Artikel von alex

…has much more impact on people than we often think they would or wouldn’t.

Here’s another “airport story” that - at least for my part - proved one of our beliefs to be true: they way you phrase something - the worst or best news - can change a person’s day quite a bit.

Here we are, coming in late with one flight, boarding for the next flight already starting when we’re not even on the bus to the terminal yet. One woman next to me gets really nervous and asks the bus driver if she even has the lightest chance to catch her connection. The bus driver remains calm, asks her about her gate and then says that she shouldn’t worry since it’s really just up the stairs and a few yards and she’ll make that distance within a few minutes. One could see that she was still worried, but feeling slightly better since the bus driver was showing a very positive attitude and encouraged her to not worry.

A few minutes later - my next flight was basically about to leave when I got off the bus - I asked the Lufthansa assistant whether I was able to catch that flight or if she had some advice. The only comment she made was “run up the stairs and ask at the other desk, they’ll be able to tell you more”. I felt like an idiot, not only disappointed about the poor customer service, but also about the lack of “mental support”, felt a sudden drain of my energy, frustration and no desire to head up the stairs and run like a goof through the terminals; I’d never make it to my flight…;  due to my responsibilities though, I couldn’t afford to miss the flight and started to run, arrived breathless at the gate and just made it to the plane.

While starting to relax and breathe deeply again in my seat, I thought about what just happened and realized, how happy that other woman must have been to just hear some encouraging words (even if she didn’t make it to the plane or had to walk at a faster pace to the next gate). She had at least much more of that positive spirit and energy in her, with a great deal of hope that she’ll reach her destination.

It’s so important how you approach people, how you tell them critical things, how you inform them about sad or bad issuess, how you can still generate some positive energy within the worst situation.

I guess it was not so much another tough week of work - which is a constant factor anyway in the restructuring, M&A business - but it’s much more the fact that this week has gone underneath my skin, and I deeply felt sorry for the scene that some top level management was trying to “manage”.

It was once again one of those tight-deadlines, everybody-working-their-buds-off type of project, implementation of some new, yet standard piece of software. As the software development partner already previously hasn’t shown great understanding nor respect of us as customers, nor proven any sense of business partnership approach, has regularly missed deadlines and constantly kept arguing against our requirements and inquiries, I had a feeling that also this upcoming project would go down the drain.

Management - against my advice - thought that, since it’s such a simple piece to implement and only 6 workers would be involved in the new process and technology - we wouldn’t have to start testing a few days prior to go live but one to a max of 1.5 days would be more than enough.

hmmm, and there we went…Tuesday came, nothing set in stone, Wednesday came, again no signs of some more activity and software testing, Wednesday evening came and suddenly the ball started rolling. Doubts rose that the software partner might not have done his job, Thursday came and we asked the software engineer to come on site. By Thursday evening it was clear that neither they had done their job, nor had the internal staff been well prepared. By Friday morning, it was nothing but a stressful case. The workers didn’t know what was going on, management was trying to save their project but realized that they made a huge mistake, the software partner was the one who cared least (having been able to charge at least 2 days worth of consulting fees). The project was cancelled shortly after lunch-time on Friday. The (late) training/instruction session was cancelled at the minute, workers who pushed their week-end planning off till next week-end were left with neither new technology, nor any positive outlook for the next few weeks. All the energy they invested in the project during the past few weeks suddenly burst like a bubble.

There was nothing more painful and worse in the failure of this project than such lack of respect towards the workforce, towards a customer - both top management and business partner missed out on the most important value in business: the value of relationships up and down the ladder, the value of respect, the value of the contribution people make either physically or emotionally.

Next time you pick up a project, make sure you remember those points - you’ll see your project succeed and happy faces move on if you hold on to the very basic values you probably already honored as a child in your family.

Building the Next Generation Company: Innovation, Talent, Excellence

While Obama is certainly the most important person people pay attention to at the moment and watch closely, there are so many others out there who do great things and remain strong, confident and full of leadership charisma in troubled times like these. Anyone who owns a business, anyone who needs to feed his children and care for his/her family, anyone who feels socially responsible for what’s happening around him, anyone of those people is on the move, is speaking up, is trying to improve things in little steps.

