There will be changes. And the timeline for a return to whatever the new normal will be is unknown. Even so, Cynthia Marshall said that while nobody can know when we come out of this, we can determine how we come out of it. “We do know there will be a new normal in how we interact,” Marshall said. “We’re going to have Mavs’ masks, with the Mavs’ logo, we’re going to have gloves — even outside of games, just to help us live differently. We’re thinking of all of that just in terms of our people coming back to work.”
Tag: Cynthia Marshall
At the arena, she said, “we’re thinking …
At the arena, she said, “we’re thinking about what kind of touchless mechanisms we will have. We’ll have thermometers that when you get within 10 feet, they’ll take your temperature automatically. There’s so much stuff out there. We have time to plan and come up with all kind of scenarios to make this a good experience for our fans. Rest assured we will have thought it out. “
Cynthia Marshall: “It is criminal that, …
Cynthia Marshall: “It is criminal that, in 2020, we have kids who can’t eat because school is out. They don’t have access to technology. That’s crazy to me. Not everybody can go to a grocery store. These are the things that are top of mind for us. My boss (Mark Cuban) is out there advocating for small businesses and people who are losing their jobs. Even though we’re not playing basketball, we’re playing the game of life with people right now. We don’t just play here. We live here, too. We’re part of something bigger and now we get to make it better.”
Cynthia “Cynt” Marshall was the first …
Cynthia “Cynt” Marshall was the first black cheerleader at the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s. She spent nearly four decades climbing the corporate ladder at AT&T. And today she is the first black, female CEO in the NBA, having taken the helm at the Dallas Mavericks in 2018 to clean up the league’s toxic work culture. But Marshall, 60, says she didn’t truly come into her own until more than 20 years into her career. “I just did my job and did what [my bosses] told me to do,” Marshall tells CNBC Make It.
Marshall started as the first …
Marshall started as the first African-American female to ever lead an NBA basketball team in February of 2018. She says she wanted to take the job “for the sisterhood.” Since taking the helm, Marshall has been focused on hiring a diverse executive team. There were no women or people of color on the Mavericks’ leadership team when Marshall started. Today, 50% are women and 47% are people of color, according to a Mavericks spokesperson.
She also brought her authentic …
She also brought her authentic leadership style to the Mavericks. When she started there, the first thing she did was hold one-on-ones with employees. She wanted to learn about their lives, from childhood to adulthood, not just about their career aspirations. “I [just] had a one-on-one with one of the vice presidents last night for two hours and probably an hour and a half of that was just personal talk,” Marshall tells Make It on Jan. 30. These days, Marshall says she tries to think of “the person first and the employee second” when making important decisions at the company.
I ask what the organization has done to …
I ask what the organization has done to improve, as Cuban pledged it would during his apology tour, and he gushes that the team’s new CEO, Cynthia Marshall, “changed the culture, she changed everything about the team.” But when I try to get him to elaborate on what some of the changes have been, he just repeats “everything” and adds that “people love working here, that’s the barometer,” a response that feels particularly vague coming from a guy who typically traffics in outspoken specifics.