“What am I getting myself into?” thought Gene Smith as he gazed out the window at the ground passing by far below. It was the spring of 2005, and Smith was on a flight from Phoenix to Columbus, where in a few hours he would be formally announced as the new director of athletics at The Ohio State University. It was a dream job – back in his home state, leading one of the most storied collegiate athletic programs in the country. Yet Smith had only just begun to realize that the Buckeyes were in dire straits, and that they had somehow managed to get by all these years not because of strong organizational culture, but despite it. Strewn across the seats and floor in front of him were the files of over 300 individuals who were currently employed by the athletics department. As he opened each, one after the other, he was stunned to find… nothing. Less than 20% of the folders contained any sort of evaluation of the employees’ performance. There were people who had worked in the department for over a decade, and their files contained only the original resume they had applied with for their original jobs! Smith was inheriting an operation with a budget in excesses of a hundred million dollars, and yet no one had ever sat down to determine whether the people who were running the ship were actually doing their jobs. Not surprisingly, the department had become highly fragmented with people working in silos, focused more on self-preservation than moving the organization in a positive direction. A sense of entitlement permeated throughout, as people simply punched the clock at a job that they were seemingly never in danger of losing. …
Continue Reading: Why The Ohio State Buckeyes Prove That Great Leadership Starts With Emotion
