American University of Sharjah

• MANAGEMENT MBA 612

• LEADERSHIP IN FOCUS Video Case Transcript BOB HOLDEN: Taking On a Struggling Team 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."