So you think you survived the recession?

As governments around the world begin to announce that the ‘corner’ is about to be turned and that the worst of the recession is over, you would think it a good time for organisations to breath a sigh of relief and relax a little. Lets face it, a number of your companies have gone and some businesses will have seen competition disappear.

But before you break out the champagne its maybe time to take stock and ask ‘how good a shape are we in?’ Here are four quick “health check’ questions that you may want to ask of your business or your team, however big or small.

Body Mass Index
A lot of businesses survive recession by cutting. Taking out staff numbers, reducing spending, stopping maintenance etc. If this goes too far this can leave you without the right people to take advantage of the opportunities that will now present themselves, with plant/equipment downtime just as you need it or systems that are more out of date than the competition. Sure, you had to do this to get through the bad times, but don’t ignore the choices you had to make. If you made them for good reason you knew the possible impact that they had. Now is the time to look hard at those choices and see what you will need to do in the coming months to get back in to shape so you can last in the long run. Of course if you didn’t take the opportunity to look at the shape of your business and get clear on what is core for your organisation you may be unhealthily slow to recover and need to shed a few kilo’s just as everyone else is getting in the starting blocks!

Flexibility
Those that survive hard times often do so because they have improved the agility of the organisation. Often rules are relaxed to allow opportunities to be taken. Bureaucracy and red tape are trimmed while people are encouraged to ‘go-get’. There are two sides to this as times improve. One view would be that you want agility at all times, and the other would be that too much agility means increased risk (shortcuts, compliance, not checking etc.). If you’ve learnt to be agile, you may have tested your old rules and systems to see what you really need to run your business and now you know what the new rules for the organisation should be. Before you put back the old constraints it is a good time to test what you might have learnt.

Eyesight
During good times it is easy to lose focus on what is core to the business by picking up whatever come the way of your business because they represent an opportunity to make a bi more profit. During leaner times you need to be really clear on the focus of your business or team to maximise what you are really good at, and where you can succeed in the marketplace. Did you use the recession as an opportunity to tune up your eyesight and get a focus on where you can succeed in the marketplace?

Blood Pressure
How have the people in your organisation come through the last year? I’ve heard from people who are covering two jobs and doubling their travelling! and others who have been doing very long hours. Is everyone coping? are they tense or overstressed? People who are tired, worn out or stressed tend to ‘just get by’ and lose their sharpness. At the very worst they start dropping off with health issues just as you need them to be fighting fit. If they’ve lost their vigour it may be time to re-motivate them or it may be time to take a look at the working hours habits that they have built up for you in the bad times. If you want to be healthy in a year’s time, nows a time to check the pulse and see if its strong!

We'd love to hear your ideas on a health check list for teams/organisations that are coming out of the marketplace!

Shifting the team viewfinder

I sometimes wonder if we are living in the 21st century. Not with what we see on the Tv or in the news, but when I see some of the issues that arise in the workplace.

I’m talking about inter-team strife.

Does it happen in your business? Do you have a few teams that should work hand in hand but don’t? Do you have examples of silo’s that do more than think differently, they work against each other?

A few years ago I was running a change programme that involved the down-sizing of two teams who worked side by side for different managers. One team handled customer problems and the other handled customer bills. Often the problems that the customer team faced from customers was the bills. Often the problem that the billing team faced was with customers not paying the bill. You would think that with such an overlap of issues the teams would find some benefit in working together wouldn’t you? Their team areas were a mere ten feet apart yet the gulf often felt like the great wall of china!

To improve the situation we decided that the downsizing project would also involve the moving of some of the better team-members between the two teams. The idea was that with better understanding of what each team did, we would reduce the friction and improve the cross silo working. When the appointments were announced I was working close by the team-space and I witnessed one of the candidates nominated to move teams proclaiming that they would ‘soon sort out those ------ next door!’ I wondered what we had let ourselves in for. Had we just moved the battlegrounds?
A month later I witnessed the same person talking in their new team. They were complaining about the team next door! A complete shift in perspective in four weeks!

I realised then how tribal people still were and began to notice similar behaviour in many places that I worked. Teams often have practices that amount to rituals. These rituals make a unique team and differentiate them from other teams in the organisation. Some teams have different uniforms from others. Most teams have different locations that are close to tribal lands (and you know when you have entered and you aren’t one of the tribe don’t you!). Teams meet and discuss issues and often these are with the team whose function adjoins them. These issues are often ‘stepping on our turf’ by doing our role instead of what we perceive as theirs. And sometimes the tribal leader joins in!

Sound familiar? So what do you do about it?

A lot of people try and deal with team friction through rules or discipline or by trying to create empathy between people. This might work to a point, but my view is that if they are behaving tribally you’ve got to think tribally in your solutions.

