Glance Management

By Jeff Oltmann

Just yesterday, the status reports from your most critical project indicated that everything was OK. The milestone tracking charts and earned value metrics showed a project that was gloriously on schedule. This morning, out of the blue, a key team member gave you the horrible news that a “surprise” problem will cause a big slip in the key milestone due next week. After investigating, you found that the programmer working on the problem module has been worried about a potential problem for weeks.

How did this surprise happen? Why didn’t your formal project monitoring methods give you enough early warning to head off the problem? Unfortunately, this happens more often than it should, especially on projects that are complex, fast changing, or pushing the boundaries of what the team has done before.

Such projects are often too fluid, with too many nuances, for tried-and-true written and formal monitoring methods like status reports, milestone analysis, and earned value to show a complete picture. To avoid nasty surprises, project managers must supplement these formal monitoring techniques with informal monitoring.

Glance management techniques are a good way to do this because they help you informally and periodically sample what is going on in your project. For complex, rapidly changing projects, they surface information from the front lines that would never come through on status reports. Here are some helpful glance management techniques.

Make Time

 

Make regular time in your schedule for frequent, casual interactions with the project team and key stakeholders. Frequent and casual are key words here. People shouldn’t feel that you’re grilling them at a monthly scheduled interrogation.

Someone once told a story that makes the point. An ambitious junior manager wanted to move rapidly up the career ladder at his company, so he set out to investigate what the most successful managers did differently. To his surprise, he observed that a big factor was where the manager ate lunch. The most successful managers made a point of eating with project team members who worked in the trenches. The less successful managers ate at their desks or with other managers. Trying this himself, he was amazed at how much valuable project information he learned before it ever reached him in status reports. Whether or not this story is true, the point hits home: take the time for casual, unscripted interactions.

Break the Hierarchy

Hold “skip level” one-on-one meetings. These are regularly scheduled meetings with people who are not your direct reports or not directly on your project team. For example, identify and meet with key stakeholders, sponsors, internal customers, or project workers that you don’t see on a regular basis. Your job is to listen and ask intelligent questions – let the other person set the agenda. You may have to get creative to make these meetings happen, such as orchestrating “accidental” hallway meetings with a busy manager.

Really Listen

Observe and listen carefully. Too often, we yield quickly to the temptation to talk. We suggest solutions after only cursory listening. Instead, listen actively and ask probing questions in a friendly way. If you are consistent, you will build a reputation for an open door and an open mind. People will seek you out early when there is trouble brewing under the surface because they know you will help.

Wander Around

Hewlett-Packard first popularized MBWA (Management by Wandering Around).  MBWA may conjure up images of time-wasting, unfocused wandering, but there is a disciplined technique to it. Look at the sequence below. How can you use MBWA to get better information on the progress of your projects?

Wander

• Wander different routes

• Go where the action is

• See and be seen

 

Gather Info from the Team

• Stop to talk

• Don’t interrogate

• Spot check details of status

• Avoid problem solving

 

Communicate to Team

• Answer questions

• Build up team members

• Communicate your vision

 

Act

• Keep supervisors in the loop

• Don’t usurp delegated authority

• Act on the info you’ve gathered

Glance management may seem soft and squishy. After all, you’ve got work to do and metrics to measure. Isn’t it a waste of time? On the contrary – it is an effective way to use your limited project management time. You can gather information, build morale, improve “hidden” problems, and communicate your leadership vision. You will get key information about project issues far sooner and in clearer detail than by relying solely on formal status reports and indicators. The nasty surprises you avoid will make your projects more successful.

To learn more about Jeff Oltmann, visit www.pdc.pdx.edu/lamp/instructors.php

Three Legal Nuggets About Hiring Practices

By Stan Muir

So you’ve finally been given the opportunity to hire someone.  Until now, you’ve been on the other side of the table and you’re trying to recall what questions you were asked.  As you mull this over you have an “ah-ha” moment: There were things that never seemed to come up during your interviews, and you bet there was a reason for this. 

Without question, you should take the time to visit with your Human Resources professional to discuss your company’s guidelines on interviewing and hiring.  She or he may be able to explain why some questions are beyond politeness and pertinence.

But you’re busy (or your HR person is), and you could use something brief in a form that at least helps you tackle this problem.  Here are three tidbits of “interview advice,” as well as the legal reasons behind this counsel.

