Tag Archives: Employee

Urgency in Turnarounds

When a team has tried everything in their power to solve a dilemma and is unsuccessful, the turnaround manager must step in. The buck stops with him; if a third party cannot reach resolution with company staff, someone with more clout must reestablish credibility. Use of a consistent complain resolution process can prove quite effective. It frees the team up to not have to stress relationships with those with whom they have either had long term relationships or with whom they must transact business once the turnaround is complete. Even managers should appeal to the business owner or turnaround executive if a third party will not accept their efforts to resolve issues.

Doing the Job Effectively

Encouraging employees to perform their jobs thoroughly, to the point they exceed performance standards, is most easily done by providing responsibility and reward. Treat employees as peers, recognizing that they too have responsibilities and commitments. Offering them the opportunity to wield more authority is rarely rejected. Promote a diligent working atmosphere wherein employees want to go the extra mile.

Ask all employees to document any problems with suppliers, customers, or service providers. Often, taking it a step further and documenting issues with sales teams, distributors and governmental agencies (where appropriate) can provide a paper trail to  help the executive team and turnaround artist in their work to remove roadblocks. When relevant facts are understood, appropriate actions can be taken.

Dealing With a Lack of Resources

When a company is in the middle of a turnaround, certain items that would make work easier are not going to be available due to a lack of funds. Using skills and abilities creatively to overcome this lack of resources or other unpredicted occurrence as an example for employees to follow. In tough situations, executives should look for a way to overcome the situation rather than dwelling on the inconvenience caused.

Successful turnarounds are a tribute to employees who strive to overcome limitations and exceed performance standards rather than merely meet them. To bring work projects in early and under budget, everyone must strive to do much better than is required, constantly searching out ways to improve efficiency. No time can be wasted–every minute and every dollar that exceeds schedule or budget extends the distance between a struggling company and its ultimate goal of renewed profitability.

Following the Turnaround Plan

All employees need to be reminded that a plan has been developed to promote optimal recovery and that all actions taken are done so in accordance with the dictates of the plan. United by common objectives, the work force can and will help to implement the turnaround plan. Three essential principles apply:

  • Some short-term gains will be sacrificed for ling-term profitability.
  • Some long-term successes will have to be postponed for short-term cash flow.
  • The means of implementation is always open to suggestion and never open to argument.

Creating a Sense of Urgency

Certain goals, particularly dates and milestones, need to be met without fail. To accomplish these goals, a sense of urgency must prevail. Departures from the schedule can cause the company to lose out on windows of opportunity. The interest carrying cost of financing operations longer than anticipated is an example; if work projects are completed on time, lines of credit can be paid down sooner. Even one foot-dragging employee can impede the progress of the group, and the resulting missed deadlines can mean substantial financial losses.

Meet With Employees

Sit down with your staff and clearly and frankly describe the situation. Inform them that the company is experiencing some short-term problems in meeting its objectives and that actions are being undertaken to minimize long-term  impact. Explain and reiterate throughout the turnaround that company health can be restored through combined best efforts. Explain the turnaround plan, with an emphasis on the valuable role of each and every employee in reaching plan goals.

Meet With Management

Regular meetings with managers will be needed to discuss progress in detail. Begin with twice weekly meetings and progress to biweekly as the situation improves. Update reports should be given on activities since the prior meeting, with input required from managers from each department. Discuss problems and develop plans to resolve them within the meeting. Take advantage of a quorum of opinions to move the company forward in rapid-fire fashion.

 

Implementing Your Turnaround Plan

A turnaround plan presupposes that someone will be around to implement it. A lack of execution or inappropriate one (timing or lack of adaptation) will quickly undermine all earlier efforts that went into drafting the plan. Control over operations is therefore a must–no single part of the business should monopolize the company’s attention and efforts.

