2007, the departures were voluntary. Most of the involuntary cuts occurred in 2008, and ended in January 2009.
Leitch says that no more are planned.
It hasn’t been easy keeping spirits up. “Maintaining
morale during that period, and keeping the hearts and
minds of those who were left behind, was a challenge,” the
general counsel acknowledges. The lesson he learned? “Be
completely forthright,” he says. Tell employees as much as
you can, as soon as you can: “Because at the end of the day,
John Mellen, Don
lough, anD Katherine
KJolheDe (FroM leFt)
oversaw the litigation
group’s Downsizing.
2009
2010
January
Ford reports
2008 losses of
$14.7 billion.
March–april
Ford completes
restructuring that
reduces company
debt by $10 billion.
Data shows that
Toyota was first in
2008 worldwide
auto sales,
knocking longtime
leader GM from
the top spot.
april
Chrysler files
for bankruptcy
(emerges in June).
January
Ford reports
2009 profits of
$2.7 billion and
its first full-year
gain in U.S. market
share since 1995.
June
GM files for
bankruptcy
(emerges in July).
people respect honesty. They
know difficult decisions had
to be made.”
The leaders of the litiga-
tion group took that lesson to
heart. Given that the group
employs the most lawyers, and lost the most, they had
a heavy burden. They decided the best approach was to
hold short meetings to update colleagues when they had
information.
“It was designed to limit the impact of rumors,” says John
Mellen, who heads the group. There were about a half-dozen
meetings in all. He and Don Lough, who heads the product
litigation subgroup, gathered the entire litigation staff in a
conference room and told them what they knew, what they
didn’t, and when they expected to know more.
The meetings didn’t last long. Some were as short as
five minutes, the longest no more than 1 5. Mellen tried to
stress that they were handling the process “as fairly and
humanely as possible.” And he made sure to emphasize
each time before they left: “We will get through this.”
The sessions weren’t dictated, or even suggested, by
Ford’s human resources department. Mellen and Lough
felt they were important not only for the people who
departed, but for those who remained. According to Lough,
the people who stayed on needed to see how their former
colleagues were treated “because those are their friends.”
Though the meetings were sometimes awkward, Mellen
says many lawyers thanked him for holding them.
Cutting colleagues wasn’t easy. Company secretary
Peter Sherry, who heads the law department’s corporate
group and has been with the company for 30 years, says it
was “personally painful” to lay off “very qualified” lawyers. The saving grace was that many have since landed