Interview Advice:  An interview isn’t a conversation leading up to a date.   Therefore, be sure not ask personal questions or questions that lead to personal answers.  In the context of prospective employment, there is no reason for you to know whether a person is married, in a relationship, whether he or she is straight or gay, how old he is, what his or her religion or national origin is, or any of the other personal questions that might fill the silence with on a date.

Legal Translation:  Questions regarding an applicant’s race, color, age, sex, religion and national origin (these are known as “protected classes”) are prohibited under Title VII of The Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended. This law applies to private employers, employment agencies, labor organizations and training programs. Therefore, interview questions that either directly or indirectly permit an interviewer to elicit information that would permit a wrongful discriminatory decision to be reached are prohibited from being asked.    

Interview Advice:  Be Joe Friday, the police detective who was famous for saying “Just the facts, ma’am.”  Think about the real needs of the job and ask questions appropriate to the job.  Ask for pertinent information, not information that will lead you to a conclusion.  For example, if you need someone that is able to work on nights and weekends, don’t ask about whether he or she is married or has children, ask them straight up, “Can you work nights and weekends?”

Legal Translation:  Questions that imply group stereotypes can be interpreted as having discriminatory intent and should be avoided.

Interview Advice:  Be prepared for anything because sometimes people say the strangest things.  Review each applicant’s resume carefully and look at both the time employed as well as gaps in employment. Give the applicant plenty of time to talk and ask open ended questions, like “Why did you leave your last employer after only two years?”  Don’t be surprised by candid responses like “I filed a harassment complaint against my boss because she kept hitting on me, even though I explained I was married and had two kids, and I was thinking about taking a vow of abstinence with the Church of the Cataclysm.  But the lady in the HR department didn’t take me seriously that my 62-year-old boss was a cougar.  So I had to quit.”

Legal Translation:   An applicant may volunteer information that you cannot properly ask to receive.  Unfortunately, you can’t “unhear” what’s already been said so you need to protect yourself against claims that you asked inappropriate questions.   You should document on your interview sheet what was shared and state specifically that you didn’t ask to know this information.  Furthermore, avoid basing your hiring (or non-hiring) decisions on discriminatory information like race, age, religion, sex, etc. 

Understand, this is just some quick guidance for you.  Many other questions are deemed discriminatory in the interview process, and it’s best to have your HR department provide a list of questions that you can ask and then stick to the script.  (BTW:  You can find out more about all of this during the “Employment Law” class offered in Portland State’s Leadership and Management Program, also known as LAMP!)

To learn more about Stan Muir, visit http://www.pdc.pdx.edu/lamp/instructors.php

The Downward Performance Spiral

When Things Go Wrong, What DO you DO?

By Laurel K. Hardt

You hang up the phone; it was another client complaint.  The client had placed a call to your customer service group three days ago asking for help with a software “glitch” and still had no answer.   You were able to resolve their problem easily enough but were left apologizing once again for the lack of follow through by your team.

Lately, service complaints have been on the rise.  You know you have spent time trying to understand what is going wrong and working with them to make certain they know errors like this are unacceptable. They just don’t seem to “get it.”  You are left wondering what else you can do to fix this situation.

Out of frustration, you decide to step back and examine events of the past few months to try to figure out what the problem is.  Here’s what happened so far:

After the first compliant about the team dropping the ball, you spent time with them making certain they understood your expectations.  You reviewed service level agreements and discussed customer service protocol.

Things did not improve so you reassigned work to allow them to focus solely on customer service.  Their “special projects” were given to others.  While the team was not happy you reassigned their project work, they understood the gravity of the situation and seemed to agree it was a necessary step.

Things seemed fine for a few days until one of your most important clients called you with a complaint.  You brought the team together—once again—to ask how this could have happened.  They shrugged their shoulders, looked at each other. They had no reasonable explanation.  You decided a daily report of open calls was needed so you could see what was outstanding at the end of each day.   Your rationale:  If the team had to recap the open calls, they’d focus on closing them and certainly no more would fall through the cracks.

Unfortunately, this didn’t solve the problem.  More complaints.  Frustrated, you decided to hold a meeting with this team at the end of each day to discuss open calls, hoping to create even more accountability for following procedures.

