The Happy Burro

Uncertainty and economic instability in an organization creates a tremendous amount of stress on the employees.  Many leaders know this and look for the ‘next big thing’ or the ‘new and sexy’ to try to fix the perceived problem and placate employees, shareholders, boards, clients and themselves.  What works?  Who knows?  I know what DOES work – back to basics.  Many leaders built their careers on doing the basic work of leadership, yet stray from those tenets over time.  I couldn’t think of a better time to get back to what makes your organization great by giving your employees the service and attention they need to navigate in rough waters.

Ram Charan has  a new book out titled, “LEADERSHIP IN THE ERA OF ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY -
The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times.”

Following is an excerpt about the six essential leadership traits for hard times.  At first glance these six may appear basic and obvious.  Yet how many of these traits do you employ right now?  Exactly. Read on.

(from Ram Charan):

Which among the many important behaviors and traits that characterize a good leader are most important for managing in this downturn of downturns? Following are the six I consider essential, along with the reasons why.

Honesty and credibility. This is no simple challenge. Nobody can be certain about the business environment and its direction. How can you tell people what you believe when you can’t be confident that it is right? You can’t fake it or bluff—anybody can test your ideas by googling. The only answer is intellectual honesty and humility. Your authority derives not from omniscience but from your ability to facilitate understanding and solutions. Level with people: tell them how you see the world, acknowledge the limits of your understanding, and ask them for their own views. Doing this may take courage, but together you can piece together better probabilities than any one person can.

The ability to inspire. Always important, it is critical today. Most people are anxious. The tsunami came so suddenly, destroying their hard-earned savings and putting their jobs at risk, that they don’t trust what they hear, see, or read. Worst, they don’t see what will turn things around; many are close to losing hope. What can you do?

Start with your own team—it is they who will have to inspire the rest of the organization. Work with them to toughen their resolve to get through the storm successfully. Then help them to develop one or two realistically optimistic pictures of what can lie ahead. This is vital: they need a vision that will turn their lightbulbs on, generating creativity and ideas. Inspire your team to focus on the new priorities by doing so yourself, fearlessly. Inspiration will also come from making decisions that produce incremental successes. These are high energizers that build further successes.

Real-time connection with reality. In this volatile and uncertain environment, reality is a moving target. You have to keep updating your picture of it, continuously monitoring change and impending change through ground-level intelligence. Have your team do the same. Put all of your concrete external information on the table, however bad it may be, and discuss it among yourselves. Gather it from unconventional sources. Don’t get locked into one view of things. Allow the picture to change as you gather new information.

Realism tempered with optimism. Unadulterated pessimism is no more realistic than unbridled optimism. While the first order of a realistic assessment is to understand and accept the magnitude of a problem, the fact is that few problems are insoluble. Focus your people on a vision of what is possible, and energize them to search for the actions that will realize the vision. This is where leadership becomes a performing art, introducing that touch of optimism that taps psychological reserves to deal with bad news and transform fear into action.

Managing with intensity. Your hands-on participation is essential in these times. You must dig into the right details with much higher frequency than ever before. Only through deep personal involvement can you acquire ground-level intelligence, share and discuss it with your team, and act with the speed that is required in a volatile environment.

Importantly, your people need you to be present with them in the foxhole. Your grasp of reality is useless if you can’t bring the rest of your organization to understand it and act on it, and you cannot do this with memos and proclamations alone. You have to be interactive—listening as well as explaining, answering questions, taking the conversation to the next level, and then doing it again and again. Your people will be inspired not by stirring words as much as by seeing firsthand that you have put reality on the table and have a plan for addressing it decisively, as a team.

Boldness in building for the future. Facing the necessity of conserving cash and surviving in the short run, you may feel pressured to shortchange the future. Resist this pressure. It will take imagination and guts to place strategic bets with no guaranteed payoffs when there’s so little money available and so much uncertainty about the assumptions your plan is based on. Yet such bets are critical: what good will it do if you limp to the finish line and find nothing there?

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Which one of these traits do you feel would have the greatest positive impact on your team?  Why?

Joe Raasch :: Mar.21.2009 :: Leadership :: 2 Comments »

I was asked recently by a good friend and colleague, Robert Smith, to answer a few questions about change management.  He is currently finishing his PhD at the University of Minnesota.  Here are his questions, followed by my answers:

When you led a team or had to help another team through a change and you knew there was probably going to be some resistance (cynicism, foot-dragging, etc.) what concerns did you have about that resistance?

As a change leader, what if any, concerns did you personally have about the influence/impact those resistant-types might have on the change you were trying to drive?
In what ways did you think those resistors might have derailed the change you were responsible for implementing?

