The road to a championship starts with human resources
The first of a two-part look at the human resources management at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd., the company that owns the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Toronto Raptors. Next issue, a closer look at the successful merger of the two very different organizations.
When the puck slid down the ice and into the empty Toronto Maple Leaf net with just seconds left in game six of the conference semifinal, a conspicuous group of blue- and white-clad Leaf fans, resigned to their fate, made their way down 20 rows and past thousands of delirious and very unsympathetic New Jersey Devils supporters at the Continental Airlines Arena.
A disappointing loss ended the season for the players. For the 50 some employees of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd., (MLSEL) — the team behind the team — who had been flown down to East Rutherford, New Jersey to cheer on their side, it would be back to work the next day.
About 300 people work full-time and another 1,500 part-time, year round, behind the scenes trying to put a great Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team on the ice, and a great Toronto Raptors basketball team on the court. When their teams get knocked out of the playoffs, the whole organization regrets it and there will be some melancholy people around the office for a few days. That’s fine. The benefits of flying all of their full-time employees to playoff games 50 at a time, putting them up in a hotel, giving them tickets to the game and a tidy $50 per diem, will far outweigh the sullen faces.
Sure, they’ll remember the loss and the ignominious retreat from the stadium, past jeering Devils fans, but they will also remember being flown to the game, donning team colours and waving team flags. They’ll remember the disappointment, but that’s part of the story. They’ll also remember the excitement of going on the road to foreign territory with co-workers who become at least acquaintances and often friends.
They’ll remember this trip in particular because it was the one where John McRae missed the flight home. And they’ll laugh — probably a lot.
It’s a great story for employees to tell, and Mardi Walker, vice-president of people for Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd., knows that after the disappointment of the early exit from the playoffs wears off, they’ll feel a little bit better about coming to work and seeing the people who can share the same jokes and experiences from that trip and tell the same stories.
The problems of staffing at MLSEL are at the same time unique and typical. Although they have little problem in attracting people to the glamorous world of professional sports, the novelty eventually wears off, and Walker’s people department works hard to ensure their employees still enjoy coming to work after the honeymoon.
“It’s not the best paying industry in the world,” says Richard Peddie, president and CEO of the company that owns the Leafs, the Raptors and their arena the Air Canada Centre in downtown Toronto. The hours are long and unconventional, since so much of their work is done on the weekends and the evenings. “If we’ve got the weekend off, we’ve failed,” he says.
But lately, they’ve been keeping the voluntary turnover rate down around eight per cent.
She would like to think it’s not just the idea of bumping into Vince Carter or Mats Sundin in the parking lot that keeps them around. “It’s not an easy thing for people to leave us,” says Walker.
“I know a lot of people would die to be in my shoes,” says Martha MacEachern, who started with the Maple Leafs four years ago at old Maple Leaf Gardens and now runs the tours for the new arena.
Maple Leafs icon, Darryl Sittler’s office is just a few steps down the hall, but after a while Darryl Sittler just becomes Darryl. “For me he is just part of the family,” she says.
In recent years the business of professional sports has changed dramatically. To build a year in, year out contender it has become absolutely essential to have great people running the business that supports the teams on the ice and on the court, says Ken Dryden, president of the Toronto Maple Leafs and one-time super-star goalie for the Montreal Canadians.
“You can’t separate the teams from the business,” he says, “There is a real correlation between what you put on the ice and how you do in the office.”
Corporate sponsors have a much greater role to play and a new generation of arenas brings with them a need for an operation with a great deal of business savvy.
The teams that have the good office operation, the good marketers, the good service people, the good sales people, those are the teams that are going to contend year after year. In the past, if a franchise had to sell 70 corporate boxes in their home rink, now it is typical to have 150 boxes to fill. “You need people to go out and sell those boxes,” he says. “That’s where your next left-winger comes from.”
So just like everyone else, MLSEL is engaged in the war for talent. Not just for the next great left-winger, but also for the people who will help them pay that left-winger.
Fortunately for Walker, she is in the enviable position of having complete support from the rest of the senior team. Spending $800 per employee on a trip to New Jersey is not a problem if it means employees are going to feel more committed, more closely connected to their team and less likely to leave.
“I think it’s terrific,” says Dryden.