 Bottom line:

• You clarified expectations and procedures;
• You took away project work; refocusing the team on core responsibilities;
• You implemented a way to “inspect what you expect” and;
• You established another second mechanism to follow through on their daily performance.

None of these things worked. 

Then it hit you:  The more you intervened, the worse things became.  The more you prescribed solutions, the less willing the team became team to step forward with suggestions.  In fact, the more you intervened, the more tentative and disengaged they became.  This pattern of behavior led to even more mistakes. 

Once you figured out that what you were doing was making things worse, you brought the team together once again.  You asked them for their ideas. You gave them a few days to come back to you with their suggestions; making it their problem to solve rather than trying to solve it for them.

It worked.  Not perfectly, but things began to improve.   They modified your end of day report, took ownership of it and turned the data into meaningful reporting metrics. They could then identify improved training and better communication would reduce customer calls.  The team re-engaged, regained self confidence and as they did so, they came up with even more tools to help them self monitor.

By putting ownership back onto them, you stopped this “downward performance spiral.”   In the process, you learned that encouraging people to develop solutions to a problem themselves:

• Creates ownership and buy-in;
• Motivates rather than de-motivates;
• Is more likely to get the problem solved more quickly, and;
• Gives you more time to focus on things that only you can do.

The Limits of Trust and Loyalty

By Sally Rhys

What do you owe your employer?  A solid 40 hours of work, certainly.  How about loyalty?  If so, what are the boundaries of that loyalty?  Loyalty blind to ethical misdeeds?  How about trust?  Do you trust your employer to make decisions that benefit you as well as the company and its stockholders or constituents? 

 Let’s turn the question around.  What does your employer owe you?  A paycheck, certainly.  How about a workplace free from fraudsters or embezzlers?  Can your employer count on you to report fraud or embezzlement or do you tend to believe that these crimes are just part of any organization?

 These questions are part of what is known as a psychological contract, defined as employer and employee expectations of the employment relationship.  This psychological contract includes mutual obligations, values, expectations and aspirations that operate over and above the formal contract of employment.  (Argyis, C., Understanding Organizational Behavior, 1960.)   Whenever an employee feels his or her employer has failed to keep a promise, the trust level held by the employee towards the organization and the feelings of goodwill are negatively affected.   For instance, a case of fraud violates the employee’s expectation that the employer will protect them from harm  caused by to the misconduct of others. 

 Psychological contracts implicitly depend on trust and loyalty, even more so for organizations with dedicated, long-term employees.  Any violation of this contract has implications for employee trust (Robinson & Rosseau, 1994), performance (Robinson & Wolfe-Morrison, 1996) and behavior (Nicholson and Johns, 1985).  Why does the psychological contract matter so much?  It matters because employees who feel better a fit between themselves and the organization’s psychological contract enjoy greater job satisfaction and are less likely to quit (Larwood, Wright, Desrochers and Dahir, 1998).

 As a result of fraud or other significant misconduct, employees expect management to take corrective action to repair any injustice they have suffered. They may seek procedural justice, believing fairness should rule in resolving a dispute. But when employees have been harmed, the bar goes higher; they expect retributive justice, which is fairness in the rectification of wrongs.  Could your organization replace 401-k losses due to an employee embezzling funds?

Although you may imagine the place you work is free of misconduct, you are probably wrong.  Over 50 percent of employees report seeing a co-worker violate company policy, governmental regulations, or laws in the last 12 months.

 How management responds to ethical misconduct is watched carefully by employees.  Is your organization’s response swift and sure?  An “off with their heads!” approach?  Or maybe a deliberate, thorough investigation where the results are withheld in “an abundance of caution”?  You can be sure that employees will draw their own conclusions about how seriously your company takes misconduct by watching how management responds. 

Top management can actively forge the ethical climate in their organizations.  Frank discussion, healthy conflict and clear expectations of all employees helps make for a stronger psychological contract between employee and employer.  As a leader in your organization, what role do you want to play in creating the management character vital to a healthy organization?  The American workplace is becoming more diverse–ethnically and generationally. The best organizations will clearly describe their management character—and keep only managers who match the description.

 Thanks to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners who permitted portions of this article authored by Sally Rhys to be shared.  A full session on this topic was first presented in July 2009 at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ 20th Annual Conference and Exhibition.  For further reprints, contact lhymes@acfe.com.

