In late 1997 and early 1998, both the Toronto Raptors and Toronto Maple Leafs were looking for new homes. The two wrangled for position in the downtown core and at one point the Leafs proposed building a new arena just half a block away from the Air Canada Centre which the Raptors had already begun to build. Instead, the dispute ended with the feuding franchises becoming housemates after the Leafs bought out the Raptors and the two became co-tenants at the ACC.
As vice-president of people at the new Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd.,(MLSEL) Mardi Walker managed human resources during the uneasy merger between the two teams.
Aside from the bad blood that preceded the buy-out, Walker and the rest of the senior team had to combine two very different organizations. From their markets to their cultures and demographics the two had almost nothing in common.
People are always the key to successful mergers, says Walker. Generating employee buy-in, bringing them on board with new corporate strategy and finding the right supervisors and processes to manage them. “Without that you’re not going to be anywhere. You may as well just shut the doors.”
As they prepared to merger the two operations, the management team knew that communicating to employees would be critical for a successful merger. Even so, they now admit they did not listen enough to what employees had to say in return.
As is typical after any merger, the uncertainty of what lay ahead had most employees feeling nervous.
So the first step was to develop the new company’s organizational chart, starting at the top and installing the senior management team. After the board selected former Raptors president Richard Peddie as the new president of MLSEL, it took two months to finalize the rest of the senior team.
While this helped to settle things down a little, many former Leafs employees found new reason to fret when Raptors’ top brass had seemingly taken the helm of the new operation. Some former Leafs employees called it a reverse takeover, says Walker, and they were unsure of what to expect after the comfortable constancy that defined the years at the old Maple Leaf Gardens.
“It’s change and all people fear change,” says Peddie. But it was going to be particularly tough convincing long-term Leafs employees of the benefits of the new ways.
The Leafs knew little of modern corporate structure, says Walker. Their seats were always filled and employees — some of whom had worked there for 40 or 50 years, others who were second or third generation — were very happy and extremely dedicated. There seemed to be little need to embrace the modern businesslike approach of the Raptors organization. To a large extent the business had taken care of itself with little change in operations for decades, carried forward with the momentum that industry giants so often possess.
Even physical work environments made the two operations an unwieldy match, says Walker. At the Maple Leaf Gardens, departments and people were mostly separated, working in isolated offices, in different parts of the building some even in another building across the street. A sharp contrast to the workspace at the Raptors’ office where a younger staff worked in an open-concept office with tiny cubicles and little privacy. People were accustomed to working in a very team-oriented environment, shouting ideas back and forth over cubicle walls, she says.
“It was sort of more old-school,” Mike Evans, who now manages the ACC, says of his days with the Leafs before the merger. There was no HR department, and that showed in the way people were managed, he says. Junior staffers wouldn’t talk to the senior people, recognition programs paled compared to what is now offered at MLSEL and training was narrow and job-specific, conducted by immediate bosses or supervisors.
Since the merger, Evans, like many in management, has taken a number of development courses — how to conduct better interviews for example, all designed to improve performance and expand skills.
“They referred to the different ways we did things as ‘Raptors techniques,’” says Peddie; the Leafs had never conducted written employee evaluations, for example. “But really it was just the things that successful modern businesses do.”
“We focus hugely on communications,” says Walker, whose department is continually looking for ways to sell the corporate strategy, to generate buy-in and link it to the company vision and values statement. Anytime an e-mail goes out to notify employees of an upcoming event, whether it’s a town-hall or a brown-bag meeting, the most relevant part of the visions and values statement is sent along with it.
Eager to gain employees’ interest in the upcoming summer “training camp” for employees, Walker printed the course calendar with course descriptions over top of the vision and values statement, stuffed it into team water bottles and sent them out to employees.
Good communication has been practised since day one and was a cornerstone of the strategy as they launched the merger.
Soon after the buy-out was finalized in 1998, all employees were called to a meeting at the Second City comedy theatre in downtown Toronto. “They (Leaf employees) looked at us like we had three heads,” says Karen Petcoff, senior manager of communications and public relations for MLSEL. All-employee meetings were rare at Maple Leaf Gardens and typically meant bad news.