One of my favoured approaches when dealing with team friction is best explained through looking at the history of the land of my birth. Everyone knows that the Scot’s tribes are called clans, but not everyone knows that smaller clans were called Septs. The Septs swore allegiance to a bigger Clan and in times of war they rallied to the standard of that clan and stood side by side with other Septs and faced a common enemy. Then they went home and went back to fighting with the Septs that they had stood shoulder to shoulder with!

If you’ve got two tribes who are in conflict, one of your problems is that they see each other as the enemy. When they see another tribe as the enemy everything they do is seen in a bad light, everything they do is wrong, everything they do is something to be suspicious of. Lets face it history has taught them that’s the truth and their viewfinder is turned that direction and focused that way.

If you want to change the situation you’ve got to move the focus of the viewfinder. That focus is a ‘common enemy’ (just like the Scottish Septs). I look for a focus outside of the organisation such as a competitor. Most organisations have someone that they compare themselves with, competition for their market share, someone looking to sell to the same customers, someone whose product is too similar etc. The focus has to be real and something that everyone in the organisation knows about. It’s likely to be unwritten, but soon get told when you join. Its unlikely to be part of your vision or mission, but it will be part of your organisational chatter!

By getting each team to focus outside of the organisation at someone else that they need to win against you have a starting point for the team’s to see that there is something to value in each other. Something that means they need to work with the other team. Once a team starts to value another team then you have the chance for the other steps in moving from team conflict to team alignment.

Don’t fight the tribes! Just shift their focus and watch as the alliance begins to form and conflict begins to diminish.

A Question of Time

Does it sometimes feel as if being a leader means you have no time to yourself? That sometimes you don’t get anything done in a day because your staff are forever knocking at your door to ask questions? Do you find yourself working at home just because you didn’t get everything done during the day?

If so, you are not alone. When you stepped up to leadership nobody told you that you would be in such demand did they?

Being a leader requires you to value your time differently and more importantly it requires you to value yourself differently. But lets start with time first as that is often the biggest challenge that leaders face at every level.

In the last twenty years or so the phrase ‘open door policy’ has become the norm. You’ve heard of that? I bet you use the phrase too. In fact many leaders feel that they are obliged to say that their ‘door is always open’. Its the right thing to do isn't it? Its what you should do as a leader!

In principle the idea of an open door policy is right. As a leader you are there for your team (the word lead implies others of course) and to be there for your team when they need you.

So the principle is sound, but does the delivery match the principle? Does having your door open at all times so that anyone can come in when they need you, actually work?

Lets look at you, the leader first. Do you know your working style? Are you the kind of person that needs to complete a task before you can break your thinking from it? If you get interrupted do you often need to go back to the beginning? Do you struggle to concentrate without perfect peace? Are there some detail tasks that are not your natural style and you need to really concentrate or you make a mistake?

I have found that many thinking styles need to focus on what they are doing in order to get the best result, and that when we are doing something that is not our preferred style we need to focus even more. So interruptions might not work for you. You may need long periods of concentration or you may need short. You may need time to draft before you finalise. You may be a reflective kind of person that needs quiet thinking time. You may be a talk it out or a try it out kind of person. How you work best will be unique to you though...do you know yourself well enough to know what that is?

Lets look at your team now. How often do they need time with you? Every decision?Emergencies only? Hourly? Daily? Weekly?
How often do they need you to be immediately available? You know; ‘I have a problem and it needs sorted now’ type availability. Do they need that? or have they got used to that? Have you trained your people to think that you can be available at the drop of a hat? Does your open door policy mean ‘Always open’?

Lets put the two perspctives, of you and your team, together in to a formulae for you to think about if you have difficulty managing the time demands of your team;

How I work best + What my people need=How I organise my availability.

The outcome statement there is critical. Its good old time management. If you need thinking time, then book it in to your diary. If you need a solid two hour block to work on something then book that in too. Book time in your diary to match the way you work best and that meets the first part of the formulae.

Now you need to apply the same approach to the second part of the formulae. Take a look at what your people need from you. If you have got a good delegating habit, you will know that you need follow up to the act of delegation (to check if its done, to listen to problems, to coach for learning etc.). You might schedule regular sit down time with your staff to go through work in progress or to coach etc. You might schedule regular walk about time just to listen to your people’s problems, understand the mood in the workplace and give yourself time to see and be seen. And if you need blocks of time to work quietly yourself, you may also plan the opposite. Time that your team know they can interrupt you if they need to. Time when you are working on easy stuff, like reading e-mails or going through your own to-do list etc.

The key is to educate your people in how you work best and therefore how you can work best with them. If they are interrupting you all the time then its you that’s created the habit (by not planning time with them or not having a planned diary or by making yourself indispensable!)

Re-training yours staff means talking to them about what you are trying to do and what it means for them. They know you are busy and will be understanding of your need for some closed door time in a day, as long as its not 7.5hrs of closed door time and 0.5hrs of access time of course. You left that behind when you became a leader.

So its not really a question of time; its a question of organising your time.