Controlling Operations

Motivation

The motivational skills of a “take charge” leader can enhance job performance in many ways. Many employees complain they are not being used effectively because they don’t have enough to do or their efforts are being applied inappropriately. Management that makes the most of employee work efforts has a knack for spotting actions that, if performed immediately, will have a tremendous, positive impact on company success.

Efficiency

To ensure that operations are monitored and controlled correctly, the individual who reviews system reports must make decisions based on indicators of company efficiency. For example, if variance reports show (project or product) costs exceeding budget, action must be taken immediately to prevent further overruns. Similarly, if non-payment has a vendor worried, the top financial manager must find a way to keep the vendor on board so a return to profitability can occur.

Sound management is exhibited when field operations or internal reports require responses to abnormalities. For example, a business owner in the midst of a turnaround had a new hire (< 2 months) supervisor request on Thursday to take Monday and Tuesday off to pursue some personal matters. The business owner was not in a production crunch and was short on cash, so he approved the time off–particularly since the supervisor was not using vacation (paid) time to take leave. When the supervisor strode onto the job Monday late morning, the owner was surprised. When he requested to work the balance of Monday and all of Tuesday, the owner declined the request, citing that she had to make other arrangements that inconvenienced others and that last-minute notice would not be accommodate in this or future instances.

In this instance, the owner did what was necessary to maintain control over operations. Though it may have ruffled the supervisor’s feathers for a few days, it demonstrated the importance of setting policies and commitments–and living by them. It was also to the owner’s advantage not to have to pay the supervisor for work that had been reassigned to someone else. Proper planning was used to make sure that someone would be able to supervise the work. Additional follow-up was necessary to make sure no problems were slowing down production for those two days. Had the owner failed to exercise sound management, proper planning, or follow-up, she would have lost time, money and credibility with others due to one employee’s circumstances.

Focusing on Common Objectives

Getting employees to focus on common objectives is a difficult task. Executives an managers who are able to motivate their workers to avoid distractions, do their jobs effectively, and remember to follow the turnaround plan do so with tremendous skills/abilities.

Employee Problem Solving

Employees can best avoid distractions and aid in the turnaround process by quickly resolving issues in which they have innate skills and referring all other issues to appropriate personnel. Additionally, employees should report any persisting problems or confrontations to the executive team.

Problem-solving should be a relatively painless process, requiring only that he or she utilize skills learned on the job and “do what seems best” based on prior experience. If an employee has little or no experience in the problem area , she should not hesitate to find someone who is experienced. It is far better to admit a need for help than to take a chance on behalf of the company.

Employees should be reassured that involving others is not “shirking” or “dumping” work into another’s lap. Rather, this process is a way of relieving employees of the likelihood of error in making an uninformed decision. However, employees are not absolved from making sure the problem is resolved. Make it a habit of celebrating when employees help one another out to build camaraderie.

 

The House on the Sand Went Smash

As a youngster, I remember learning a Vacation Bible School ditty about the wise man and the foolish man. In the song, there was a great rainstorm. One builder had built his house upon a rock, and that house stood firm. The other had built his house upon sand and the house fell down (went smash!) The morale of the story is to make a sure foundation before beginning an endeavor whose outcome is important.

Most businesses know that they need to do some business or strategic or turnaround planning. Planning is vital to creating shared mission and eliciting commitment from stakeholders in the outcome(s). Most executive teams, however, underestimate the value of educating employees to prepare them to execute the plan and achieve the desired results.

We all want employees and managers who maintain a cool head and concentrated focus. What is our role, however, within executive teams, to help our people become prepared? We would assert that our role is to lead and influence through empowerment. Empowerment enhances employee engagement and reduces the likelihood that only executives will be expected to take responsibility for outcomes. 

Skilled employees are usually made, not born. Therefore, key employees deserve professional education and job training. Be constantly grooming your staff to take on more and more responsibility. Much like a second-string player on a sports team, a second generation of managers should be in waiting, ready to step in when called. This intentionality is also very useful in succession planning, because those who vacate their positions already have trained backups who would be ready to perform the role should their predecessor no longer be able or willing.

