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How to lead your company to success in a downturn

Leadership is a very broad and nebulous term. Generally accepted definitions of leadership are “The activity of leading” and/or “A person who rules or guides or inspires others.” By these definitions, anyone can be a leader, whether you formally manage and lead a team as a manager or supervisor or if you just happen to find yourself in a position to influence others. 

During hard times especially, you need leaders who have the ability to see and seize opportunities as they present themselves. Possessing leadership capabilities does not necessarily have anything to do with title and has everything to do with future-thinking professionals who are willing to proactively step up to the plate and buy into a culture of progressive action.

The grid below shows characteristics of managers vs. those of leaders. The questions for you to answer as a business professional or aspiring business professional are, “Which are you?” And, “for which attributes and characteristics would you like to be known?”

A manager …	A leader …
Administers	Innovates
Is a copy	Is an original
Maintains	Develops
Focuses on systems and structure	Focuses on people
Controls	Inspires trust
Has a short-range view	Has a long-range perspective
Asks how and when	Asks what and why
Focuses on the bottom line	Looks to the horizon
Imitates	Originates
Accepts the status quo	Challenges the status quo
Is the classic good soldier	Is his own person
Does things right	Does the right things

Warren Bennis, organizational consultant and author, said, “The truth is that no one factor makes a company admirable. But if you were forced to pick the one that makes the most difference, you’d pick leadership.”

The leaders who will be most successful during hard times are those people in an organization with the skills and characteristics of a leader vs. those of the manager. Below are five strategies that enable true leaders to lead their teams to not only survive but thrive during tough economic times:

1. Practice Hands-on Leadership
• Be visible: Get out of the office and onto the floor into the work areas. Hold town hall meetings and information sessions where everyone is invited. Greet new hires in person and welcome them to the company.
• Become a mentor: Mentors guide others to success, adding value to the employee experience and grooming internal candidates for promotion. A mentor is able to leverage his or her experience, education and knowledge of the company to develop others for the good of the individual and the company.
• Know your employees: Building relationships with employees, and learning about them as individuals, is a proven method for building employee confidence and loyalty in you and the company.
• Gain a better understanding: Set up work experiences and insist that your leadership team do the same. For example, you may require that you and your team work one shift in the operating areas in a front-line discipline at least once a quarter. There’s no better way to get to know your employees as well as gaining an understanding of how your policies, procedures, rules and expectations impact the front-line employee and the work that they perform.

 

2. Lead by Example
• Be a role model: Model the behaviors that you expect from your employees.
• Walk the talk: If, for example, you tell your employees that times are tough and everyone may have to make sacrifices to ensure that the company stays solvent, then you must make sacrifices as well. You cannot cut hours, cut pay, lay people off and then pay yourself a huge bonus, no matter how much you deserve it.

 

3. Communicate Effectively
• Communicate all news – good or bad – openly, candidly and honestly: Be sure that the employees have all of the information they need to support the company and contribute to the future success of the company.
• Communicate in all directions to all levels of the organization: Omitting people from the communication loop creates an environment of fear and distrust.
• Use appropriate and relevant methods for communication: Avoid using e-mail and other forms of written communication if the message is of a critical or complicated nature. Always remember that written communication is open to interpretation. Ensure that your method of communication aligns with the nature of the message. If it is important that the message is not misconstrued in any way, you may need to communicate in person by holding a staff or town hall meeting, or possibly even communicating one-on-one with individuals on the team.

 

4. Become a Change Agent

The four major reasons that people resist change are fear of losing something they value, misunderstanding the change and what it means, believing the change is not beneficial, and low personal tolerance for change.

