Operating In The Midst of A Global Pandemic & Economic Uncertainty

“Operations is the heart of any company”, writes Ram Charan in his book, Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times (McGraw Hill, 2009). “This is where the work gets done, and it is where the most fundamental changes will occur as your company adapts to the new circumstances and re-creates itself to become stronger in the future.” Charan points out that during times of economic uncertainty “the goals are common: lower operating costs, efficient use of resources, low working capital, and conservation of cash, along with the usual demands to meet customers’ need for quality and on-time delivery.”

As we plan for the future, leaders of service companies face some unique challenges. For them, their employees are “their engine of production and often deliver that production on a just-in-time basis.” While managing cash and cash flow are mission critical to their short and long term success, there are two other critical challenges for service organizations, namely “organizational capacity utilization and motivation.” As Charan explains, “Your people are your machinery and the term capacity utilization refers to how busy those people are.” Charan recommends we staff operations “commensurate with the need for customer service.”

I think one challenge is that as we staff for customer service we have to recognize that in the middle of a global pandemic and a time period of economic uncertainty, the capacity of staff to just keeping pushing forward through shift after shift, and day after day is limited. Burn-out is real, and there is little time for recharge, because all our normal coping systems have been disrupted. Furthermore, employees’ worries about health and family are mentally time consuming and always present. Therefore, we as leaders need to be mindful of the capacity of our staff to sustain excellent customer service. We are in a marathon more than a sprint.

Charan points out that motivation is the second challenge that demands the attention of leaders within service companies during times of economic uncertainty. He notes that it is very easy for staff to become “utterly demoralized” by the on-going challenges around uncertainty. As he continues, “… people need to feel that they are being treated equitably.” He encourages leaders of service organizations to communicate constantly with their staff and to focus on ways to keep morale high.

I agree 100% with his recommendations about communication and morale. As we continue to move through these most unusual times, I believe leaders need to update staff frequently, listen thoughtfully to their concerns and fears, and carefully explain what are the short and long term plans that the company is making and executing given the challenges before us all. When leaders are managing the intensity of the service work in a respectful and attentive manner, all involved can make realistic choices within a volatile environment

As Charan writes, “… your people need you to be present with them in the foxhole. Your grasp of reality is useless if you can’t bring the rest of your organization to understand it and act on it, and you cannot do this with memos and proclamations alone. You have to be interactive - listening as well as explaining, answering questions, taking the conversation to the next level, and then doing it again and again. Your people will be inspired not by stirring words as much as by seeing firsthand that you have put reality on the table and have a plan for addressing it decisively, as a team.”

These are challenging times and adaptation is required of all of us. When we start from a foundation of respect, integrity and teamwork, we will have the capacity to survive, thrive and ultimately learn from the experience. “You may encounter many defeats,” writes the late Maya Angelou, “but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” 

Now is our time to rise and stand together. One day, we will get through this. Meanwhile, we must be mindful of what is most important in the process.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

How do leaders transform day to day operations? - part #2

Given what I shared last week, today I want to dive deeply into how to successfully transform day to day operations.

First, leaders transform the internal architecture and culture of the company. As General Stanley McChrystal, with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell wrote in their book, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement For A Complex World, Portfolio/Penguin, 2015: “To win we had to change. Surprisingly, that change was less about tactics or new technology than it was about internal architecture and culture of our force - in other words, our approach to management.” 

We need to recognize as leaders that if you want to transform day to day operations then you need to have developed a transformative strategy based on an understanding that status quo, i.e. the current business model, is dangerous. As part of this work, we need to examine whether the organizational chart is designed for growth and transformation. Many times the organizational chart is the source of the problem rather than the strategy.  I am seeing more and more companies organization around the following categories: mission fulfillment, mission support, mission innovation, and mission advancement & advocacy. 

As I write the above, I hear John Kotter’s voice from his book, Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility For A Faster-Moving World, Harvard Business Review Press, 2014. As he wrote, “Great urgency that drives people in a dozen different directions achieves nothing. The energy that is at the core of accelerated action and dual operating systems is an aligned energy.” I believe aligned energy begins with personal alignment, i.e. our thoughts, words and deeds all line up. Once this is happening, then we can focus on alignment at the  organizational level, i.e. systems and process that create personal clarity, cultural clarity, and community connections.