Leadership Isn’t a Skill

Leadership is complicated.  Although we can often spot great leadership when we see it, there is no one (or even two or three) formulas for “successful leadership.”  Even great leaders can’t tell us what it takes to be one.  They aren’t experts at leadership; they’re just good leaders.

In fact, there aren’t “expert” leaders because leadership isn’t a set of skills at which one can develop expertise.  There are expert carpenters and expert airline pilots.  There are expert surgeons, bridge engineers, map-makers and lumberjacks.  That’s not to suggest there isn’t unpredictability or complexity in what they do.  But there is precision.  Leadership isn’t precise. 

Instead of a set of skills we can pin down neatly on a list, great leaders embody a range of characteristics, among them a vision for the future; commitment to goals; empathy; ability to make and carry out decisions; being circumspect; taking chances; and challenging the status quo. 

Still, as Dr. Richard Farson points out in his new book, The Power of Design, because we “Americans tend to believe that getting along in life is a matter of acquiring skills,” we’ve applied that belief to the area of leadership development.  Sign up for leadership skills training classes, and you’ll become one! 

“The role of a leader is far too important to be accomplished by skills,” Dr. Farson goes on to say.  “How could we ever have thought these qualities could be achieved by skill training?”

The answer to that isn’t hard:  Corporations are more impatient for improvements than they are willing to invest the time and energy to achieve them.  Besides, they operate in a culture devoted to packaging and commoditizing products, even ideas.  Leadership development isn’t exempt from this approach, and this has driven “trainers” to package leadership as seminars and multi-step programs—effective or not.

Whether impatient corporate decision-makers actually believe leadership qualities are improving thanks to skills training is anyone’s guess.  Truth is, they probably don’t care all that much.  Corporate training programs are rarely a front-and-center priority for any operational leader.  Sure, there are personal development plans and Organizational Development departments in many companies, but what’s usually the first thing to go when budgets are cut?  Training.  If decision-makers really thought “skills training” was transforming the workforce into an army of exceptional leaders and communicators, training would be the last thing to go.

Leadership education that actually develops leaders requires that educators apply imagination and creativity to delsign something different from what today’s restive operational management might imagine.  Designing education that really fosters leadership potential demands courage, creativity and (oh, by the way) leadership.

Leading in the E-World

 

            Charles Handy, the economist and author, has written a number of remarkable business books, remarkable in that they aren’t full of energetic how-to counsel intended to send entrepreneurs and business leaders off in a new, certain-to-be-successful direction.  Instead, Handy’s books offer perspective and insight combined with practical experience.  I just finished his The Elephant and the Flea, an account of life as an independent professional (a flea) after life in a corporation (the elephant).

 

            In it, he cites the results of a survey published in The Economist (magazine) in which the top 10 “skills” needed to manage e-business were listed.  They were as follows:

 

1.         Speed.

2.         Good people.

3.         Openness.

4.         Collaboration.

5.         Discipline.

6.         Good communication.

7.         Content management.  (To paraphrase, with a little bias: we keep too much stuff.)

8.         Customer focus.

9.         Knowledge management.

10.       Leadership by example.

 

            As soon as I read the list, I had to wonder what was so terribly different about this list that rendered it unique to e-business.  Seemed to me it’s a list topical for business in general.  Then I went on to read Mr. Handy’s very next comment:  “I was underwhelmed by the list.  The order might have varied a little, but it was the same list that I had been urging on organizations and their managers for thirty years”! 

 

          At first, it was simply gratifying to find I’d had the same reaction as someone as inspirational and well-respected as Charles Handy.  I thought perhaps this is what it would have felt like to have noticed, say, gravity just as Isaac Newton was figuring out what it was!

 

            But better than that (can it get better than that?), I was glad to realize that, just because business is technology-enabled, that doesn’t change fundamental requirements of leadership.  The abilities needed to organize, optimize, direct and execute are exactly the same as they’ve always been:  People who collaborate willingly, communicate openly, perform efficiently (speed), with their eye on the customer.

 

            So regardless of business type, whether it’s cyber-enabled or face-to-face, it appears there are elements of success that are as enduring and real as gravity, and just as likely to resist control and manipulation.

