A Painful Process, but with a Twist

Having been a few years since I handled all aspects of human resources for an organization on a daily basis, and never dealing with an ownership transition, I left that initial dinner meeting with a list of items I’d need to dig into prior to their upcoming acquisition date. As much as I never liked homework, I upheld my end of the bargain and was ready to role on the morning of September 2, 2021, when the formal transition took place.

Prior to working through the employment verification and other forms each team member would need to complete, the long-term owners of the business introduced the entire team to Craig and Kim. While Craig and I had touched on this several times in our conversations, I genuinely enjoyed how he detailed the core values that would drive each decision they made for the company moving forward. As you can likely imagine, Craig had to field a number of questions and address a few concerns at that point too. In each response, I saw him exemplify each of those values; Compassion, Integrity, Humility, Family, and Dependability.

Once the paperwork was behind us, it wasn’t long until we started working to fill a few positions; some to take advantage of growth opportunities and some to develop the team’s bench in preparation for some pending retirements. As with any hiring I had been involved with, we needed to identify candidates with specific skills and experience. But there, more than with any other organization I had worked with through a process like this, they were just as focused on ensuring anyone joining the team matched their values as they were about determining they could adequately perform the work involved. That was so refreshing, and not something I had the chance to discuss the management team I was supporting when I hired 225 people in an eighteen-month stint just a few years prior.

Over the next few months, Craig and I hashed out what would be the 75+ year old organization’s first official policy manual. I had helped at least half a dozen other companies through similar processes in the decade leading up to that. While I had never enjoyed anything about it, I had become pretty effective in tying these together; juggling all the required government language while still maintaining a voice that represented the actual business. From November 2021 to late February 2022, we discussed every line of the template we used as a starting point. The part of that process that stands out more than anything was how adamant Craig and Kim were about not filling the handbook full of rules just for the sake of having rules. If we couldn’t tie something directly back to one of their core values, it wasn’t included in the final edition - government regulation notwithstanding, and we would have been happy to have scrapped quite a bit of that, too, give the discretion!

Once complete, our next step was to meet with the entire team, in small groups, to roll out what would serve as their overall policy manual moving forward. I had done that several times as well, so I created a slideshow that offered an overview of the entire thing and covered the more critical segments in detail. That went far different than I could have ever imagined, so we’ll pick up there next time!