In leading a variety of change efforts, from software implementation, to facility assessments to opening of schools for another school year (in conjunction with the RNC), I personally have limited personal concerns about resistance to change.  Here’s why:

Most change efforts fail on two fronts.  The first is the change management plan used to start the change.  I have utilized a plan that is flexible to various project types and industries that allows for change to happen reasonably quickly, with little negative resistance.  Positive resistance is welcomed and part of the overall plan.  The most important step is gaining agreement on the change project itself.  Once that happens, the rest is part of the plan.

The second area most change efforts fail is in the fidelity of implementation of the change.  For example, when working on an organization-wide assessment, there was no resistance to the idea that we would do the assessment using external consultants (a BIG change to past practice).  This was due in large part to the change approach used.  Where things became a bit tenuous was during the writing of the RFP, final vendor selection and review of the data reports.  There was resistance from the team in that they felt a loss of control in their work.  To successfully complete a project with external help meant that the internal team needed to be focused, cohesive and prepared to assist and support the consultant wherever possible. As project manager, I spent most of my time working with my internal team to keep them supporting the consultant.  I spent little time having to manage the consultant.  The team did an outstanding job and the project was completed, on time, on budget and with no change orders.

Another area of concern in fidelity of implementation is leadership attention.  Most of my projects garner a lot of attention during the strategy and decision phases.  When it is time for implementation, a concern I have it whether senior leaders will give the same energy to implementation, which they do not participate in, as they did in all the strategy and decision meetings.  Their energy would come in the way of support and removing and roadblocks.  It is surprising how difficult implementation can be, even after decisions have been made and product purchased, etc.  I put senior leadership support as a key risk factor on project charters and implementation presentations.  This is usually met with surprise, as most senior leaders feel they are done once the hard work of strategy and decision-making is complete.  While this work is not easy, it is just the beginning of making a project successful!

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Feel free to continue the conversation here and add your own ‘war stories’ on resistance to change – for the benefit of Robert’s research!

Joe Raasch :: Mar.14.2009 :: Change Management, Leadership, Organizational Development :: No Comments »

Originally published in January  2008. Click here for the entire series.

The 2008 economic picture is purported to be bad. Maybe your company is facing revenue, market, and cost pressures. Stock price is down. New leadership. A freeze on hiring and on raises. Just today the Dow Jones Industrial Index lost over 240 points. How do you get your team to continue providing world class service and productivity? As always, you have options:

Make a Case For the End of the World

What if things are as bad as they seem? Do you want your bonus at risk? You need to get your team moving, and f-a-s-t! Throw some of these rhetorical questions and demands at your team:

• What happens if we don’t make our budget this year?
• You need to try harder, work harder, put in more hours!
• Should we wait for new leadership to tell us what to do?
• We could bankrupt this place if we don’t get more customers!
• Do you want to lose your job?
• Are the monthly birthday club cakes worth losing a raise?

Forgettaboutit

You could ignore the issues at hand. They could possibly be temporary. After all, the stock market crashed in 1929, recovered, crashed again in 1987, recovered. This too shall pass…

• Bring in doughnuts every morning and say “who wants sprinkles?”
• Hang around and tell more jokes to lighten the mood in the office
• Put a positive spin on any reports (e.g. if your organization was supposed to make $10M, and actually lost $3M, say “we missed our near term profitability target by just a few mil…”)
• Completely ignore any negative news and act as if you didn’t hear/read/experience it

Create Light, Not Heat

Here is where you get to talk about the future. What is possible, not what is constrained. Not ‘pie in the sky’ dreaming, but real opportunity to succeed. Try this:

• Focus on what is working. Are overall customer satisfaction scores down, but are up in the east region? Celebrate that fact, then figure out what is different about east region and try to work on the scores in other regions.
• Reward people that are reaching their goals
• Give extra attention and support to the employees that are struggling to meet their commitments
• Be a realist with company news – if the budget needs to be cut 15% do not play down the impact
• Routinely discuss what might be, not just the doom and gloom
• Thank people for extra effort and let them know you value each and every contribution

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“Better to light a candle than curse the darkness”

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Threats and ‘whipping the horses’ may have some sort of short term effect. Long term you’ll have mutiny on your hands. Or worse: people will just leave.

False bravado or hope isn’t going to work either. Like an ostrich, putting your proverbial head in the sand and ignoring problems will not make them go away. Your team will see through your fake smile and vain attempts at humor.  Doesn’t that make more sense? Sure, there are times when a tougher message may be necessary. Those situations are the exception, not the norm. Few of us face such dire circumstances that require yelling, threats, or paranoid behavior to ‘motivate’ our employees.

Be the light, not the heat.

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Want more on the power of meaning in the workplace? Check out Dr. Alex Pattakos at The Meaning Difference. Worth a weekly visit!

Joe Raasch :: Mar.07.2009 :: Leadership :: No Comments »