a time when they really weren't used to having discussions or even considering what they needed to do, or should do, to grow their career. My first day of work I had a one-on-one meeting with the person who ran graphic design. About half an hour into our conversation, I asked her about her career development that she had received thus far and what her career aspirations were and how she felt about her role. At that point in the conversation, she actual broke down into tears. My second one-on-one meeting there, I met with a person who was my direct report who promptly informed me ten minutes into the meeting that he was resigning. I found myself really early on being invited to almost every meeting that was happening in my entire product group, mainly because they felt like I had to see and hear everything in order to essentially grant approval for them to make and decisions and move ahead. These issues were I would say created a serious problem within the organization because of the fact that I don't think we were getting 70 percent of the capabilities that we could out of people. eBay had high expectations of www.rent.com overall, and product is really the nerve center, if you will, of that organization. We had a pretty aggressive financial target. We had double-digit growth targets that we were on the hook to hit, and based on what I saw, I didn't think we had the product roadmap that was going to deliver anything close to that. Our competitors meanwhile were innovation even faster, and yet innovation had really slowed down almost to a standstill. You don't get growth out of a company if you don't have an energized the excited workforce, so there was pretty much of a serious dichotomy there. Decision I really spent I would say probably my first few days just listening and just really focusing on trying to understand what the culture was like. I actually brought together all of my direct reports (and I think there were I don't know three or four of them at the time), and literally, we had a conversation that basically said, "Look, the times are changed. I've heard from all of you and I see some common threads around the fact that you had a product director who was really driving the decision making here and really didn't give you guys the authority to really drive what you think is right. That's over." I told people right away, "Don't invite me to the meetings where you're literally just trying to figure out some of the nuances of the product early on. Invite me to the meeting where I can add value."

LEADERSHIP IN FOCUS Video Case Transcript When people came to me with ideas that I didn't agree with, I handled it in one of two ways: No. 1, half the time, if it was just a pure judgment call and it wasn't a mission-critical issue, I would let them try it; or if it was a really mission-critical type of project that I just could not allow to go ahead, I would tell them, "Look, here are the issues that I have. I need you to go back and address these and come back with a better plan," and we would go from there. I tried to meet them in the middle. We spent a lot of time building out or product roadmap, because I felt like No. 1, we needed to know what are the things that we need to build? Once we know what we need to build, then we can match that up with how many people we actually had to build it with. So the team really went into kind of deep strategy mode and came out with a really unified vision, which they hadn't had before. "Okay, here's what we need to build over the next six months." Results It took me about a quarter to really understand first of all what the strengths and weaknesses were of the people on my team; No. 2, understand what our business challenges and opportunities were; and No. 3, be able to paint a vision for them of where we're trying to go and why having us work as a unified team is going to enable us to get there. Within probably about six months, we were really operating at a high level in terms of the number of really new, innovative products that we had in the pipeline to bring to market. We went from an organization where a few people who were leading the company were deciding strategy and pushing it down to the organization to a strategy process that involved a lot more people across the organization and a lot more bubbling up of ideas from the bottom and people across the organization making decisions about which way we're going to go. Lessons Learned No. 1 is take time to listen. That was probably the biggest thing I did right without even knowing that I was doing it right, was just not trying to come in and change the world. No. 2, really understand what you're stepping into as you're doing that listening. Understand what the culture and the work environment is like, and don't come in and try and change everything in one fell swoop. In terms of managing innovation, I think there's two pieces of it: There's No. 1, just how do you get more innovative? I absolutely believe the way you get more innovative is by getting folks engaged at the bottom of the organization, because they're the ones who are interacting with your customers directly, and they have a ton of great ideas. If you can get them engaged, and most importantly, getting them to believe deep in their heart that you have a vested interest in hearing what they say and helping to drive the ideas that they have versus just taking their ideas and picking them apart and so forth, that really helps. In terms of managing innovation, you also got to have an engaged team. It takes a whole team to really drive innovation, not just one or two passionate and committed people. [End]

Question: Why didn't he bring in his own team of outsiders (as suggested by one executive in "How to boost...")? Should he? Why the "go-slow" approach? Why not be a leader and provide a vision along with a plan? Did the people in his new organization really want to improve? Is this an important issue to consider? Why or why not?