Instead, actors were used to satirize the difficult events that led up to the merger — to clear the air, and to make the point that employees were going to be in the loop.
At one meeting a game of musical chairs was used to represent complicated business plans, taking chairs away to represent different pieces of the budget. Humour is also used as much as possible. The Second City parody is one example. Last year the senior team dressed up in Austin Powers-type outfits to present the business plan. Humour is universal, says Petcoff. It can break down literary and hierarchical barriers to get the message across more effectively.
With a sophisticated communications strategy, a modern business plan in place and progressive HR policies introduced, the senior team was surprised when the first employee attitude survey was conducted and the scores were lower than expected.
In response, focus groups were conducted with employees. Time and again employees expressed frustration that they weren’t being listened to or their contributions weren’t respected, says Peddie.
“We were in such a hurry and we had to be,” says Peddie. Unlike the large number of franchises that had recently opened a new arena, the Leafs were the only team to open on budget and on time.
But the dash to open the ACC on time meant, in turns out, they were probably a little heavy-handed trying to convert Leafs employees, many of whom needed time and management patience to make the change to the modern ways of the new regime.
“We understood about the length of service on the Leafs side, but I don’t think we truly understood how deep-seated the roots were,” says Walker. It was not unusual when a long-time employee of the Maple Leafs died for the coffin to be draped in a Maple Leafs flag and co-workers to attend the funeral wearing their uniforms.
“They had a really nice family feel and I didn’t, and others didn’t, understand the depth of that family feel and the depth of their loyalty,” Peddie says. “We did not respect all of their experience and loyalty.”
He blames this for the well-publicized problems they had with the ice surface soon after the arena was opened. Making ice is both a science and an art, he says. The ACC had all of the best equipment to make the ice but they were ignoring the artistic touch of the people who had been making ice for years at the Maple Leaf Gardens. The quality of the ice suffered, players complained and the press belaboured the point.
Two years down the road, after many, many meetings, plenty of training and some valuable lessons learned, MLSEL has emerged relatively unscathed but still with work to do, says Walker.
“It’s not over yet,” agrees Peddie. “There is still staff that maybe aren’t as trusting as we’d like them to be.”
And they are working to gain that trust. One senior manager has committed to talking to every hourly employee face to face. Attitude surveys have revealed a lot and when people feel free to complain to the HR department, things bubble up through there, he says.
“It took a couple of years to really get into the skin of those people and figure out why they think that way, even if you don’t — to see things through their eyes,” says Walker.
Women in a man’s game
Soon after joining MLSEL, Mardi Walker, vice-president of people and the first female senior executive from either the Leafs or the Raptors, was invited to come along with the wives and join the male executives for dinner after their golf tournament. Not to play, just for dinner. With the wives.
Professional sports has long been a male bastion, says Walker. But management at MLSEL has committed to putting an end to that tradition. There are now two female vice-presidents, a number of women hold senior positions, and women now comprise about 30 per cent of the MLSEL corporate office.
But soon after the merger, it became apparent some of the women employees felt they weren’t being equally recognized. President and CEO of MLSEL, Richard Peddie and seven senior women, including Walker, met to figure out why women felt that way. “It really bothered him because there was no way he wanted to see that happening,” says Walker.
There were inevitable blind spots at an organization where until a short time before there were no women in the senior ranks, says Walker.
It was the little things mostly, probably lingering behaviours from the old days at the Leafs, or issues the Raptors hadn’t even addressed yet. But the little things add up. After their conversation with Peddie, they resolved to take a close look at things like pay and promotions and enact immediate changes to address the concerns of female employees.
They began immediately to remedy those little things. Walker began to send female employees to women’s corporate events, female managers are given game tickets as readily as the men, and the ladies at MLSEL were given ice-time so that they could go and play some shinny as the men had been doing.
While the examination of pay revealed there was minimal difference between men and women at the director level, there have been more promotions of women to director level and Walker will continue to track those indicators.
At the recent inaugural women in business session, every female employee was given a half day off work to hear Walker and three other executive women from outside the company talk about obstacles they’ve had to overcome in their careers, how they balance home and work, the different ways of managing men and women and other things they wish they had known as they progressed along their career path.