You Can’t Motivate Employees

No one can persuade me to get excited about something I’m not naturally excited about.  No form of incentive, no sums of money, no amount of community reinforcement can make me genuinely rev up about something I don’t especially care about or believe in. 

Business leaders who think money, incentives, or even threats are “motivating” their employees are kidding themselves.  “Finish this project ahead of schedule and there’s a bonus in it for you!” is tying a reward to a specific outcome.  While it may result in short-term behavior changes (longer hours, more focus on the task), that’s hardly the same as motivating people.

Motivated, committed, engaged employees care about what they do and why they do it.  They get up and come to work every day because they care about it.  It’s not a short-term energy surge; it’s a way of life.

So the truth is you can’t motivate people because people motivate themselves. 

What, then, can you as a business leader do to help them get there? 

You can create the best conditions under which people motivate themselves.

If you’re asking yourself, “Good grief, what conditions are those?” here’s the answer:

Sense of Purpose:  What is it about your job that gets you out of bed in the morning?  What contribution to the betterment of anything are you, personally, making every day?

Leadership:  Competent, trustworthy, genuine, conscientious innovators who are glad to be on the job every day!  (Well, okay, most days.)

Organizational Character:  The integrity and consistency of choices and decisions the organization makes.  More than “how we do things around here,” but the principles that guide why we do them that way.

Sense of Purpose

Most people want there to be some meaning in the work they do, something more than hours of labor that result in a bi-weekly paycheck.  The paycheck is necessary, of course, but at the end of the day, we want to think we’ve done something more than that.

A little over 30 years ago, an extraordinary book came out that remains the definitive examination of people in jobs – Working, by world class journalist Studs Terkel.  He met and listened to workers around the nation, capturing their thoughts and feelings about the jobs they were doing, the on-the-job experiences they’d had.  A recurring theme in this narrative is that employees want to feel they’re doing something that matters.

“You throw yourself into things because you feel that important questions – self-discipline, goals, a meaning of your life – are carried out in your work,” says one of the more than 100 workers whose voices Terkel captured.

Keeping an eye on why our companies are in the business they’re in sounds easy enough, but it isn’t often enough what employees are reminded of.  For one thing, it’s difficult to measure purpose.  There aren’t generally accepted accounting practices that quantify how much of a company’s operations are fulfilling that purpose. 

Perhaps that’s why it goes in and out of focus for so many employees.  They’re more often aware of the stock price, the latest cost-cutting measures, and the current steps being taken to meet that all-important end-of-quarter earnings report.

“You cannot inspire employees by urging them to help management get the company’s stock price up,” says Bill George in his book Authentic Leadership.  “Employees today are seeking meaning in their work.”

In his Harvard Business Review article (December 2002), “What’s a Business For?” Charles Handy recognizes the same thing:  “The contribution ethic has always been a strong motivating force.  To survive, even to prosper, is not enough.… We need to associate with a cause in order to give purpose to our lives.”

Purpose:  Every business has one.  To deliver electricity that sustains lives and livelihood.  To conduct research that leads to life-improving discoveries.  To build bridges across cultures.  To renovate civic infrastructure.  To promote learning, restore rivers, capture history, heal the sick, enable new businesses. 

It could be anything, but it needs to be front and center in the hearts, minds and conscious attention of the people who do the jobs and the people who lead them.

Motivated, engaged, even enthusiastic employees believe in what they do.  Business leadership must also and must remind people “why we do what we do” so that employees can align themselves and their individual jobs with the contribution.

Everyday Leadership in Uncertain Times

Every story about the economy is, directly or indirectly, about leadership.  How did we get here?  We were led. What’s next?  We’ll be led.  Whether, when and how we recover—leadership will determine that.   What our economic (and social and cultural) landscape looks like in one year, five years, a decade—that depends on leadership, too.  Not just the elected leadership in Washington, DC, but leadership in our very midst every day. 

How we behave as individuals—what we decide to do as we confront bad news, terrible surprises, people in need—calls on our leadership abilities.  But what does “leadership” look like at a time like this?   We hear many of the catchphrases that go with “leadership,” words like “vision,” “commitment,” “optimism,” “execution,” “communication,” “authenticity.”  We haven’t stopped believing in them, and many of us are trying to live up to them every day, perhaps now more than ever.