There’s no question a lot of people come to work for the Maple Leafs looking to be associated with a high-energy product like a professional sports franchise. “They like the feelings of sports and team and it is that image that the corporate world has expropriated from the sporting world,” he says.
Teams have a one-for-all and all-for-one mentality. The challenge is to try and replicate that energy and passion in the office, he says. And there is perhaps no better way to do that than to send employees out on the road, when their team is up against it and it’s the playoffs. They are sent into the opponents home arena filled with enemy fans and that little group is gathered in the stands, cheering for the team they help put together.
That’s what helps to develop that team mentality, where everybody wins together but also loses together, he says.
Walker was warned when she first started with the company that her boss would be keeping a close eye on her work because he considered it such an important job.
“I spend about 50 per cent of my time on people every day,” says Peddie.
“I’ve been a president for 17 years and have run a lot of companies and I learned very quickly that people make the difference,” he says.
One of the first things he did when he became president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd., was introduce a corporate visions and values statement: “Create Champions: excite our fans, inspire our employees, bring pride to our community and we all win.”
“We keep falling back to our vision and values. It’s huge here; if you have a clear vision and values it guides people,” says Peddie, who believes that unlike a lot of other organizations, they give substance to the vision and values statement to make it more than hollow rhetoric. “If a third of companies have them, maybe half of those actually live them,” he says.
One of the cornerstones of the company’s vision and values statement is to inspire employees by being a dynamic and exceptional place to work.
It’s a work-hard, play-hard culture, says Walker. Aside from the road trips, every month an employee is named player-of-the-month, presented with prizes and has her picture posted over one of the main entrances to the ACC. At the same meeting names are drawn for people who have been named on “soaring above the crowd.” At anytime, employees can fill out the cards for employees who have done something nice to help them do their job. If the card is drawn the employee who committed the good deed is also rewarded.
When employees are recognized for long service their names are put on the wall, tying them in history to the veritable institution that is the Maple Leafs and that the Raptors hope one day to become.
Last summer, when everyone was gathered at a picnic on Centre Island in Toronto’s harbour for the annual meeting to present the company business plan, they were entertained by Peddie, Dryden, Walker and the rest of the senior team who presented the plan in a skit dressed up in Austin Powers-type outfits, frilly shirts, outrageous pants, mini skirts and all. Once everyone sees Richard Peddie and Ken Dryden dressed up in ridiculous Austin Powers outfits, they can see that we are not afraid to laugh at ourselves, says Peddie, who also takes at least 15 minutes with every new hire who joins the team to make them feel more comfortable in an organization that eschews the rigidity of old hierarchies. “Everyone calls me Richard and I correct them when they don’t,” he says.
“We try very hard to integrate everyone. It’s one of our huge initiatives,” says Walker.
If you want to have a total family feeling, you have to constantly remind people that they have to work together. “If the building hasn’t been converted properly (from basketball court to hockey rink, for example), it’s going to effect how the team is going to play and what the fans think of what we are doing here,” she says.
Shortly after the ACC was opened, for example, the local media reported complaints about the condition of the ice. The crew that tends to the ice took it really personally, says Karen Petcoff, senior manager of communications and public relations. Some of the players knew that and would make a point of going over and telling them whenever they noticed the ice felt good. It’s a small thing but it really meant a lot to them, she says.
Aside from the player-of-the-month awards, brown-bag lunch meetings are held eight to 10 times a year when all employees from every department can come together, four or five of which give updates on new developments in that department and field questions from everyone else. “Some of our best questions we get our from staff,” says Petcoff.
And when so many employees come together on road-trips or a couple of days a month for the player-of-the-month or brown-bag meetings, faces become more familiar and conversations become easier, says MacEachern.
With an office spread out over several floors, “It’s amazing how much physical space creates barriers,” she says. But coming together a couple of days a month helps to remove some of those barriers.
“I’m much more likely to deliver something in person rather than just put it in inter-office mail.”
Photos of all the staff will soon be put on the company intranet to help people become more familiar with each other and a staff yearbook will also be produced to take that initiative a step further.
Employee surveys are conducted every 18 to 24 months but they will also begin to conduct smaller quarterly surveys online to see how they are performing against the findings from the previous survey.