Grooming Effective Managers

Continuously analyze employees for management potential through an interactive process of interview, observation, and written response. Be on the lookout for employees in all areas who posses strong analytical and evaluation skills, combined with the emotional intelligence to handle changes effectively and appropriately. Give your people the opportunity to prove themselves worthy of consideration for grooming.

When evaluating management candidates, leaders will often try to determine, through an employee’s actions or words, the employee’s perceptions about the company’s mission. A demonstrated commitment to the mission shows promise. Using individual interviews and feedback sessions, leaders can determine whether employees understand chain of command and critical success factors for business success. Asking employees how to improve the productivity of their part of the business, their own execution, and corporate profitability can reveal (through their responses and actions) whether they understand the key levers of management.

Education and Training

Those who can consistently make recommendations for company improvement should be considered for management positions and be given an opportunity to refine their skills through education and training. The employee development need not be formal; the one-to-one mentoring of high potential employees can yield significant results. Formal workshops and continuing education offered within your industry or organizations serving people in key roles can sharpen skills, focus, and performance.

Personnel files should document employee attendance at educational programs as well as innovative solutions they have offered to real problems. These files serve as the basis for performance reviews as well as management development. Difficult work assignments containing known problems offer the high potential employees to contribute on  meaningful decisions. If unsatisfactory decisions are made in these situations, the employees can be coached and mentored through what should have been done differently and learning will occur.

Adapting to Change

Over time, employees will learn to adapt to changing events in the operating environment. The first few times a managerial candidate faces unforeseen circumstances, it may be difficult to revise the game plan to suit the conditions. With effective coaching and a sprinkling of successes, however, the new manager will learn to handle tough situations without the need to involve a higher up.

Every business has its share of unpredicatable events that can influence performance. While these events cannot be anticipated exactly, they can be expected and planned for in a hypothetical sense. As employees become more flexible in the way in which they carry out their responsibilities, they will be able to aid the business plan execution by adapting to change more quickly and accurately.

 

SCARF Up Some Change

In an HBR blog post about organizational change this morning, Walter McFarland draws in the role of the brain in defining whether change efforts will meet with success. Some of the casualties of failure to adapt to changing market conditions he mentions include Sunbeam, Polaroid, and Circuit City. While each of these formerly strong companies is no longer in business, proponents of organizational change struggle to define why some are able to reinvent themselves and others are not, other than the nefarious “human element.”

Organizational change as a field of study has long maintained that change can be defined in linear, sequential terms and processes. What we are discovering, largely through examining principles of neuroscience, is that change is neither. Instead, McFarland, the board chair elect of the American Society of Training and Development (ASTD), argues that modern business dynamics would suggest that it is chaotic. It is the chaotic nature of change that creates the need for greater research. We live in a time when the need to constantly change is critical to competitiveness. Neuroscience may be a key to helping us steer organizations through adaptation more effectively.

Thompson and Luthans wrote that typical reactions to change “can be so excessive and immediate, that some researchers have suggested it may be easier to start a completely new organization than to try to change an existing one.” While industrial psychologists refer to this as “human resistance to change,” very few who study the phenomenon have identified how to lower the resistance consistently and pervasively. 

At the NeuroLeadership Summit, being held in New York this week, a panel discussion with senior executives and experts from The Conference Board, the Association of Change Management Professionals, Change Leaders, and Barnard College will explore the connection between neuroscience and organizational change, understanding how we can effectively deal with the human resistance to change. 

A new organizational change model is being proposed that takes into account how successful change functions in a modern organization, where work is conceptual, creative, and relational, and talent is portable. According to McFarland, activities that have contributed to the continuing poor performance of change initiatives include:

  • Perpetual underpreparation: change is always dreaded and a surprise to employees
  • A perceived need to “create a burning platform”: meant to motive employees via expressed or implied threat
  • Leading change from the top of the organization down: only a few individuals are actively involved in the change and either under communicate or miscommunicate with others

Top-down change (the traditional model) can trigger fear within employees because it “deprives them of key needs that help them better navigate the social world in the workplace. These needs include status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness” — the foundation of the SCARF model. 

