Potentially scary company news can be easy to break

Breaking news that could possibly be unsettling to a company’s employees — say like a 31-year-old being named president, or that after 71 years the company is embarking on an entirely new product line that won’t be manufactured in their own plant — doesn’t have to be scary, providing channels of two-way communication have been established.

In the past two years, both of those developments were announced to the more than 600 employees of Tervis, the Venice-based manufacturer of insulated drinkware. Tervis President Rogan Donelly, now 33, is the third generation leader of the family company founded in 1946 by Michigan businessmen Frank Cotter and G. Howlett Davis. Working his way up through the company for seven years while his father, Norbert Donelly, was president, Rogan Donelly was not unknown to the workforce. That has proven effective in the internal network used to communicate with the Tervis team.