Pressler’s process was as important to this as the specific expectations he set. He conducted one-on-one interviews with the company's top fifty managers, asking each of them the same six carefully considered questions to get their insights about the business, to solicit their advice, and to see what themes emerged. He and the Gap Inc. communications department also created a weblog for all the company’s employees, posting all of his activities and what he was learning. As a result, “people saw that I was genuinely engaged and was willing to listen before I talked about where we needed to go or communicated a vision or approach,” Pressler says. “And that put people at ease. More important, people felt very connected to the learning experience I went through, and all those folks in the field who felt underappreciated began to feel that they were significant. I wasn’t making promises or changes as much as being a listening post.

Pressler recognized that it would be premature in the first hundred days to develop a comprehensive strategic plan - and even if he did, it might be wrong. But he knew that in an organization of 165,000 employees, he needed to find a way to set a direction and motivate the people.

Eckert adds, “As the new guy, I realized that every first encounter with a Mattel employee had the potential to be fraught with tension, and I felt it was my responsibility to do everything possible to reduce it. Surprisingly, I found that in each situation, recognizing my own lack of knowledge about the company’s people and culture - in effect, allowing the employees to be the ‘boss’ in certain situations - actually helped me lead.

I got a lot of resistance initially,” Pressler recalls. “People asked, ‘How am I to be held accountable for something I don’t control?’” Pressler’s response: “You do. We’re a team, sharing responsibility and accountability for what’s best for our brands and for our company. We will set our agenda and determine our priorities together.” The result: “We still had to learn how to work effectively as a team, but this helped us begin to change our thinking and our actions.

[Carly] Fiorina, who in fact had done such an in-depth study of the company and the situation that she had many of the answers, probably meant to reassure people by her knowledge. But by not asking questions and by not failing to have some answers, she scared many of the employees. Fortunately, when this feedback was delivered and received, Fiorina adapted her active listening and allowed her natural gift for communication to flourish. This increased her credibility and at the same time deepened her insights into the company, its challenges, and its opportunities.