RCMP Watch

Can the new man at the top fix the dysfunctional force? Without experience, it seems highly unlikely.

James Bagnall, The Ottawa Citizen

Prime Minister Stephen Harper clearly has a lot of faith in William Elliott, his new commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

But does one person — especially an outsider with no experience at the RCMP — really have what it takes to quickly reform a “horribly broken” organization?As it happens, there is a private-sector outfit with a huge Ottawa presence that offers clear insight into the situation facing Elliott. Three years ago, Nortel Networks — which is only slightly bigger than the RCMP in terms of employees — sacked 10 of its most senior executives for cooking the company’s books.

That move proved just the beginning of a tortuous process to restore the company’s good name. For 18 months, Nortel was run on an interim basis by Bill Owens, a board member with limited history in the telecommunications equipment business — the company’s primary focus.

Owens spent most of his tenure getting up to speed on Nortel’s dozens of business units and myriad technologies. He then made investment decisions that had to be reversed because they made little sense economically.

Most notable of these business blunders was his move to supply an India-based wireless contract at a huge loss.

Elliott, the RCMP’s top gun, has a similar lack of experience in his new field. Trained as a lawyer, Elliott has spent decades in senior civil jobs in the departments of Transport, Coast Guard, Security and Intelligence and Public Safety.

Elliott obviously knows his way around the public service. But will this background be sufficient to swiftly tackle a dysfunctional RCMP organization with 26,000 employees?

It seems unlikely. Consider the challenge faced by Bill Owens’ successor as CEO at Nortel — Mike Zafirovski. A former senior executive at Motorola, one of high-tech’s more storied franchises, Zafirovski is a supremely talented workaholic with a rock-solid reputation for getting things done.

Not only that, his stint at Motorola gave him plenty of exposure to Nortel’s key technologies. In the 20 months since his hiring as CEO, Zafirovski has replaced more than half the company’s senior executives, closed or sold off a couple of unprofitable business units, resolved a major class-action lawsuit and finally put Nortel on a (barely) profitable footing.

Nevertheless, Zafirovski has readily acknowledged this turnaround is more difficult than he expected. There were times, he told the Wall Street Journal, when he was forced to make too many decisions, too quickly. Doubt would creep in. Was he really doing the right thing, he would ask himself. Occasionally, the sheer physical pace took its toll in the form of near-exhaustion.

Now, after thousands of hours devoted to reviving Nortel’s fortunes, Zafirovski knows the job isn’t nearly complete. He is thinking in terms of years, not months.

In fact, the hard part lies ahead of him. It’s one thing to address the obvious shortcomings of a prior regime, it’s quite another to create a new culture strong enough to take hold at every level of the organization.

It’s no secret that Zafirovski has been frustrated by the relatively bureaucratic pace of decision-making within Nortel’s middle ranks. Investors, too, seem disappointed by the company’s progress to date. Since Zafirovski’s appointment as CEO, Nortel’s share price has declined 30 per cent compared with a 30-per-cent increase over the same period for the main index on the TSX stock exchange.

To understand why Zafirovski is still confident about Nortel’s future, you have to consult his bible, Good to Great, by management guru Jim Collins.

The essential message in Collins’ writing is that executives who want to create a truly great organization — whether in business or government — must start by hiring a top-notch team. Only then should they figure out what the game plan should be.

“If you have the right people,” Collins writes, “the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away. They will be self-motivated.”

Zafirovski, accordingly, has surrounded himself with people who do not merely parrot his views. Most of his new executives were successful in their own right. Some required considerable persuasion to join him in a very risky enterprise to try to transform a broken Canadian icon into a winner again.

Zafirovski’s willingness to encourage dissent at the top contrasts sharply with the practice of former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli. David Brown, the special investigator who last month reported on the RCMP’s leadership crisis, described Zaccardelli’s style as showing “little regard or apparent respect for those with whom he was dealing.”

Indeed, RCMP employees who tried to alert Zaccardelli to serious irregularities in the management of the agency’s pension plan were dismissed or demoted for their bravery.

Elliott can move quickly to set a different tone at the top. But he will need lots of help from the managers who report to him. The case of Nortel suggests that in any organization this large — and this traumatized by autocratic personalities — it will take many years before a culture sets in where doing the right thing, the risky thing, comes naturally.