Second, develop a shared mindset on your team. The first prerequisite to doing this level of work is to put people in leadership positions who have the capacity, i.e. mindset and skill set, to transform the organization. Furthermore, we need to remember that management is not leadership. As Kotter continues in the aforementioned book, “Management is a set of well-known processes that help organizations produce reliable, efficient, and predictable results.

Leadership is about setting direction. It’s about creating a vision, empowering and inspiring people to want to achieve the vision, and enabling them to do so with energy and speed through an effective strategy. In its most basic sense, leadership is about mobilizing a group of people to jump into a better future.”

The second prerequisite to building a shared mindset on a team is to put people in leadership positions with relational skill sets who can truly join a team. Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson explore this in their article called “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams” by Harvard Business Review, November 2007. As they explain, good team leaders and team players can invest time and energy into building and maintaining social relationships throughout the organization,  model collaborative behavior, and coach people about why establishing and maintaining healthy relationships is important.

Third, create and maintain a gardener’s approach. Back to General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell. Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement For A Complex World, Portfolio/Penguin, 2015 where they wrote: “The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing…. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an “Eyes-On, Hands-Off” enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.”

Since the early 90’s, I have taught and coached executives that the best leaders are “Gardeners Of Trust.” They recognize and understand that the followers place their trust in us when we seek to improve or transform an organization. Remember that there are three levels to trust as outlined by  Robert Galford and Anne Seibold Drapeau in their article called "The Enemies of Trust" by, Harvard Business Review, February 2003. Here is a quick review:

-  organizational trust where people trust not any individual but in the company itself.

- strategic trust where people trust the team that is running the show to make the right strategic decisions.

- personal trust where people trust their managers to make the right decisions.

This week review the internal architecture and culture of the company to see what may need to be realigned, and then begin the process of building a shared mindset on your team.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

How do leaders transform day to day operations? - part #1

It started one day when I was coaching the CEO. This individual and their team had stepped back from day to day issues, and had looked at the bigger picture. From the various detailed pieces of information they had explored, the team decided that an organizational transformation was the necessary and right choice of action. Therefore, with great thought and reflection, they created a focused strategy, and a solid level of urgency throughout the middle management team.

However, over time while they could “execute” the plan well and roll out many initiatives, it was not resulting in a transformation of the day to day operations. Tactical issues at the local level kept trumping strategic changes and transformations. The senior team felt they were playing the whack a mole game. Overall, there was limited progress.

So, on the day I was coaching the CEO, this all came pouring out. After all the details had been shared, the CEO asked me the following question: How do leaders transform day to day operations?

While we all have worked hard in our thoughtful planning and careful roll-out of change initiatives, sometimes transformative strategic plans never really change  day to day observations. In specific, we forget something that Ron Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky wrote in their book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, Harvard Business Press, 2009: “The reality is that any social system ... is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way.”

First, the ground level truth is that most people do not want day to day operations to change. They like status quo just the way it is even if it is a dysfunctional status quo and not workable moving forward. As the old timers say, "the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know."

Second, we need to remember there is a difference between complicated changes, which requires a great effort and timely tracking and measuring but ultimately results in predictable outcomes, and complex change, which requires a great effort and timely tracking and measuring but ultimately results in unpredictable outcomes. The former is the typical approach by many leaders, but it often is the later that is actually happening.

Our goal as leaders during the next two to three years is to deal with complicated and complex change better, to develop personal and organizational resilience, to create the ability to continually and organically adapt, plus learn how to reconfigure our organizations in order to confront the unknown.

While transforming day to day operations is not easy, it still is important. The first step is to understand that most people do not want change or transformation to take place, and that some of the work is complicated and other elements are complex.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

Transforming Day to Day Operations

Although no one in a leadership position wants to admit it, sometimes the best strategic plans do not really change day to day operations. The problem as Ron Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky in their book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (Harvard Business Press, 2009) note is the following: “The reality is that any social system [i.e. tactical operations] … is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way.”