  • Status is about relative importance to others.
  • Certainty concerns being able to predict the future.
  • Autonomy provides a sense of control over events.
  • Relatedness is a sense of safety with others – of friend rather than foe.
  • Fairness is a perception of fair exchanges between people.

SCARF is a summary of important discoveries from neuroscience about the way people interact socially and is built on three central ideas:

  1. The brain treats many social threats and rewards with the same intensity as physical threats and rewards (Lieberman, & Eisenberger, 2009). 
  2. The capacity to make decisions, solve problems and collaborate with others is generally reduced by a threat response and increased under a reward response (Elliot, 2008). 
  3. The threat response is more intense and more common and often needs to be carefully minimized in social interactions (Baumeister et al, 2001).

Since organizational change is a significant social interaction in the marketplace, it is important to minimize perceived risk. Understanding how people tick, empowering them to vocalize their ideas, and creating better systems to engage them in the change process is best practice. More organizations need to get on board.

 

Experimental Failure Leads to Success

We’ve all heard the Thomas Edison quote that he “successfully discovered 1000 ways to not make a light bulb.” He didn’t consider the 1000 attempts as failures, but rather experiments from which he collected data that guided the innovative process. Who else lays claim to so many failures? Cisco grew to be one of the largest technology companies in the world after being rejected for funding by 76 venture capital firms. Michael Jordan, in the minds of many (including yours truly) the greatest basketball player of all time, was cut from his high school basketball team. John Grisham, award winning novelist, was rejected by a couple dozen  publishers before getting his first sizable deal. Slumdog Millionaire won 8 Academy Awards after Warner Brothers gave up on it and sold the property to Fox Searchlight. In short, each of these is a story about finding a positive way to apply lessons learned.

Why is it that workers go from being starry eyed, curious and energetic to automatons after working for a company for an extended period of time? Usually, by the time these numbed brains “check out” mentally, they have already been promoted to a managerial level. We value visionary leaders, but all disdain lethargic managers. What’s the difference between the two? The loss of intellectual creativity and desire to take risks leads to bureaucracy. The market demands innovation. Those who will lead are challenged to not become shut off to progress and new ideas.

Paul Arden wrote It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be. The former executive creative director of Saatchi & Sattchi said, people “will say nice things rather than be too critical. Also, we tend to edit out the bad so that we hear only what we want to hear…If, instead of seeking approval, you ask, ‘What’s wrong with it? How can I make it better?’ You are more likely to get a truthful, critical answer.”

Jeremy Gutsche concurs with Arden, writing that “a culture that openly discusses imperfection is more likely to accept the failure that comes from acceptable risk.”

Michael Jordan, mentioned above as the greatest basketball player in history, said the following about taking risks, 

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 ti,es I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” 

Most companies, however, spend a lot of time in performance appraisals celebrating successful outcomes and critiquing efforts that don’t appear to meet expectations. Think for a minute, however, about how to inspire your employees to be clever and progressive. Put measures in place to help them feel protected. It must be understood that trying new things, even if failure is the outcome, is a better business decision than undertaking safe projects constantly.

It is said that Steven Ross would fire employees for not making mistakes when Warner was launching its MTV subsidiary. He and his leadership team were trying to debut new programming and needed as much innovation as possible. Similarly, Microsoft used to have the mentality that a leader was not ready for promotion if he had not had a highly publicized, big flop. Thomas Watson, Sr., founder of IBM, once received a phone call from an employee who wanted to resign after making a $10 million mistake. Watson refused to let him follow through with his intended action, telling the manager that IBM had just spent $10 million educating him.

How much money and time are you willing to spend in your organization to educate people and give them the chance to pioneer something great? Probably not enough.