Feature

Corporate Angst

Like individuals, organizations can become depressed, agitated and dysfunctional. Here's how one company that had a problem in authority dynamics fought its way back to health.

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By Stephanie Overby

April 01, 2002 — CIO — The air inside the IS department at Millennium Teleservices had become poisonous. "No one looking at our department could tell that we were ready to kill each other," says CIO Leif Maiorini. "But we were ready to kill each other."

By the fall of 1999, the 113-person technology department at this Edison, N.J.-based telemarketing service provider was in the throes of a slow-motion, virtual nervous breakdown. Departments within IS were warring. Ninety percent of the staff was threatening to leave. Revenues were flat. Productivity, according to Maiorini, was half of what it should have been. And no one was looking forward to the looming promotion of then-Vice President of IT Maiorini to CIO, not even the would-be CIO himself. "For the first time in my career, I doubted my ability to have a positive effect on the situation," Maiorini admits.

Self-doubting, dysfunctional departments are nothing new; an industry of consultants, coaches, training institutes and book publishers exists to inspire leaders, empower employees and get them all working together. But Millennium Managing Partner Brian Pasch took a different tack.

He called a shrink.

Christine Truhe, an organizational psychologist based in Summit, N.J., began what she calls an intervention. Known in the organizational development field as "organizational diagnosis" and inside the Millennium offices as simply "the Dr. Truhe thing," it’s a process of assessing an organization or a particular business problem by addressing the relationships between individuals and groups.

At Millennium, Truhe encountered a dynamic she says is quite common among family-run businesses seeking to become more professional, startups that suddenly become successful, merged corporations and previously stable companies experiencing exponential growth. "There are a variety of complex psychological forces that converge in these kinds of situations, but generally the critical element is unclear or competing authority figures," says Truhe. After diagnosing Millennium with a problem in authority dynamics, she prescribed a cure.

And according to almost everyone involved at Millennium, a year and a half and about $100,000 later, it worked. Productivity and efficiency are up, costs have come down, retention has increased and, most important, people can breathe again.

Hitting Bottom

It had taken some time for the 39-year-old Pasch, who in 1993 joined Millennium cofounders Scott Pasch (his younger brother) and Dave Keezer as a managing partner and the company’s first IS employee, to see that there were real issues in the department. "I started seeing a lot of professional people, who were good at what they did, not getting along," says Brian. "I tried saying, ’Hey, you guys are adults. Go work it out.’ That didn’t work." He encouraged his group of eight IT managers to attend workshops and courses in communication. To generate team spirit, he tried taking them out to New York Yankees baseball games in the spring and summer and New Jersey Nets basketball games in the fall and winter. He looked into setting up a lending library on leadership and management topics. Nothing worked.