Issue No. 151 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a collection of eight Harvard Business Review articles on managing through a downturn and how to solve pervasive bellyaching problems at your shop. And this reminder, check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
Pervasive Bellyaching
Many of the top-rated articles from Harvard Business Review have been packaged, by theme, into quick-reading paperbacks. This week’s book features eight such HBR articles on managing through a downturn. You’ll get maximum take-away wisdom from these timeless classics—because the writers get down to business quickly. Because it’s hard for me to pass up an interview, the first chapter I read was a 2001 interview with Eric Schmidt, who became chairman and CEO of Novell in 1997 with one assignment: orchestrate a turn-around. His thoughts on “Leading Through Rough Times” at Novell are eloquent and perhaps even more meaningful in 2009. Schmidt, by the way, became chairman and CEO at Google in 2001. Here’s what he faced in his early days at Novell:
“The more conversations I had, the more clear it became that Novell had a dysfunctional culture, a sick culture. Doctors will tell you that when you’re sick, having a diagnosis allows you to focus your energy on overcoming your disease. So my management team worked together to name Novell’s condition, and we ended up calling it the 'culture of fear.' In a culture of fear, which I think is a common condition in companies going through rough times, people are always worried about getting laid off, and so they suppress their feelings instead of complaining to their bosses, whom they fear might fire them, they complain vociferously to their peers. That’s what was going on here. This situation created a kind of pervasive bellyaching, a corporate cynicism.”
Schmidt added, “A related condition which we came to call the ‘Novell nod,” was ubiquitous. People would sit in a room listening to someone talk and nodding in agreement. Then, as they left the room, they’d all say to one another, ‘That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.’ I’d see that kind of behavior constantly.”
So how did Schmidt fix this culture of fear—and the company? “The biggest challenge was retaining our key talent—the ones I call ‘smart people’—and keeping them motivated. A company can survive losing a lot of people, but if it loses its smart people, it’s done for,” he warned.
In the early turn-around days, he simply asked team members to give him a list of the smartest people they knew in the company. He built a list of 100 people and set up half-hour one-on-one meetings with every person—and he listened. (And he also asked those people for their lists of the 10 smartest people in the company.) He identified the talent, reduced the bureaucracy from seven layers to four, gave people a voice, let folks work in their area of passion and allowed people to go around, under or over their managers—if they had good ideas the managers were blocking.
And with a nod to the Results Bucket, when Schmidt would meet with complainers, he asked each person “What are your objectives for this quarter?” If they didn’t know, he’d call their managers and remind them how critical it was for the team to be focused on quarterly objectives.
The book has seven other “managing through a downturn” articles including: How Resilience Works, Moving Upward in a Downturn, When Growth Stalls, Leadership and the Psychology of Turnarounds, Zeitgeist Leadership, and Cutting Costs Without Drawing Blood.
To order this week’s book from Amazon, click on this title: Harvard Business Review on Managing Through a Downturn.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate our culture here? 1 = a culture of fear; 10 = a culture of “Speak up—we want your ideas and we want to hear the good news AND the bad news.”
2) As we manage through a downturn, what is the elephant on the table that no one here is talking about?
What? No Delegation Training? - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the Delegation Bucket, Chapter 16, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is that team members must be experts at appropriate delegation. In my Mastering the Management Buckets workshops, it is a rare day when more than ten percent of the participants have ever read a book on delegation, listed to a CD on delegation, or attended a workshop on delegation. Yet—everyone in the room delegates every day. What’s wrong with this picture?
We recommend you build a “Delegation 101” course into your new employee orientation and—at least quarterly—offer a refresher workshop in appropriate delegation for all comers. Start by reading the delegation chapter in my book. Then give Starbucks cards and other bribes for team members who read further in the art and science of delegation.
On the Buckets website, you’ll find other delegation book recommendations, plus “Worksheet #16.1: Dysfunctional Delegation Diseases." Take this Delegation Gut-Check Assessment and diagnose the severity of your delegation diseases. Are you a Code Green, Code Yellow or Code Red?
NEXT CEO DIALOGUES:
• August 28, 2009 – CEO Dialogues 1-Day Roundtable (Dana Point, California)
• October 1, 2009 – CEO Dialogues 1-Day Roundtable (New York City)
Click here for more information.
MANAGEMENT BUCKETS WORKSHOP:
• October 20-21, 2009 – Mastering the Management Buckets Workshop Experience (Orange County, California)
Click here for more information.
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