As for the golf tournament, women are always invited to play in all golf outings. But, with a keen sense of how most corporate tournaments are geared toward men — it’s all steaks and cigars, she says —Walker now helps promote a popular tournament exclusively for women, with meals and prizes that women will actually enjoy and appreciate.
As vice-president of people at the new Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd.,(MLSEL) Mardi Walker managed human resources during the uneasy merger between the two teams.
Aside from the bad blood that preceded the buy-out, Walker and the rest of the senior team had to combine two very different organizations. From their markets to their cultures and demographics the two had almost nothing in common.
People are always the key to successful mergers, says Walker. Generating employee buy-in, bringing them on board with new corporate strategy and finding the right supervisors and processes to manage them. “Without that you’re not going to be anywhere. You may as well just shut the doors.”
As they prepared to merger the two operations, the management team knew that communicating to employees would be critical for a successful merger. Even so, they now admit they did not listen enough to what employees had to say in return.
As is typical after any merger, the uncertainty of what lay ahead had most employees feeling nervous.
So the first step was to develop the new company’s organizational chart, starting at the top and installing the senior management team. After the board selected former Raptors president Richard Peddie as the new president of MLSEL, it took two months to finalize the rest of the senior team.
While this helped to settle things down a little, many former Leafs employees found new reason to fret when Raptors’ top brass had seemingly taken the helm of the new operation. Some former Leafs employees called it a reverse takeover, says Walker, and they were unsure of what to expect after the comfortable constancy that defined the years at the old Maple Leaf Gardens.
“It’s change and all people fear change,” says Peddie. But it was going to be particularly tough convincing long-term Leafs employees of the benefits of the new ways.
The Leafs knew little of modern corporate structure, says Walker. Their seats were always filled and employees — some of whom had worked there for 40 or 50 years, others who were second or third generation — were very happy and extremely dedicated. There seemed to be little need to embrace the modern businesslike approach of the Raptors organization. To a large extent the business had taken care of itself with little change in operations for decades, carried forward with the momentum that industry giants so often possess.
Even physical work environments made the two operations an unwieldy match, says Walker. At the Maple Leaf Gardens, departments and people were mostly separated, working in isolated offices, in different parts of the building some even in another building across the street. A sharp contrast to the workspace at the Raptors’ office where a younger staff worked in an open-concept office with tiny cubicles and little privacy. People were accustomed to working in a very team-oriented environment, shouting ideas back and forth over cubicle walls, she says.
“It was sort of more old-school,” Mike Evans, who now manages the ACC, says of his days with the Leafs before the merger. There was no HR department, and that showed in the way people were managed, he says. Junior staffers wouldn’t talk to the senior people, recognition programs paled compared to what is now offered at MLSEL and training was narrow and job-specific, conducted by immediate bosses or supervisors.
Since the merger, Evans, like many in management, has taken a number of development courses — how to conduct better interviews for example, all designed to improve performance and expand skills.
“They referred to the different ways we did things as ‘Raptors techniques,’” says Peddie; the Leafs had never conducted written employee evaluations, for example. “But really it was just the things that successful modern businesses do.”
“We focus hugely on communications,” says Walker, whose department is continually looking for ways to sell the corporate strategy, to generate buy-in and link it to the company vision and values statement. Anytime an e-mail goes out to notify employees of an upcoming event, whether it’s a town-hall or a brown-bag meeting, the most relevant part of the visions and values statement is sent along with it.
Eager to gain employees’ interest in the upcoming summer “training camp” for employees, Walker printed the course calendar with course descriptions over top of the vision and values statement, stuffed it into team water bottles and sent them out to employees.
Good communication has been practised since day one and was a cornerstone of the strategy as they launched the merger.
Soon after the buy-out was finalized in 1998, all employees were called to a meeting at the Second City comedy theatre in downtown Toronto. “They (Leaf employees) looked at us like we had three heads,” says Karen Petcoff, senior manager of communications and public relations for MLSEL. All-employee meetings were rare at Maple Leaf Gardens and typically meant bad news.
Instead, actors were used to satirize the difficult events that led up to the merger — to clear the air, and to make the point that employees were going to be in the loop.