The recognition programs came out of previous surveys and after the last one, the lunch room was enlarged and equipped with a computer system so part-timers could have access to e-mail updates.
The brown-bags, though popular, were sometimes held on event days when staff were too busy to attend or employees found they weren’t being held in the best location. After that became clear in the last survey, the events were changed to non-event days and in the seats of the arena with powerpoint presentations displayed on the overhead scoreboard.
“We don’t have any policies on long hours,” says Peddie. In fact they try to avoid policies as a rule of thumb. Most of the time they’re just huge binders that nobody reads, he says.
Instead, two “floater holidays” were created to be taken at anytime, summer hours close the office at noon on Fridays and managers are constantly reminded to find lieu time wherever they can for employees who have been putting in extra time.
The compensation schemes are fairly traditional, says Walker, they can’t offer stock options, for instance. But she is confident their benefits packages are above average.
There is no deductible, the company pays all the premiums and a DC pension plan is fully matched by MLSEL up to five per cent of each cheque. There is an EAP that Walker herself used to help her find a nanny when she moved and found the longer commute was cutting into her time with her three kids.
And although nobody is going to get rich working in the office at the Air Canada Centre, promotion, succession planning and training have all become very big, says Peddie.
He personally runs leadership development courses for directors and managers once a month so that over the course of a year, Peddie spends a day with all 80 of them. In addition to tuition reimbursement for development courses, they are also considering a new policy of paying for employees who want to complete and e-MBA.
And Walker is always reminding managers not to be frightened to find someone who could take their job and developing them to that end. By grooming a replacement, they will free themselves up to work on special projects or take on new challenges elsewhere in the organization. They recently agreed to release somebody for eight weeks to do research for NBC at the Olympics.
While the Leafs have a long history of filling the Air Canada Centre and the Maple Leaf Gardens before that — certainly one measure of success — and the Toronto Raptors seem be on their way to earning a place in the hearts of Toronto sports fans, none of that means the company can rest on its laurels.
Peddie, Walker and Dryden all truly believe they have to act as though that could all end tomorrow and they want to employ the best people to ensure that it doesn’t.
“Complacency is a success disease,” says Peddie. “If I spend 50 per cent of my time on people, I spend 25 per cent worrying.”
When the puck slid down the ice and into the empty Toronto Maple Leaf net with just seconds left in game six of the conference semifinal, a conspicuous group of blue- and white-clad Leaf fans, resigned to their fate, made their way down 20 rows and past thousands of delirious and very unsympathetic New Jersey Devils supporters at the Continental Airlines Arena.
A disappointing loss ended the season for the players. For the 50 some employees of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd., (MLSEL) — the team behind the team — who had been flown down to East Rutherford, New Jersey to cheer on their side, it would be back to work the next day.
About 300 people work full-time and another 1,500 part-time, year round, behind the scenes trying to put a great Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team on the ice, and a great Toronto Raptors basketball team on the court. When their teams get knocked out of the playoffs, the whole organization regrets it and there will be some melancholy people around the office for a few days. That’s fine. The benefits of flying all of their full-time employees to playoff games 50 at a time, putting them up in a hotel, giving them tickets to the game and a tidy $50 per diem, will far outweigh the sullen faces.
Sure, they’ll remember the loss and the ignominious retreat from the stadium, past jeering Devils fans, but they will also remember being flown to the game, donning team colours and waving team flags. They’ll remember the disappointment, but that’s part of the story. They’ll also remember the excitement of going on the road to foreign territory with co-workers who become at least acquaintances and often friends.
They’ll remember this trip in particular because it was the one where John McRae missed the flight home. And they’ll laugh — probably a lot.
It’s a great story for employees to tell, and Mardi Walker, vice-president of people for Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd., knows that after the disappointment of the early exit from the playoffs wears off, they’ll feel a little bit better about coming to work and seeing the people who can share the same jokes and experiences from that trip and tell the same stories.
The problems of staffing at MLSEL are at the same time unique and typical. Although they have little problem in attracting people to the glamorous world of professional sports, the novelty eventually wears off, and Walker’s people department works hard to ensure their employees still enjoy coming to work after the honeymoon.