• Embrace change: Embrace change, do not brace for change. Change is the rule rather than the exception, especially in today’s business environment. In fact, it’s not an exaggeration to say that business in this country will never be the same again! Change is inevitable. Make sure that it is the right change, not change for change’s sake
• Proactively seek change: If you wait until the business is failing, it’s too late. By not proactively changing to keep up with changes in the internal business or external environment, you have given the competition a green flag to take over your market share and put you out of business.
• Realize that change is emotional: Like it or not, as part of the plan for change, leaders must prepare to deal with the emotions generated by change, big or small, in the organization. People will experience fear – for their jobs, their positions and their status. They will feel anxiety over what will happen next and wonder what the future looks like for them. Some people become angry, especially if the company is implementing change frequently during a short time span. Leaders who put their heads in the sand and refuse to deal with the emotional aspects of change will experience low morale leading to low productivity, low quality of work and high turnover – all of which disable the company’s competitive growth engine.
• Involve people in the change: Whenever possible, get everyone involved in the change process. This generates buy-in and helps to alleviate some of the more negative emotions surrounding change.
• Communicate openly and honestly: The worst thing that a leader can do is to keep information from employees. In the absence of information, they make it up, making a difficult situation worse.

 

5. Redefine Operational Efficiencies
1. Assess, assess: Regularly assess policies, processes and procedures to ensure that they continue to be effective in the changing environment. During tough times, you must look at your business in new ways. The external environment has changed and the altered forces driving business require new and innovative thinking.
2. Ask for/listen to employees’ ideas: One of the biggest challenges is to assess which operational policies and processes may need to change or even be eliminated. Great leaders know that employees have the best ideas and that no one knows better than the front-line employees which operational policies, processes and procedures work and which do not.
3. Remove old paradigms: Eradicate the phrase, “We’ve always done it this way!” from yours and your teams’ vocabulary.

 

Five Leadership Mistakes to Avoid
(Talent Management Perspectives; Robert Hosking; Published May 2009)

1. Thinking employees can’t handle the truth: Too often, leaders believe that it is better to keep information from employees, usually under the misconception that the truth will only make them unhappy and that they will not be able to understand the business criteria driving leadership decisions. In reality, employees want all the news, good and bad. Sharing information with employees builds trust and loyalty, and you probably will be pleasantly surprised at how much they understand.
2. Feeling that people are lucky to have a job: This attitude is condescending, to say the least. A recent poll, as reported on Good Morning America on March 25, 2010, showed that 55 percent of employees are extremely unhappy in their current jobs. They cite feeling trapped and miserable. For now, there are not enough jobs for them to move out of the jobs they hate, but when this recession ends, and it will eventually, many companies can expect mass defection!
3. Eliminating incentives: When a company is experiencing hard times, one knee-jerk reaction is to eliminate incentives. This is absolutely the wrong thing to do! People need to know that they are appreciated. Incentives do not have to be elaborate and/or expensive to show your employees that you recognize their value.
4. Cutting/eliminating training: Believe it or not, this is not the time to drastically eliminate training. Certainly evaluate the value for the training being offered and make good decisions about which training programs will deliver the biggest value to the employee, the customer and the bottom line. For example, if you will not be promoting anyone in the next year, it doesn’t make sense to put employees through a management development program. However, it does make sense to continue ongoing development of current managers to ensure that they are ready for the future, and continue to grow and add value. Especially critical is to provide developmental training if you plan to consolidate responsibilities and expect employees to pick up extra duties, some of which they may not have performed previously and may be outside of their demonstrated areas of expertise.
5. Making work “mission impossible”: Making work almost impossible to achieve, whether it is due to assigning responsibilities outside someone’s ability to perform or piling on an impossible work load, is extremely discouraging. This tactic will probably backfire on you. People shut down if they feel that there is no chance to succeed, reverting to mediocre work (i.e., doing just enough to get by).

The leaders who will be most successful during these hard times are those leaders with the ability to demonstrate the skills for efficiently delivering on these five strategies for growth and survival.

Whether you’re a leader today or a future leader, you should be aware that the game has changed. Leaders for the future will require more skills, more patience, and a new and innovative view of leadership and corporate America in general in order to find success in the new businesses of the 21st century and beyond.

I would be very interested in any ideas that you have for future topics. Please feel free to contact me by commenting below, sending an e-mail to debbiez@lsapartners.com, or calling me at 407-497-0075. You may also want to visit our Web site at http://www.lsapartners.com for the latest and greatest on leadership and workforce development, operational effectiveness, and other topics.

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