But when unemployment exceeds 10% and giant corporations are imploding before our very eyes, what is there to be “committed” to?  And what does having “vision” mean under these circumstances?

Answering those questions means calling on another couple of leadership characteristics, namely courage and a willingness to challenge the status quo.  Describing a future that’s different from our past, being willing to posit unusual answers to predictable questions—that takes nerve.  It’s a risk-averse world we operate in (now more than ever!), yet leadership, real leadership, won’t be afraid to manage to new metrics, look for what needs to be done and do it and to set new goals.  (I don’t mean stretching old goals either.  I mean upending them.)

We aren’t seeing any of that.  We’re still watching the Dow, employing conventional analysis, marketing as we’ve always marketed.  What am I suggesting?  Take a chance?  Situations like the one we’re in cause people to withdraw, cower, hedge bets, worry.  That’s not leadership, but it is human nature.  If vision, courage, authenticity and optimism came together right in front us, we’d just lob suspicion and criticism at it.   

Fortunately, leadership begins with you.  It’s not just in the hands of Barack Obama or Ben Bernanke or the CEOs of the failing monolithic corporations.  It’s not just in your company’s C-level officers or their direct reports or your boss.  It’s also in your hands.  You can be committed, courageous and visionary.  You can be optimistic, authentic and empathetic.  You can apply these characteristics to what you do every day.

If you hear an idea that seems unconventional, don’t reject it out of hand.  Listen.  Consider.  Take time, be thorough, especially if you feel overrun by a sense of urgency.  Look to be inspired, rather than just knock things off your to-do list.  Don’t insist on conformist metrics, or other things that have worked in the past.  The past is showing us something:  What we’ve been doing, what we believed was protecting us, expanding us, empowering us was not.  We should sit up and take notice.

Here’s to courage, creativity and optimism.  May we remember it’s within us and may we apply it everywhere we can.

Encouraging Your Employees During Difficult Times

No doubt about it, this has been another dark week in the news.  The economic landscape is continuing to change before our very eyes.  GM is the latest casualty, and we have live updates of the particulars coming at us every minute.

But the live updates trigger more questions than they answer.  Certainly, the one question everyone is asking is “What does it mean to me?” 

It’s likely your employees are actively worried.  You see signs of it all around you:  People checking the internet constantly to see how the Dow and the S&P are doing, people chatting in the break room, the parking lot, the cafeteria

“I’ve lost a huge chunk of our college fund in just the last couple of weeks, and my son is ready to head off to school next year!”

“My neighbor was laid off last week, and my sister the week before that.”

“Anyone can be next!  No one is safe.”

You realize the dark news is impeding progress where you work, hitting individual productivity, taking down the collective morale. But what can you do?  You don’t have the answers.  You’re just a business leader, an executive, someone in management, not a fortune teller or a nationally recognized economist. 

You Have Two Options

You could ignore what your people are saying and worrying about.  Say nothing.  After all, you have nothing to offer, no answers, no special view into the future.  We’re all in the same boat, and you’re as worried as everyone else.  So let’s just keep watching the news and hope this passes quickly. 

That’s one approach.

Or you could do something with more leadership character to it:  You could talk to your employees, acknowledge their concerns and help them try to focus in the midst of these disturbing events. 

Talking Points

You don’t have to have The Answer.  Your employees don’t expect you to, and you certainly shouldn’t pretend to.  No one knows how this is all going to turn out.  Your message is that you share their concerns.  You appreciate that they’re worried, it’s realistic, who wouldn’t be, we’re all in this together.

Then you move on to helping them cope.  Here are some recommended talking points:

1.         What are we known for in this country?  Optimism.  Not unrealistic, rose-colored-glasses optimism, but continuing on toward success, rather than cowering under the fear of failure.  The message:  Be encouraged.  We are a people who rebound.

2.         What are we known for?  We work hard.  There’s something in us that rallies to a challenge.  If there’s something that needs re-building, who better to do it than someone who’s not afraid to work hard?

3          Something else we’re known for in this country:  Creativity.  Discovering solutions, cures, remedies to the most difficult problems. 

4.         It’s easy to be preoccupied with the barrage of messages coming from the media, to hang on every fluctuation in the stock indices.  But don’t.  You can’t nudge the Dow up by watching it.  It will do what it’s going to do.