“It’s not the best paying industry in the world,” says Richard Peddie, president and CEO of the company that owns the Leafs, the Raptors and their arena the Air Canada Centre in downtown Toronto. The hours are long and unconventional, since so much of their work is done on the weekends and the evenings. “If we’ve got the weekend off, we’ve failed,” he says.
But lately, they’ve been keeping the voluntary turnover rate down around eight per cent.
She would like to think it’s not just the idea of bumping into Vince Carter or Mats Sundin in the parking lot that keeps them around. “It’s not an easy thing for people to leave us,” says Walker.
“I know a lot of people would die to be in my shoes,” says Martha MacEachern, who started with the Maple Leafs four years ago at old Maple Leaf Gardens and now runs the tours for the new arena.
Maple Leafs icon, Darryl Sittler’s office is just a few steps down the hall, but after a while Darryl Sittler just becomes Darryl. “For me he is just part of the family,” she says.
In recent years the business of professional sports has changed dramatically. To build a year in, year out contender it has become absolutely essential to have great people running the business that supports the teams on the ice and on the court, says Ken Dryden, president of the Toronto Maple Leafs and one-time super-star goalie for the Montreal Canadians.
“You can’t separate the teams from the business,” he says, “There is a real correlation between what you put on the ice and how you do in the office.”
Corporate sponsors have a much greater role to play and a new generation of arenas brings with them a need for an operation with a great deal of business savvy.
The teams that have the good office operation, the good marketers, the good service people, the good sales people, those are the teams that are going to contend year after year. In the past, if a franchise had to sell 70 corporate boxes in their home rink, now it is typical to have 150 boxes to fill. “You need people to go out and sell those boxes,” he says. “That’s where your next left-winger comes from.”
So just like everyone else, MLSEL is engaged in the war for talent. Not just for the next great left-winger, but also for the people who will help them pay that left-winger.
Fortunately for Walker, she is in the enviable position of having complete support from the rest of the senior team. Spending $800 per employee on a trip to New Jersey is not a problem if it means employees are going to feel more committed, more closely connected to their team and less likely to leave.
“I think it’s terrific,” says Dryden.
There’s no question a lot of people come to work for the Maple Leafs looking to be associated with a high-energy product like a professional sports franchise. “They like the feelings of sports and team and it is that image that the corporate world has expropriated from the sporting world,” he says.
Teams have a one-for-all and all-for-one mentality. The challenge is to try and replicate that energy and passion in the office, he says. And there is perhaps no better way to do that than to send employees out on the road, when their team is up against it and it’s the playoffs. They are sent into the opponents home arena filled with enemy fans and that little group is gathered in the stands, cheering for the team they help put together.
That’s what helps to develop that team mentality, where everybody wins together but also loses together, he says.
Walker was warned when she first started with the company that her boss would be keeping a close eye on her work because he considered it such an important job.
“I spend about 50 per cent of my time on people every day,” says Peddie.
“I’ve been a president for 17 years and have run a lot of companies and I learned very quickly that people make the difference,” he says.
One of the first things he did when he became president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd., was introduce a corporate visions and values statement: “Create Champions: excite our fans, inspire our employees, bring pride to our community and we all win.”
“We keep falling back to our vision and values. It’s huge here; if you have a clear vision and values it guides people,” says Peddie, who believes that unlike a lot of other organizations, they give substance to the vision and values statement to make it more than hollow rhetoric. “If a third of companies have them, maybe half of those actually live them,” he says.
One of the cornerstones of the company’s vision and values statement is to inspire employees by being a dynamic and exceptional place to work.
It’s a work-hard, play-hard culture, says Walker. Aside from the road trips, every month an employee is named player-of-the-month, presented with prizes and has her picture posted over one of the main entrances to the ACC. At the same meeting names are drawn for people who have been named on “soaring above the crowd.” At anytime, employees can fill out the cards for employees who have done something nice to help them do their job. If the card is drawn the employee who committed the good deed is also rewarded.
When employees are recognized for long service their names are put on the wall, tying them in history to the veritable institution that is the Maple Leafs and that the Raptors hope one day to become.
