Formula for surviving tough times

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:24
Ricky Robinson

IN TOUGH TIMES YOU HAVE TO GET YOUR STAFF ENGAGED AND ALIGNED.

Green shoots or not in the South African and world economies right now, the past year has been a tough time in business for most of us. And in the view of many, it is likely to remain so for a while yet. The question I want to raise concerns the extent to which staff engagement within an organisation and alignment to its strategy are critical in these times. Is the effort of alignment and engagement a waste of valuable resources, or is it possibly an opportunity not to be missed? And, if it is a genuine opportunity, how does one make the most of it?

I would suggest that engagement with the organisation and alignment to its strategy, while both based on sentiment and therefore very ephemeral, are even more critical in tough times than they are in good times. Various reasons for this include:

• Unmotivated staff will make a bad situation exponentially worse. A drop in organisational performance can quickly become a vertiginous decline if staff are dispirited;
• You don’t want to lose your best people just when you need them most;
• It’s a great opportunity to steal a lead on your opposition, many of whom are likely to be floundering; and
• Engagement in tough times is different to engagement in good times, and it is in my view an excellent opportunity to ensure alignment to more of the hard business variables than might easily be achieved in good times.

Before discussing factors that could significantly enhance engagement in the current environment, a qualifier: there is no one-size-fits-all solution to staff engagement, and context and situation are, as ever, crucial. Two frameworks are useful in this regard:

1. Ichak Adizes talks of the 10 stages of a corporate life cycle, from conception to cessation, in an elegant way that highlights organisational context. (The stages are Courtship, Infancy, Go-go, Adolescence, Prime, Stability, Aristocracy, Recrimination, Bureaucracy, Death. See Adizes’ Managing Corporate Lifecycles).
2. Michael Watkins provides an interesting contextual model in an article entitled ‘Picking the Right Transition Strategy’ (Harvard Business Review, January 2009). He discusses the difference between start up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment and sustaining success contexts.

ENGAGEMENT FORMULA

The formula for engaging and aligning your people includes:

Carefully redefine your organisation’s objectives for the short term. While the vision remains important, the real need and opportunity lie in redefining the organisation’s objectives for the shorter term. In an environment that has drastically changed over the past year, organisations need to realign themselves accordingly. People will align more easily with realistic short-term goals than lofty goals that are no longer plausible or appropriate. Survival itself can become a realistic short-term goal.

In turbulent times (which may also include uncertainty in their lives outside of work), people want more than anything to be part of a successful team, not a team that is perceived to be losing against old and unachievable objectives. A defeatist malaise is to be avoided at all costs.

Communicate your objectives. Once you have decided on the new message, and ideally there should be at least some broad consultation involved (most people prefer a vision of the future that reflects their own aspirations, after all!), it should be communicated consistently, clearly and often. (We have a rule of thumb that eight times is a good starting point for a message to be received!) This means, among other things, that all managers must a) understand; b) buy into; and c) be able to truly deliver the message. In our experience, this is easier said than done! Carefully assess individual contribution vis-à-vis the stated objectives. In tough times, the contribution by each employee is a key denominator. There is little more damaging to a business and dispiriting for top performers than having to carry non-performers who continue to get away with non-delivery. Jim Collins put it bluntly in his book Good to Great: ‘The old adage, “People are your most important asset” turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.’

The million-dollar question is, of course, ‘Who are the right people?’ My suggestion is: those who are self-motivated, disciplined, competent, fully aligned with the business strategy and highly engaged with the organisation. There is a virtuous circle here in that it will require effort and ability from both the individual and the organisation to achieve the sought-after alignment and engagement. Multiskill your people. Tough times are an opportunity to give your best managers and staff broader new responsibilities. This is also a good time to profile jobs, assess people and confirm competence (1), as well as to deliver relevant and meaningful learning, along with similarly relevant performance support. People’s willingness to learn seems to be heightened in difficult times.

Some key skills that could add great value in today’s environment include coaching and mentoring, listening skills, internal networking, communication, motivating and leading others.

Have a look at some key aspects of your organisational culture. Tough times provide a good opportunity to ‘lift up the rocks and look at the squiggly things’ as Jim Collins puts it, although you may not have needed to in the past, or may not have had the propensity to do so. Cultures that encourage this behaviour tend to be winning cultures. Organisations with what Collins termed a ‘culture of truth’ displayed the ability to:

• lead with questions and not answers;
• engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion;
• conduct regular autopsies, but without blame;
• build red flag mechanisms; and
• ‘confront the brutal facts’, which means truly assessing and acknowledging the reality of a situation.

Simplicity, thrift, hard work, a sense of urgency (see John Kotter’s superb new book, A Sense of Urgency on this topic) and an emphasis on performance, are other important aspects of corporate culture and values-based behaviour that should be encouraged and assessed in difficult times.

Listen carefully to staff. Tough times make it even more important to listen to your staff, for two main reasons:

• You may be surprised at the innovative ideas – necessity is the mother of invention for good reason; and
• Staff are more prepared to tell you the truth about things. For instance, poor performers, who in good times may have been accepted because they were ‘nice people’, will not be given such leeway in tougher times.

Celebrate successes. It is vital to build up morale in tough times, and nothing adds momentum to a positive flywheel of success and good morale as much as celebrating successes. Celebrate behaviours that you want to encourage as well as successes in reaching the newly defined short-term objectives. Another qualifier here: be careful to celebrate all contributors, not just the easy-to-identify goal scorers or front-line heroes. A good idea poorly executed will do more damage than good.

Eliminate all waste. Tough times are an opportunity to ensure that there is no fat in the system. Revisit all operating procedures, process and systems in the business. It can be debilitating (to both individuals and the organisation) and demotivating to continually be on the back foot fixing things and resolving crises borne of poor process in the system. Wading through treacle is not good fun! To conclude, I would argue that organisations that get their people aligned and engaged on the basis of some of the ideas discussed above would be more likely to survive, and indeed to thrive, in these tough times. As Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said shortly before the new US president assumed office, ”You never want a serious crisis to go to waste: it’s an opportunity.”

Ricky Robinson - CEO of The LR Management Group (Pty) Ltd