Then you weave into this presentation the particular goals and good progress going on at your company now and urge your employees to apply their best selves to the work at hand,

Caveats

Authenticity is key to delivering a message like this.  If you don’t really care about whether your employees ride this out emotionally, you won’t be able to convince them you do. 

Resist the urge to try to answer any “what’s going to happen” questions.  Even if by some miracle you were right, whatever you offer as a possible outcome is going to scare someone even worse than they already are for now.  Sticking with “I don’t know” is safe and honest.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from politicians, it’s that putting a positive spin on a negative story usually falls flat.  If you decide to deliver this kind of encouragement, be realistic and appropriately serious, and know that in some measure you are helping others to move forward.

Proposal for a New Business Paradigm

We could just wait and see what happens.  Maybe confidence, diligence and patience are enough to power our economic resurgence.  Part of me hopes that’s true because it’s scary to think we might be heading into a future that’s remarkably different from our past.

Still, it’d be okay with me made some significant changes to how and why we do business in this country.  Changes like these:

Move the Horizon

Thanks to Wall Street’s lack of imagination, business’s intense focus on maximizing quarterly profits has driven it into tail-chasing mode.  There’s little attention to planning a future that might not exist after you’ve had a couple of bad quarters.

We are preoccupied with the price of a company’s stock, and we watch it minute by minute (especially these days).  That means shortchanging the future to inflate the present, a practice that’s still very much in vogue.

Let’s re-set our expectations about the lifespan of a business.  Why, for example, must all new business ventures have an “exit plan”?  What’s wrong with staying in business?

Put Profit in Its Place

We need a capitalist, market-driven system to sustain us, but we’re forgetting that for many decades our healthy economy was fueled by ideas and innovation first and a desire to be profitable second. 

A decade ago, James Collins and Jerry Porras published the results of their five-year study of very successful companies in Built to Last:  Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.  They examined a long list of prominent companies, those with outstanding reputations who had enjoyed exceptional prosperity.  They wanted to understand what it is that distinguishes those companies from others who are simply survivors. 

In every case, they found that successful, lasting companies do not consider “maximizing profits” to be their dominant driving force.  Instead, enduring, prosperous companies operate from a core ideology—a “purpose beyond profit”—that guides their actions and achievement.  Businesses that thrive believe, then, that profit is not the prime directive.

Or, as Charles Handy says in his article Harvard Business Review article “What’s a Business For?”:  “The purpose of business, in other words, is not to make a profit, full stop.  It is to make a profit so that the business can do something more of better…the real justification for the business.”

Work With Purpose

We should restore the perspective—that purpose beyond profit must exist— not only because it appears to be a proven formula for success, but also because it’d be nice to go to work each day with some energy and excitement for the work itself. 

Leaders often wonder how to “motivate” their employees.  The answer is right under their noses.  “Missions motivate, dollars don’t,” former Medtronic CEO Bill George says in his book Authentic Leadership. 

Measure Something Else

“Can’t measure it?  Can’t manage it.”  I wish I had a xxx for every time I’ve heard that.   I don’t actually believe it.  There are all kinds of things you can manage that you can’t measure.  Your behavior, for one.  But I digress.

What gets attention in business is what’s measurable.  We’re always watching the numbers.  Revenue.  Expense.  Customer sat.  If Wall Street doesn’t like what it sees, there will be hell to pay.

“The numbers” reflect two values: 

Did we do whatever it is we do as cheaply as we could? 

Did we charge as much for it as the market would allow?

But couldn’t we apply more robust values?  Let’s ask:  What good have we done?  How many people have been fed, cured, instructed, housed?  How much collaboration have we fostered?  A “Community Value Index,” perhaps. 

If we measure it, we’ll manage to it. 

Business Re-Design

As Dr. Richard Farson says in his new book The Power of Design, we love to reduce complex situations to the level of problem.  Problems have solutions.  Find the solution, fix the problem.  But most situations we really struggle with, including the economic calamity we’re now witnessing, aren’t problems.  They’re predicaments.  Predicaments have many dimensions; they are layers deep, and they’re dense, ambiguous, intricate.

Working our way out of predicaments requires systemic thinking, examining the design that underpins the operation.  In the case of commerce and economics, I think we at least need these four changes (i.e., move the horizon, put profit in its place, work with purpose, and measure something else).