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Sometimes bad things happen to horses, sometimes good things happen too. Whatever the event, major changes are tomes when horses need people's help the most. They get sick. They get stressed when they have to be moved to a new place. Horses' lives like all lives, are marked by transitions, and they need extra attention and care at these times. Managers need to recognize that their organizations are living being too and may also need special attention during times of transition. Move Fast Through Transitions If you are overseeing a change, it might be wisest to step on the gas. PreicewaterCoopers surveyed leaders who had been in charge of an acquisition for their company, and learned that 89% of them said that in hindsight they would do it faster. Time spent in transition is wasted time during which employees are unsure of their footing, making it hard to focus on work. Don't keep them waiting. Get it over with and get everyone back to work as soon as possible. Create a Sense of Urgency Sometimes your role as a leader is to challenge people to recognize that the organization is at a turning point and that they must leave no stone unturned in their search for ne solutions and approaches. To make it clear that change was in the wind when DaimlerChrysler purchased Mitsubishi Motors, Rolf Exckrodt of DaimlerChrysler brought the managers of Mitsubishi an unusual gift. he gave each of them a chunk of stone originally taken from the Berlin wall. he had each of these rocks labeled with the words. "Leave no stone unturned." The recipients of this gift could have no doubt that he was serious about making changes and expected them to produce new solutions to Mitsubishi's financial problems. Whether they enjoyed their gifts or not, the message came through loud and clear in spite of any communication gaps between headquarters in Germany and the new acquisition in Japan. I guess that whenever a message has to be made completely clear and memorable, writing it in stone is a good idea. Bouncing Back This inspiring quote comes from a survivor of the World Trade Center disaster, the sales manager of a firm which lost its headquarters and some of its employees in the attack of September 11, 2001. "It's been bizarre stuff every day.. This is one of the times in your life when you're really going to be put to the test. It's been inspiring to watch the people who take the challenge and go with it." Nick Webb, Vice President of Sales, Baseline (October 2, 2001) Be Guided by the Employee's Voice When any organization goes through a traumatic event or troubled times, there is a tendency for the leaders to centralize authority and feel called upon to set the tone and speak for the entire organization. But maybe the leaders are not sure how to look at what has happened, how to come to terms with it. That at least seemed to be the case for United Airlines, which lost two of its planes in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. What should the company say to reassure its employees and customers? What sort of attitude is appropriate and helpful in the aftermath? These are difficult questions for any leaders. So United did something unusual: It asked its employees to speak instead. Working with ad agency Fallon Worldwide of Minneapolis, the company videotaped interviews with dozen of employees, then edited them into spot advertisements to air on national television. It wasn't the original plan. The ad agency had written scripts for employees to read—consistent with the tradition of scripting the "official" response in time of crisis. But when they got to talking to employees, they realized that the employees' views were moving and well thought out (after all, they have to live with it in their daily work). According to an Associated Press report, Bob Moore, creative director at the ad agency, says, "Once we started filming, it became apparent that what they had to say from their heart was much better than what I had written for them." This was an interesting finding, and one that probably applies in every organization during stressful times. An added advantage of letting employees take the floor in these ads is it helped United employees speak to each other as well as their customers, in their effortd to move the healing process ahead. Practive Makes Perfect In the majority of business transitions, employees are expected to make some significant changes in their behavior. They are supposed to learn new tricks and do their work in new ways using new systems, equipement, processes, or philosophies. Their leaders always complain that they are resistant to these changes and don't seem to take the new instructions or training to heart. The problem is that you cannot expext to change behavior just by telling people what to do. Even a full day of training is not really enough to bring about successful and permanent change. If you want to change any aspect of employees behavior, plan on giving them repeated, bried lessons and practice opportunities over an extended period of time. - Design a learning plan for your group that spreads training and checkups over multiple weeks. - Try to devote the vast majority of the time to giving them hands-on practice, not lecturing them or giving them information to read or view on a monitor. Practice makes perfect, but only if you give people plenty of