Getting Through Adversity June 17, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Adversity, Best Of 2009, Leadership, Management Skills
2 comments
The current recession has generated countless articles and blog postings on leadership during tough times. I’ve been hit with surveys on the topic, as well as innumerable offers for seminars and courses to help me through these times. All of these offers, articles, and surveys have the same approach: how to cut back, do more with less, and still maintain productivity in spite of limited resources.
This is not another one of those articles.
Leading in difficult times is not about making your budget work. It’s not about figuring out who to let go, or which project to cancel, or how to adjust ROI to reflect the new austerity. Those things are important, but they are all part of managing during difficult times. We’re supposed to know how to do these things. If you can’t, what are you doing in charge? Anyone can succeed in good times; if you can’t manage in bad times, what can you manage?
Leading in tough times is about getting your people through the tough times. The tight budget, the reduced projects, the smaller staff all result in stressed, nervous people. They worry about their jobs and their families. They look for any small sign that something is wrong. Even small things get blown out of proportion, resulting in rumors and distractions.
Our job is to keep that from happening. Leaders make sure their people are secure, informed, and as comfortable as possible. We need to project confidence and competence. Our people need to know that a steady hand is on the tiller and that things are being managed correctly.
If we appear nervous or unsure in difficult times, our people will reflect that back to us. If we are calm and collected, they’ll pick up on that as well. While our situation is often not our choice, our attitude is. We need to choose wisely every day.
The best way to keep our team calm and sure is to communicate with them, all the time, in things large and small. Don’t mislead them. Don’t sugar-coat bad news. Offer your honest opinions on the situation and help them understand what you are doing and how they will be affected. This isn’t easy, but every good leader needs to learn these skills.
The current downturn may not end for a while. Your team’s ability to succeed in spite of the situation has nothing to do with how you manage in the current climate. It’s all about how you lead them through it. What are you doing to lead them to the better days ahead?
Scheduling Formal Fun June 12, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Leadership, Management Skills, Morale, Teams
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When I inherited my current team, they had gone through an exercise in self-management wherein they formed various committees to address and improve different aspects of their work life. These teams looked into things like meeting etiquette, time management, and internal training. Many of these teams identified a problem, solved it, and eventually disbanded. But one team, the most important one, has lasted for years. That team is the Fun Committee.
All of our people work hard, especially in these times of tight budgets. Long hours, tough projects, and high expectations put our people under stress that can tear a team apart. The best way to alleviate that stress is to blow off some steam and have some fun with your coworkers. My group thinks that this is so important that it cannot be left to chance. Thus the Fun Committee was born, to make sure we have fun on a regular basis.
It may seem odd to formally schedule something that should happen spontaneously. But if you don’t plan to have fun, you rarely will. We get so caught up in our jobs that we won’t take time to relax a bit and enjoy each other’s company.
The events planned by the Fun Committee are not elaborate. They provide a collective birthday cake each month, which takes all of thirty minutes. There is typically an annual Halloween costume contest in the fall, and a Strawberry Festival each spring. There are occasional unannounced events, drawing everyone to the break room for some small treat on the spur of the moment.
Even though these events are small, they bring our whole group together for a specifically non-business event. We socialize a bit, celebrate the moment as needed, and return to our work a bit more energized. We’ve come to expect these events, and they are a positive component of our team culture.
Most teams enjoy getting together and having these moments, but many groups never seem to make them happen. Without a formal approach to scheduling fun, time slips away and the events never occur. People regret not doing more with their group, but rarely act to change things.
I didn’t create the Fun Committee, but I have certainly come to appreciate what they do and I’d hate to see the Fun Committee disband. That’s the best part: the committee is self-sustaining. People stay on for a period of time and then rotate off, to be replaced by others. The committee manages this process, and I’ve never been called on to keep the team alive. It is truly on its own, sustained by the common desire to keep that social bond strong in the group.
As leaders, team morale is as much our responsibility as anything else. How do you build and maintain morale in your group? Do you have a Fun Committee? Do you need one?
I Can Help! May 29, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Customer Service, Management Skills, Users
5 comments
My mother tells the story of a friend who was caught in a power outage. The line for her house was down,keeping her from getting power even as other parts of town were being restored. Repeated calls to the power company had no effect as they busied themselves with other, more important areas.