At one meeting a game of musical chairs was used to represent complicated business plans, taking chairs away to represent different pieces of the budget. Humour is also used as much as possible. The Second City parody is one example. Last year the senior team dressed up in Austin Powers-type outfits to present the business plan. Humour is universal, says Petcoff. It can break down literary and hierarchical barriers to get the message across more effectively.
With a sophisticated communications strategy, a modern business plan in place and progressive HR policies introduced, the senior team was surprised when the first employee attitude survey was conducted and the scores were lower than expected.
In response, focus groups were conducted with employees. Time and again employees expressed frustration that they weren’t being listened to or their contributions weren’t respected, says Peddie.
“We were in such a hurry and we had to be,” says Peddie. Unlike the large number of franchises that had recently opened a new arena, the Leafs were the only team to open on budget and on time.
But the dash to open the ACC on time meant, in turns out, they were probably a little heavy-handed trying to convert Leafs employees, many of whom needed time and management patience to make the change to the modern ways of the new regime.
“We understood about the length of service on the Leafs side, but I don’t think we truly understood how deep-seated the roots were,” says Walker. It was not unusual when a long-time employee of the Maple Leafs died for the coffin to be draped in a Maple Leafs flag and co-workers to attend the funeral wearing their uniforms.
“They had a really nice family feel and I didn’t, and others didn’t, understand the depth of that family feel and the depth of their loyalty,” Peddie says. “We did not respect all of their experience and loyalty.”
He blames this for the well-publicized problems they had with the ice surface soon after the arena was opened. Making ice is both a science and an art, he says. The ACC had all of the best equipment to make the ice but they were ignoring the artistic touch of the people who had been making ice for years at the Maple Leaf Gardens. The quality of the ice suffered, players complained and the press belaboured the point.
Two years down the road, after many, many meetings, plenty of training and some valuable lessons learned, MLSEL has emerged relatively unscathed but still with work to do, says Walker.
“It’s not over yet,” agrees Peddie. “There is still staff that maybe aren’t as trusting as we’d like them to be.”
And they are working to gain that trust. One senior manager has committed to talking to every hourly employee face to face. Attitude surveys have revealed a lot and when people feel free to complain to the HR department, things bubble up through there, he says.
“It took a couple of years to really get into the skin of those people and figure out why they think that way, even if you don’t — to see things through their eyes,” says Walker.
Women in a man’s game
Soon after joining MLSEL, Mardi Walker, vice-president of people and the first female senior executive from either the Leafs or the Raptors, was invited to come along with the wives and join the male executives for dinner after their golf tournament. Not to play, just for dinner. With the wives.
Professional sports has long been a male bastion, says Walker. But management at MLSEL has committed to putting an end to that tradition. There are now two female vice-presidents, a number of women hold senior positions, and women now comprise about 30 per cent of the MLSEL corporate office.
But soon after the merger, it became apparent some of the women employees felt they weren’t being equally recognized. President and CEO of MLSEL, Richard Peddie and seven senior women, including Walker, met to figure out why women felt that way. “It really bothered him because there was no way he wanted to see that happening,” says Walker.
There were inevitable blind spots at an organization where until a short time before there were no women in the senior ranks, says Walker.
It was the little things mostly, probably lingering behaviours from the old days at the Leafs, or issues the Raptors hadn’t even addressed yet. But the little things add up. After their conversation with Peddie, they resolved to take a close look at things like pay and promotions and enact immediate changes to address the concerns of female employees.
They began immediately to remedy those little things. Walker began to send female employees to women’s corporate events, female managers are given game tickets as readily as the men, and the ladies at MLSEL were given ice-time so that they could go and play some shinny as the men had been doing.
While the examination of pay revealed there was minimal difference between men and women at the director level, there have been more promotions of women to director level and Walker will continue to track those indicators.
At the recent inaugural women in business session, every female employee was given a half day off work to hear Walker and three other executive women from outside the company talk about obstacles they’ve had to overcome in their careers, how they balance home and work, the different ways of managing men and women and other things they wish they had known as they progressed along their career path.
As for the golf tournament, women are always invited to play in all golf outings. But, with a keen sense of how most corporate tournaments are geared toward men — it’s all steaks and cigars, she says —Walker now helps promote a popular tournament exclusively for women, with meals and prizes that women will actually enjoy and appreciate.