opportunities to practice. Don't Get Blindsided by Changes Changes are harder or easier depending on how well you have anticipated them. (For instance, the investor who sells tech stocks before they tank is not upset by a stock market crash. But the one who doesn't see the writing on the wall runs into it... the wall, that is.) A simple but powerful technique is to use weekly staff meetings to "sniff the wind" for possible shifts or trends. In fact, every leader should take a few minutes to share anything he or she has noticed/wondered about and ask employees what they have noticed. That way you are actually looking for signs of change, which increases the chances of being prepared by an immense amount! Provide Adaptable Leadership Of course you can't make a horse drink. But you can and must lead the way to water. This is a key part of the leader's responsibility, and it is complicated by the fast-changing business landscape. Sometimes the oases we aim for dry up and we have to change our course. How quickly we recognize the need for change and roll it out into new goals for all employees determines how much water we are able to provide. Consider the following, an excellent example of a decisive action by a leader that saved his organization from the worst effects of a drought. "In February 2002,a month before the recession began, Tom Siebel... logged onto his company's web site to... review the sales force's forecasts for the quarters. For the first time, the figures had suddenly stalled." Siebel discovered that many of his firm's customers were postponing or canceling orders, and deducted that an economic downturn was coming. he quicly bagan slahing costs, revised his firm's projections and budgets, and asked his salespeople to rush the close of pending orders before those could get cancelled too. His was one of the few tech firms to anticipate and prepare properly for the recession that followed. The Fortune story goes on to explain how Siebel uses his firm's intranet to set overall sales goals, which are quickly rolled out to individual goals for all 1,500 salespeople. The it explains how Siebel used this goal-setting system to change direction when he saw that a recession was looming. "Siebel jumped on the intranet, retracted the 16 growth objectives he had placed there weeks earlier and replaced them with three simple and devastatingly clear ones: Keep customers happy, keep cash coming in, and protect market share. 'Everyone knows the goal and how they fit in', he says." Ask Your People If You Can Alter the Future When something bad happens or seems about to, most people either freeze up like a rabbit in the headlight, or start running on the assumption they have to respond to the change. But what if you can alter the course of the car instead of having to get out of the way? Often we have more control over the course of events than we think we do. It's wise as a leader to stop and ask employees to consider whether there are any practical ways to alter the coming change even slightly so as to lessen its negative impact or possibly turn it into a business opportunity. Days-Off Intead of Layoffs In the sharp high-tech downturn of Spring 2001, many high-tech firms announced cuts to their payroll—in other words, pink slips for many employees. Such layoffs are good for the short-term cash flow, but not so good for morale. Some companies preserved jobs by spreading the financial pain more evenly. They asked employees to take mandatory days off instead. For example, Adobe Systems, Inc. closed all North American offices for a week in July, requiring employees to take four unpaid vacation days following the July 4th US holiday. Figure it this way. One week saved out of 52 in the year for Adobe's 2,000 employees is roughly equivalent to firing 40 people or 2 percent of their workforce. A week off is the financial equivalent of a mild layoff, but not nearly as disruptive. If you find yourself in the position of having to figure out what to do to trim payroll costs, consider the Adobe model. Layoffs carry a lot of hidden costs and should be avoided whenever possible. The Responsibility of Leadership A lot of business readers reacted charitably in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster, temporarily suspendig the pursuit of profits in order to help people who were in need. But leaders who had never given much thought to civic responsibilities before sometimes found it difficult to step up to the challenge. One of them, the head of a New York head-hunting firm, found himself and his company in serious hot water when the New York Times broke a story detailing his reaction to the human suffering resulting from the attack. The story detailed how one of this firm's employee, a young woman, had lost her husband in the destruction of one of the tower. Returning to her desk a week later, she was surprised to find that her boss had given some of her territory and accounts to others. When she asked what was going on, she was escorted to the president's office and told she no longer had a job. The story ends with a quote from the employee: "That people can act like this, that they think they can kick people when they're down, is so unbelievable. Would it have killed them to wait?" (The New York Times, October 4, 2001). Book, $10.95, signed by the author, reg price $19.95  |
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