Leadership Done Right

Brandon W. Jones

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Layoffs

Was It A Good Leadership Decision For Yahoo’s New CEO To Have Layoffs?

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Scott Thompson, the new Yahoo CEO, held a conference call yesterday to report the first quarter earnings. He became the CEO in January, so it was his first time reviewing quarterly earnings with the shareholders. Since Scott Thompson took over, Yahoo’s stock value has lost 7% of its value. Yahoo, however, was struggling even before Scott became the CEO. Since he took over, Yahoo has not improved and continues to fall behind their competition. He is now being labeled as a struggling CEO.

Yahoo has many companies that are branches of their core business. Under Scott Thompson’s leadership, Yahoo will be shutting down or “transitioning” about 50 Web properties. In addition, Scott’s significant measures to reduce costs included his announcement earlier this month that Yahoo plans to layoff 2,000 employees. Yahoo also plans to have additional layoffs at some point in the near future. At the same time, when Scott Thompson became CEO, he was given the possibility of making $26 million this year if he performs well.

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The Layoff

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As the case “The Layoff” pointed out there are a few different options that can be looked at prior to any action. The approach that Robin brought to the table was too narrow. He should have gone to the other executives and brought up the financial situation and then said, “How are we going to fix this situation?” By putting the problem on the group he is making everyone figure out a solution. In addition, he would be working to bring the team together.The Layoff

The Layoff

The approach that Robin should have taken, in order to maintain high morale within the company, would be to have layoff’s be the last resort. He should have looked at more options for recovering from the financial struggles. One way that Robin could have handled the situation would have been to cut the executives’ salaries before layoffs would occur.

Group Think

He should have made each person come up with solutions to the problem. There is a tendency for people in the group setting to begin to do group think. To avoid group think, he could have everyone go to their offices and think of several ideas on their own before going over ideas as a group. If he did that, he would have to set a minimum number of ideas that everyone had to come up with before the meeting so that everyone would be forced to be creative.

In order for this method to work, Robin would have to require everyone in the group to bring their ideas to the table in a large brainstorming session. From that point, they would be able to narrow down the ideas to the most feasible option and proceed from there.

By forcing the executive team to come up with their ideas individually, each one of the executives would have to formulate their own stance. They would not be able to jump on the backs of the more dominant personalities in the group and resort to group think.

Overall, the approach that Robin used to resolve their financial crisis was too narrow minded. It seemed as though many of the executives didn’t care that much how they did the layoffs because it wouldn’t affect them personally. Robin needed to make the financial position of the company a problem for whole team to solve.

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