You’re going through the most challenging situation you’ve faced in your career. Mistakes surround you. Morale is low. Revenue is missing projections. Your team, your organization is depending on you. What do you do?
It’s painful. Sometimes it’s not fair – it’s not your fault. The team has not been resourced properly. Certain team members aren’t pulling their weight. You have to do something!
Whatever you do, make sure you don’t make these 3 mistakes:
1. Share the pain
I’ve seen this disastrous mistake made over and over in business, in non-profits, in ministry, in higher education. Sharing the pain always leads to more pain.
Across the board pay cuts don’t work – because, along with cutting the pay of your low performers, you’re cutting the pay of your top performers. And what affect do you think that’s going to have on performance and your bottom line?
No long-term good will result from sharing the pain. So call it what it is – it’s either laziness or fear. Someone was either too lazy to figure out the real problem or they know what the problem is and they’re afraid to deal with it. So they cut everywhere. Everything. Everybody. And it won’t work.
If you have to cut, cut strategically. Take down what’s not working. Cut low performing products and services. Cut low performing personnel. But don’t ever give in to the temptation to share the pain!
Remember, you get what you reward. And rewarding top performers by sharing the pain of lazy, lethargic leadership won’t turn out well.
2. Anecdotal decision-making
You’ve been doing your job a long time – longer than most. You know what it takes to grow. And you know your market. So you make the recommendation to the team. In doing so, you know there’s no actual data – at least none other than your gut and your experience.
To be fair – we’ve all done it. Many times.
My dear friend – anecdotal evidence is not good enough. Not anymore. What got you here will not get you there. The world and your audience have become far too complex to shoot from the hip.
Furthermore, your people are trading substantial portions of their lives to serve your organization. Are they trading it for something that’s worthwhile? If your work is worthwhile, then make the well-founded decisions that your work and your team deserves.
Anecdotal decision-making will take you in circles. Weeks from now you’ll be right back at the table with the same people dealing with this same issue. And they’re not going to like it. So handle it fully today.
Develop a culture of making sound decisions based on market research and actionable data. If you don’t have the data, slow down long enough to collect it. Create systems and processes that support a data-guided culture. And keep it simple – great systems are simple. Just don’t give in to lazy or fearful decision-making.
3. Get in a hurry
This is a tough one if you’re task-oriented and growth-oriented – like me. Never forget, you have your entire life to do your life’s work. Your vision – your huge, daunting, compelling vision for your work, your team, your organization, your industry – is just not going to happen overnight. So accept that fact and quit reacting!
If you’re not committed to a lifetime of service with your current organization or team, then reevaluate where you are. If you have to, leave. And if your team isn’t what it needs to be, make changes. Just don’t do it in a hurry.
John Wesley once said,
I am always in haste but never in a hurry; because I never attempt that which I cannot accomplish in calmness of spirit.
Be purposeful and passionate – but slow down. Enjoy the journey. Love your team!
If you want to reach the mountain peaks in your life and work, lead your team to consider these 4 disciplines:
Understand, Develop, Create & Manage
- Understand how their work fits into their overall life. Leading them to create a personal life plan is a great way to get them started. Check out my post, Your Life Matters, for a link to a free eBook and tool for creating a life plan.
- Develop a vision for their work. For their career, for their position, for the team, for the organization. Let them decide. I’ve written an eBook, Creating Your Business Vision, which explains each of these types of vision. You can read more about it here – download it free to work through it with your team.
- Create specific plans for accomplishing the vision. Review and evaluate them regularly – at least quarterly. To get the results you desire, you must get very specific.
- Effectively manage priorities and decisions. It’s tempting to spend all your time managing priorities and decisions – scheduling meetings, responding to needs and email, improving efficiency and effectiveness. Yet if you don’t understand how your work fits into your life, if you don’t have a business vision, if you haven’t written out specific business plans, you’ll have to deal with the same problems over and over again.
Question: What other mistakes have you seen organizations make in tough times? How did they turn out? Share in the comments.
When businesses respond to tough times by going into flight-survival mode, they inevitably crash and burn. This is never the right response.
One aspect of “share the pain:” if you are the one setting your own take-home, then there needs to be an objective measure that shows whether or not you deserve to share the pain. I’ve seen this in both corporate and non-profit (church) situations: under the heading of “compensating top-performers” the boss himself got a raise while nearly everyone else either took a cut or had to forego raises due to economic issues. Since he was the one who subjectively determined who was a “top performer” it really did more to engender bitterness and morale drops. Many of the the rest of us were doing all we knew to do–maybe we didn’t know enough to do, but we were at the max of training and workload, all assigned by the person approving his own raises while cutting our compensation.
So there’s a place for sharing the pain–or, at the very least, do not trumpet that you are feeling no pain while your organization is feeling it.
Wow! That would be a tough situation. Thanks for sharing it.
Great leaders serve – in this situation a great leader would, at a minimum, suspend a personal pay raise until the organization is out of the woods. And look for opportunities to serve the team.
I think those situations have a tendency to crop up more when leadership is dysfunctional–and when we’re young and desperate, there’s a great tendency to think working for a dysfunctional leader will still work out for you.
I’ve reached a point that I realize now that this is not true–I’ve learned some interesting things the past 15 years in corporate and ministry working for some leaders that were there because of their position or even because an influential person put them in a spot they were unqualified for. That person either could not admit or could not correct the mistake–some rules protect those that should not be protected.
I’ve detoured on to a path that has me on my own to hone my skills as a leader rather than keep banging my head against the dysfunctional ones I was working for. Risks are different, but the rewards are better. At the very least, the stress is much, much more worth having. The mistakes I have to correct are my own instead of someone else’s!
But meanwhile, I have a decade and a half of negative example to borrow from.
Love your attitude Doug. Keep growing.
I appreciate your feedback and encouragement. Let me know how I can serve you.
Keep writing good stuff 🙂
I’m a bit isolated out here, so a good blog or two helps me a lot.
Thanks my friend. Blogs make the world smaller.
I like your point about it being a life long journey. We need to remember to take time to smell the roses and to invest in others journeys as well. It’s not all about me, it’s about relationships.
Absolutely – something I have to work on daily. Thanks my friend.
Me too. To give of ourselves takes constant vigilance because it is so easy to grow selfish, even when doing good things.
Ending quality vendor relationships in search of “cheaper”. If they are a valued partner, then weather the storm with them.
That’s a good one too Cory – tough for fiscal conservatives. 😉 Thanks for sharing my friend.
Good thoughts. I believe that some level of desperation is healthy – its a natural part of doing what you love and doing it with passion. How you manage the desperation is another story – when we get in a hurry, we’re bound for trouble. :/
I’ve found sharing too little or too much to be a problem.
Sometimes when you share too little information the rumor mill starts running. Employees start to theorize on what is going on and how it’s going to affect them.
Sharing too much can be a bad thing as well. People then KNOW the company is going down the drain or cuts are coming.
You need to find that right balance of too much and too little to share.
I agree Joe. I experienced the same challenges. Making the effort to know and understand the culture of the team and organization goes a long way in this area. Often there’s some trial and error involved. Thanks buddy.