Leading During The Economic Crisis – Part 3
ByThis is the third in a series of posts about leading/managing during the economic crisis.The content of these posts will include unedited transcriptions from a recent webinar addressing “How to Optimize Teams’ Effectiveness in Difficult Economic Times”. The webinar contained questions from the attendees. The questions are answered by the following five management and leadership experts:Jerry Houston, Carol Bergmann, A.J. Hiltenbrand, Ed Oakley and See Luan Foo.
The rest of this post contains an unedited transcription of one of the questions asked and answered during the webinar:
Ed: Let’s move on to another question. Ironically this is Miriam and I understand they’re in the same office and one of the reasons I pick this one next is that a lot of people will resonate with in any culture.
So here it is. I’ll read the whole thing. How and when do we adjust our work style and leadership within a team to solve problems more effectively, increase creativity and save time, and the second part of that same question is how do you go about setting the right goals fostering the optimal level of collaboration and selecting the appropriate people to participate in projects.
Who would like to take a stab at that?
Carol: This is Carol, I’ll be glad to start that one off. I think what I’d like to do is probably start with the second question first on how to go about setting the right goals.
I think one of the things when times are difficult or we’re in challenging times, it’s important that we go back to the basics and certainly goals setting is one of the key areas to look at.
Light goals, maybe looking at goals that you’re going to be able to achieve. So in times when things are challenging making sure that the goals are realistic and also having people participate in the goal setting process inviting them as part of that process is probably even more important than in other times so that fostering the optimal level of collaboration, again inviting people to really look at the solution and participating that in that process is really important.
Your first question, “How and when to adjust work style and leadership within the team to solve problems more effectively increase creativity and save time?” It’s more important to go back to basics at this time. It’s not so much about adjusting leadership but remembering what’s really important in these times.
So really inviting people to participate, helping them remember what the goals are. This is one that is really challenging I think in times when we’re struggling at times. These people maybe coming in with concerns and issues that’s on their mind.
And so you might find yourself especially if you’re a team lead or a manager where you have to remind people of the goals that were working more than you would in other times. So those are couple of points that I would bring forth.
Ed: Anybody else likes to add anything to that.
Jerry: This is Jerry Houston. You know, first of all I think Carol is absolutely right on that thing focus the goals particularly in times when things are not going as well as we would like them to really helps people to be focused on the mission as supposed to be being focused on another issues.
The other thing I would say is that we need to allow people to express how they’re feeling. There are concerns and of course if we pay attention to the teachings of Abraham Maslow we know that people want a sense of community, they want a sense of belonging and a sense of self-esteem but in order to have that, they have to feel safe and secure and people are not feeling safe and secure and they need to express that and they need to understand that their safety and their security depends on their actions and how they apply themselves to helping their business to be a successful as it can be in their current economic conditions.
So I invite our listeners to really broad that out of their team and let their people vent on their feeling so that they can talk about those frustrations and then move on to more productive goal setting.
Ed: You know Jerry that leads right into a question that I think that you are already sort of in alignment with addressing. So I’d like to ask that question and just keep this going and the question was from Donna. “How do effectively deal with the anxiety and fear that accompanies the national and world climate. People afraid of losing jobs, consultants afraid of losing work, security, etc. lowered optimism, negative expectations, anticipating the worse, pulling in versus exploring opportunities and the impact that has on personal well-being and effectiveness.
I think it’s a great question and I think you were on the verge of starting to address it anyways, so thought to bring it up.
Jerry: Well, thanks and it’s a big issue. In fact, I wrote an article called “Faith not Fear” recently and this article came really from sitting at my Church and recently and listening to a sermon that struck me more than most.
I do admit to dosing off in some sermons and coming back to life like towards the offering but our pastor asked us how we were being directed during this difficult economic time.
Are we being directed by our faith? We will get through this time of uncertainty or we being driven by fear. And then the context of our business and professionalize, it is helpful to look at the word fear, and fear really is defined as an unpleasant emotion cause by expectation or awareness of danger to be afraid of something or perhaps even something that’s unknown.
In fact, I think most of us will recognize that fear of the unknown is one of the greatest fears that we possess and going back to Maslow of course we recognize that we can’t move to the higher levels of self-esteem and so on until we feel safe and secure on what’s going on.