Last summer, when everyone was gathered at a picnic on Centre Island in Toronto’s harbour for the annual meeting to present the company business plan, they were entertained by Peddie, Dryden, Walker and the rest of the senior team who presented the plan in a skit dressed up in Austin Powers-type outfits, frilly shirts, outrageous pants, mini skirts and all. Once everyone sees Richard Peddie and Ken Dryden dressed up in ridiculous Austin Powers outfits, they can see that we are not afraid to laugh at ourselves, says Peddie, who also takes at least 15 minutes with every new hire who joins the team to make them feel more comfortable in an organization that eschews the rigidity of old hierarchies. “Everyone calls me Richard and I correct them when they don’t,” he says.
“We try very hard to integrate everyone. It’s one of our huge initiatives,” says Walker.
If you want to have a total family feeling, you have to constantly remind people that they have to work together. “If the building hasn’t been converted properly (from basketball court to hockey rink, for example), it’s going to effect how the team is going to play and what the fans think of what we are doing here,” she says.
Shortly after the ACC was opened, for example, the local media reported complaints about the condition of the ice. The crew that tends to the ice took it really personally, says Karen Petcoff, senior manager of communications and public relations. Some of the players knew that and would make a point of going over and telling them whenever they noticed the ice felt good. It’s a small thing but it really meant a lot to them, she says.
Aside from the player-of-the-month awards, brown-bag lunch meetings are held eight to 10 times a year when all employees from every department can come together, four or five of which give updates on new developments in that department and field questions from everyone else. “Some of our best questions we get our from staff,” says Petcoff.
And when so many employees come together on road-trips or a couple of days a month for the player-of-the-month or brown-bag meetings, faces become more familiar and conversations become easier, says MacEachern.
With an office spread out over several floors, “It’s amazing how much physical space creates barriers,” she says. But coming together a couple of days a month helps to remove some of those barriers.
“I’m much more likely to deliver something in person rather than just put it in inter-office mail.”
Photos of all the staff will soon be put on the company intranet to help people become more familiar with each other and a staff yearbook will also be produced to take that initiative a step further.
Employee surveys are conducted every 18 to 24 months but they will also begin to conduct smaller quarterly surveys online to see how they are performing against the findings from the previous survey.
The recognition programs came out of previous surveys and after the last one, the lunch room was enlarged and equipped with a computer system so part-timers could have access to e-mail updates.
The brown-bags, though popular, were sometimes held on event days when staff were too busy to attend or employees found they weren’t being held in the best location. After that became clear in the last survey, the events were changed to non-event days and in the seats of the arena with powerpoint presentations displayed on the overhead scoreboard.
“We don’t have any policies on long hours,” says Peddie. In fact they try to avoid policies as a rule of thumb. Most of the time they’re just huge binders that nobody reads, he says.
Instead, two “floater holidays” were created to be taken at anytime, summer hours close the office at noon on Fridays and managers are constantly reminded to find lieu time wherever they can for employees who have been putting in extra time.
The compensation schemes are fairly traditional, says Walker, they can’t offer stock options, for instance. But she is confident their benefits packages are above average.
There is no deductible, the company pays all the premiums and a DC pension plan is fully matched by MLSEL up to five per cent of each cheque. There is an EAP that Walker herself used to help her find a nanny when she moved and found the longer commute was cutting into her time with her three kids.
And although nobody is going to get rich working in the office at the Air Canada Centre, promotion, succession planning and training have all become very big, says Peddie.
He personally runs leadership development courses for directors and managers once a month so that over the course of a year, Peddie spends a day with all 80 of them. In addition to tuition reimbursement for development courses, they are also considering a new policy of paying for employees who want to complete and e-MBA.
And Walker is always reminding managers not to be frightened to find someone who could take their job and developing them to that end. By grooming a replacement, they will free themselves up to work on special projects or take on new challenges elsewhere in the organization. They recently agreed to release somebody for eight weeks to do research for NBC at the Olympics.
While the Leafs have a long history of filling the Air Canada Centre and the Maple Leaf Gardens before that — certainly one measure of success — and the Toronto Raptors seem be on their way to earning a place in the hearts of Toronto sports fans, none of that means the company can rest on its laurels.
Peddie, Walker and Dryden all truly believe they have to act as though that could all end tomorrow and they want to employ the best people to ensure that it doesn’t.
“Complacency is a success disease,” says Peddie. “If I spend 50 per cent of my time on people, I spend 25 per cent worrying.”