The reality is that most people who do day to day work do not want day to day operations to change. They like status quo just the way it is, even if it is a dysfunctional status quo. As one person shared with me a recently, “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.”

General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell in their book called Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement For A Complex World (Portfolio/Penguin, 2015) explored the subject of transforming day to day operations when combatting Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in 2004. While it looked on the surface like a traditional insurgency, under the surface AQI operated unlike anything they had seen before. In place of a traditional hierarchy, AQI took the form of a dispersed network that proved devastatingly effective against the United States military’s objectively more qualified force. As they wrote, “To win we had to change. Surprisingly, that change was less about tactics or new technology than it was about internal architecture and culture of our force - in other words, our approach to management.”

We will be exploring this subject and many more on September 21 - 22, 2016 during the upcoming Fall 2016 From Vision to Action Executive Roundtable at the Coralville Marriott Hotel and Conference Center in Coralville, Iowa. 

Here is the overall agenda for your review:

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

- 8:30 am - Arrival & Visiting Time

- 9:00 am - 10:15 am - How do leaders transform day to day operations?

- 10:15 am - 10:30 am - Break

- 10:30 am - 12:00 pm - How do leaders know if they have the “right people on the right seats of the bus”?

- 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm - Lunch & Networking 

- 1:30 pm - 2:45 pm - How do leaders create an understanding of a problem and buy-in for the solution?

- 2:45 pm - 3:00 pm - Break

- 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm - How do leaders create a team during times of high turnover?

- 4:30 pm - Adjourn

Thursday, September 22, 2016

- 9:00 am - 10:15 am - How do leaders cope with prolonged uncertainty and having too much to do?

- 10:30 am - 12:00 pm - Integration and Application

- 12:00 pm - Adjourn

If you and your team are interested in participating, here is the link to the registration form:

http://www.chartyourpath.com/pdf/2016-From-Vision-To-Action-Exec-Roundtable-Regist.pdf

I hope you will join me and many other business leaders as we explore how to transform day to day operations. Given all that is happening in the world at this time period, we, as leaders, can not afford to create strategic plans that do not actually transform day to day operations. 

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

The Connection Between Strategic Direction and Day to Day Operations

These days some people in leadership and management positions are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. They have not a clue of where they are going and what they should be focused on. Still, they are very busy and very intense.

The best middle managers I have meet are the exact opposite. They are grounded and they are clear. They know where they are going and they know what are their priorities. This happens because they are clear about the connection between strategic direction and day to day operations.

In the world of operations, good managers are focused on their existing customer base and they communicate clearly to their front line service supervisors and employees about what needs to be done when it comes to product delivery and service support. They also make sure the supply chain is focused on supporting the sales force and the on-time delivery of products. They know they need to consistently improve what already exists as this is the cash generating part of the business. 

Between managing the current budget and resources, these managers improve behaviors related to production and service delivery. This may involve the development of better skills, structure, goals, and systems in order to improve the ways we serve existing customers. This is the sole focus of day to day work.

On the other hand, they can also help prepare the organization for the market of tomorrow, i.e. the strategic direction. Here, as much as possible, they assist in on-boarding the next generation of high growth opportunities that are already in the R&D pipeline. They also focus on closing the gaps between current competitive strengths and tomorrow’s competitive requirements. Building new core competencies in alignment with the strategic direction is important work.

One way they manage the challenge of day to day operations vs. strategic level work is their ability to clarify priorities. Many years ago, the late Stephen Covey wrote a book called First Things First. In it, he offered a successful approach to time management which described a framework for prioritizing work that is aimed at long-term goals, at the expense of tasks that appear to be urgent, but are in fact less important. In his four square model, classifying tasks as urgent and non-urgent is on one axis, and important or non-important is on the other axis. His quadrant 2 has the items that are non-urgent but important. These are the ones he believes we are likely to neglect; but, should focus on to achieve effectiveness. Here is a link for more details about this approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Things_First_(book)

When we as managers are clear about the connection between day to day operations and strategic direction, then we can be more effective and efficient in all we do.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257