And when we think about business downturns, mortgage foreclosures, housing values at a lower than what is owed on some of these houses, the stock market that rival the fastest and most violent roller coasters in the world. It’s no wonder why the tendency is for all of us to have these feelings of fear but is also true that the greatest is fear of the unknown of what will happen next, you know, will I still be in business a month from now or will I still have a job or will I still have my home.
These feelings are natural. And the question becomes do we allow these feelings to control us? What type of faith do we possess? What type of confidence do we have in ourselves and in our organizations that we can make the right decisions and move forward with the confidence to make course corrections and find a way to manage through this economic storm.
The naysayers all around the world are preaching doom and gloom as if this is the first time we have ever been through these hard times in this world. Well, a friend of mine Chip Schulze out of the North East forwarded a copy of the Times Magazine article and it really was the cover page of Times Magazines so they just want to read the titles on these magazines for you. The first one is war and terror, Mid-East violence, Social Security, weak US dollar, stagnant market, personal debt, federal deficit, China-Emerges, Corporate fraud, housing bubble, the new economy, and gas prices. All of those magazine covers are from the 1970’s.
Ed: Wow.
Jerry: And so this is not the first time we’re through these issues. This is something that has gone on before and it self-corrected and we moved forward. And the same thing will happen now and so it’s very important to determine how are these tough times going to test our metal, who are we? What are we made of? Will we step up and pass the test of this difficult time or give in to it.
And so that is really an important question to ask ourselves. Are we ready to confront what’s going on? Make the adjustments that are necessary, some of them won’t be pleasant and then move on from there.
Ed: Oh, great, alright. Anybody else wants to comment on that one. Thank you Jerry.
See Luan: I’m See Luan from Singapore. I totally agree with what Jerry just said. If we look back far enough to the 1929 great depression, you will see some similarities between the current situation in 2008. For example shortage of credit, unemployment, banks becoming bankrupt, run on the bank, etc.
So it is understandable in these two different environments that fear, panic, anxiety dominates. Now we have a Chinese proverb which says in times of fear, in times of anxiety, we refer to the Chinese word crisis and the Chinese word crisis has about two components. One component is danger “Way” and the other component is opportunity “Chi”, Way-Chi.
So if we remember that times like this we should look at both sides of the equation not only just fear but also looking at it as a time for opportunity. An illustration would be when I feel the heat that’s crisis I see the light, that’s the opportunity. So in the current environment if we can find a niche or a vacuum and fill it that is like what you say it in America that is ultimately a light at the end of tunnel because this particular crisis will pass through, how long? We do not know but hopefully it won’t be as long as a great depression, we took about three to four years to overcome.
Ed: Okay. Thank you. Just one other comment is the idea that when we’re managing a team, we first have to manage our own fear, our own anxiety, our own attitude if you will, and we need to take care of ourselves and do whatever it takes to be in the right place as we work with our team.
So if we’re in struggle, we need to have our own way to deal with that struggle, with the fears that we have, the emotions we’re going through and it doesn’t matter how you do it but you got to have a way to do it, you know, some people like to ride out their fumes to get them out, some people like to, you know, the proverbial yell into a pillow, some people like to exercise.
Exercise seems to breakthrough the emotional energy kinds of issues and we’ve got to do that and in my experience is that once I’m back at almost neutral then I can sit down and I use pads of paper in my so called organization if you really want to call it that and at the back of every pad of paper that I write in I will start a page about what’s working and a little bit stuck as long as I’m not super emotional.
The super emotional I got to deal with it on those other ways but now I’m almost back in neutral. Now I can sit down and start writing down what’s working in the situation and by time, I’ve gotten 10 or 12 things. First thing, my mind is back forward, focused, excited again, I’m clear again about what needs to be done. I’m really able to focus again which is really back to clarity of the goal if you will, so that’s just the piece I would like to add on that. Okay go ahead.
Jerry: This is Jerry again if I can just add if you really want a testimonial on that point that I had brought up. Read this book “Leadership Made Simple” because it’s all about focusing forward and that to me is the best tool out there that help people understand what needs to happen, so I’d highly recommend that to our listeners this morning.
Ed: Thank you, I appreciate that.
That was the end of one of the questions and answers in the webinar. My next post will contain another question and the answers. I plan to publish this series of posts every two days.
You can find more leadership ideas at my web site:
http://www.enleadership.com/lmd/lmd_dmil.html
Best Regards,
Ed Oakley