Finally, in frustration, she called the power company and asked them to cancel the service call. “Why?” they asked. She explained that she knew they were very busy, dealing with all those other customers. Her husband, she said, was very handy, and was headed outside with a ladder to reconnect the drop line himself. They were aghast. “Don’t let you husband touch those lines!” “Oh, no,” she assured them. “It’s OK. We just want to help out, and this way you can send your people to fix other houses instead.”
A truck roared up in five minutes, and her power was restored.
At some point, every organization is a service organization, focused on internal or external customers. As we try to provide “fair” service, it can be easy to lose sight of one or two customers who warrant our attention even though they may not be as big or as important as other customers. What seems fair to us can seem completely unjust to those who are on the wrong side of the decision. That leads to frustration that forces customers to threaten unusual behavior to get our attention.
As we manage with limited resources, we need to keep in mind that every customer is equally important. While it may impossible to serve everyone at once, we need to find creative ways to serve everyone a little bit. The vast majority of customers are fair-minded; when they see that everyone is getting some measure of service, they tend to recognize that we’re doing the best we can in a tough situation.
This goes beyond IT issues like fixing PCs and resolving system errors. Some of us may be faced with allocating scarce products among competing customers. Others may have legal work or audits to be done under tight deadlines with limited personnel. It’s easy to tell everyone to just wait their turn as we honestly work to get to each customer as quickly as we can. In these days of instant gratification and rapid responses to everything, we need to find ways to provide a little bit of service to everyone, just so they know we understand their needs and are working to meet them.
This kind of incremental service isn’t easy and sometimes requires a complete rethinking of how we tackle problems. It may not always be necessary; sometimes we’re blessed with enough resources to take care of everyone at once. But we all need these skills when times get tight. If not, we’ll have customers reaching for live wires, and that causes problems that are a lot harder to solve.
A Quiet Place May 13, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Leadership, Management Skills, Planning
4 comments
Leaders get pulled in a thousand directions. No matter where you sit in the org chart, you are being pulled by those above and those below. From above, requests for status and things to do; from below, a need for guidance and clarification. There is little time to think; you need to be ready to respond at a moment’s notice, and you need to be right every time.
Truth be told, I thrive in this kind of world. I like the pull, the energy, the constant change, and the challenge of not dropping the ball. For an ADD mind like mine, constant change feeds my natural need for distraction. If the world did not present distractions, I’d have to create them.
Nonetheless, everyone needs to time to think. When that time comes, it can be almost impossible to stop the distractions (self-induced or externally imposed) and find an extended block of time for concentrated thought. For leaders, these blocks of time are crucial for pulling all the pieces together and thinking strategically. Tactical thinking thrives on distraction (solve this problem now!); strategic thinking thrives on solitude and focus (what will we be doing years from now?).
How do you find time to think? I cannot find the time at the office or even at home; there is always something, either self-inflicted or from someone else, that demands my attention and pulls me away from a quiet moment. Instead, I think best in the noisiest activity available to me: while I cut the grass.
The overwhelming cacophony of the mower shuts out everything else in the world. Coupled with the iPod plugged into my ears, I am absolutely oblivious to any outside stimulus, to the point that my wife often has to throw things at me to get my attention while I’m mowing. The simple repetitive act of going back and forth across the yard occupies a large part of my brain that would otherwise be engaged in ADD-related activity. The end result is that my mind is truly freed to engage in long-term thinking and problem-solving.
The other nice thing about lawn-mowing is that it has to happen every week, rain or shine. As a result, I get consistent thinking time on a regular basis. Were it not for the relentless growth of the grass, I know that I would never put so much time on my schedule just for thinking. In fact, I can feel the loss of that time in the winter, when I don’t get the chance to think as much.
I’m not recommending that everyone turn to lawn care as their preferred deep-thought environment. What I am suggesting is that we all need to find some way to create a deep-thinking place, and we need to go there on a regular basis.
It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day stuff and neglect our strategic focus. Successful leadership requires strategic thinking that can only occur in self-imposed solitude. How you find that solitude is up to you, depending on your personality and psyche. Finding that time, however, is not optional and is crucial to your success as a leader.
The Effective CIO 