Paralysis
I know business people that are caught, like rabbits in a headlight, right now.
It is something to do with the sheer speed of the downturn. Business-as-Usual just isn’t for many. And if we have staff, stock, and premises then cash flow, depending on the business, is almost certainly a challenge.
Meanwhile savings invested in pension schemes and endowment policies are being decimated. And if you didn’t read the very small print, financial institutions can impose draconian penalties at will. Very few of us read the small print when we signed. And if we did we didn’t believe the actions would be invoked.
The paralysis can be in our heads. Our bodies can move but the outputs from our thinking are just fixed somehow. Ideas and thoughts occur but they are not joined up; they are like the bits in a minestrone soup that someone keeps stirring. Nothing seems to break the loop.
It’s other people that can break the loop: people that are honest, open and trustworthy.
It’s nice if you like them as well.Labels: overcoming depression on the business front, paralysed thinking, trustworthy relationships
Always
Losing a £40m contract overnight can be a shock, especially if its half your business. In one split second it can turn a leader inside out.
My client always preferred to relate and communicate with the individual members of his senior management team (SMT) on a one to one basis. He would avoid regular monthly management meetings with all the team. If any such meetings were called he would always decide who should attend and who should not; full management information, including the financials, would not be available either.
Leaders that behave this way do it because they know they are in absolute control. It’s one on one and whatever style or manner they adopt they can always face down their employee, even if he/she is a director. They know there is no one else in the room to challenge or contradict their views.
The downside of this approach is always the same. The SMT is fragmented and dysfunctional. You pay a small fortune to attract high talent to the business but then you treat them like children so, the intelligent ones, they leave. The serious issues are not debated or discussed in open forum and therefore it is always the leader’s views that prevail. The concept of the SMT working as a team with all the benefits of synergy, innovation and creativity are totally and utterly lost.
Why do leaders behave like this? There is always another agenda.
It can be anything – emotional insecurity, tax evasion, lifestyle issues, inability to trust, poor choice of colleagues. Whatever it is, the prognosis for the patient is not good and it may be terminal.Labels: leadership style, other agendas, politics interferring with business.
Voices
We all have these voices that kick in, usually at moments of extremity. It’s the ones that start
when we have had a bad day, a bad week, or a bad even longer that can, if they are allowed, do the damage.
It’s grim enough that we have been told our working week has been cut, or that we have lost our job, or to realise that we left a good job only to find there is nothing out there to replace it. All these things happen and then the voices put the boot in and try to make things even worse.
“Surely you could have seen that your hours would be cut without just waiting for it to happen”
“The writing was on the wall for your job months ago, why didn’t you start looking for something last September?”
“Oh well, that was really stupid to walk out of well paid work with no job to go to. That is your own fault!”
So we have to teach these voices a lesson, we have to quieten them down. One good way is to change our immediate paradigm by going out for a long walk, by visiting a favourite gallery or by calling in some favours from trusted friends. And then when we are in a more resourceful frame of mind, we plan strategy for recovery, we write down all the specific things that we are going to do and when we are going to do them. It can always help to have a little support from people we know that are trustworthy.
Sometimes we just have to ask.Labels: enhancing performance, looking for support, trust, using trusted networks
Constants and variables
Some things need to be there all the time. The clearer you are as an individual or as an organisation about where you want be, the more likely you are to get there. This is direction. On the journey, the more trustworthy relationships that you have in all areas of your life, the better the chance of great performance. And this is a cycle, these things have to be revisited periodically. So, direction, trust and performance are constants; they are eternal truths in our lives.
However there are variables that distort the model and the two I’m thinking of are time and circumstance. It as if we are swimming in the sea all life long. And when good things happen it is so easy to be buoyant, ride the waves and cut effortlessly through the water. But as time and circumstance are always changing this will not last for long. We may lose a big order, watch a super member of staff leave to live abroad, worry about bad debts, Suddenly the swimming is not so easy and it can feel as if we are struggling to swim at all, being pulled under, drowning even.
And it seems that this push and pull of time and circumstance is always with us. So it is important not to be seduced, not to over react to the really good things that happen, because their impact is likely to be ephemeral. Equally it is crucial that the difficulties, the challenges and the toughness out there is not allowed to sink us.
So how do you stop it, how do you deal with troubles right now? The answer is to go back to the constants, the direction and the trustworthy relationships. You revisit direction and trust to see what performance you really want over the next few years.
And then you can start to swim again.Labels: direction, organisational performance, three eternal truths, trust and performance