Here’s an example how companies that had been hit seriously several times, still believe in the “we can”:

While the ongoing world economic crisis has left many business leaders sweating (or worse), John Chambers, President and CEO of Cisco Systems, is rolling up his sleeves in anticipation of an eventual recovery. After every economic challenge, he says during his recent visit at MIT, Cisco has come out with dramatic gains in market share. This time won’t be different, if Chambers’ bets pay off.

Watch the video >>

Just like Obama stood up for the American people, inspired them with simple words and a feeling of true understanding, willingness to communicate, to respect, to trust each other, no matter which social level one belongs to, we believe that we can and will change the leadership culture in the upcoming months and years. We will have just as powerful partners next to us, with the same goal and the same drive and enthusiasm to create a better, more sustainable corporate world, we will have the media look upon us worldwide, taking our thoughts and concepts - the very basics of great leadership - far beyond of what we personally could ever reach.

Especially in times of crisis, highly unstable markets, unsecured social and financial support, people need more than just a lumpsum of money to survive the upcoming months. They need to become self-confident again, believe in themselves, in partnerships, in teamwork, they need to go back to the roots, identify and appreciate basic values again, and build their life - professional and private - on those. That’s when they will have found solid grounds of sustainability, security and power.

A recent article on BBC caught my attention as it underlines, once again - that authentic leadership skills are the basis to any successful organization, even in times of worst crisis.

Even “simple” skills like listening and open communication are rarely found in board rooms. As described by Mr. Baker in his article, most Wall Street bosses didn’t know that trouble was brewing, confirmed by the fact that 58% of workers with “bully” bosses  don’t speak openly with their bosses and also claim that their bosses wouldn’t listen anyway, even if they did speak up.

While European tradition too often calls for those “tough, bully” managers because they seem to push things ahead, research and examples of leading highly profitable organizations show, that the “kind” type of manager with a social attitude and great leadership skills are much more successful and achieve superior results.

Baker outlines, that companies with the “new generation of “kind bosses” reflect high productivity, happy employees, more creative problem solving and better bottom lines. Witness companies like Google, Eileen Fisher, Pitney Bowes, Smuckers, Rodale and hundreds of others.

“Kind” bosses are not doormats - nice guys/women who are walked over by their employees. Rather, they conduct themselves like respectful, knowledgeable “parents” having qualities like compassion, integrity and clear boundaries.

In the current financial meltdown, although many of these “kind” bosses will be stressed to the maximum, their style will allow them to institute layoffs in a respectful and compassionate manner and rally those people around and underneath him to initiate and lead corporate change without compromise.

Under correct leadership whole workforces can be made to feel like a family and willingly tighten their personal belts if top management does the same. And I believe that managers who want to successfully lead through turmoil, need more “soft” than “hard” skills to be able to stay on board and deal with the worst.

In my role as turnaround and M&A consultant, daily confrontation with critical situations is a constant factor: financial disasters, and companies going down the drain for quite some time, dealing with problems due to consolidation or spin-off. There isn’t really anything that would get one of us interim managers out of focus or off track – we are used to dealing with difficult times, used to managing a (large) group of people with different objectives in life, with people who are full of fear (about what’s coming up next), people who simply can’t handle change very well.
Now – do we define difficult times as a “crisis” or is it rather a matter of managers’ state of mind, lack of required leadership skills and a mix of poor market research and related corporate strategy?
I’d like to briefly refer to the description of crisis by the Institute of Crisis Management (http://www.crisisexperts.com/) in the US, which I think very accurately reflects my thoughts: 

“A significant business disruption that stimulates extensive news media coverage. The resulting public scrutiny will affect the organization’s normal operations and also could have a political, legal, financial and governmental impact on its business.”

The basic causes of a business crisis are four in number:

1. Acts of God (storms, earthquakes, volcanic action, etc)
2. Mechanical problems (ruptured pipes, metal fatigue, etc.)
3. Human errors (the wrong valve was opened, miscommunication about what to do, etc.)
4. Management decisions/indecision (the problem is not serious, nobody will find out)

Most of the crises ICM has studied fall in the last category and are the result of management not taking action when they were informed about a problem that eventually would grow into a crisis.

As far as I have noticed during many of my assignments, most of the critical situations are NOT caused by market-related issues, but much more driven by internal problems – the character and management style of the leading team, the lack of internal communication power, the way a vision is lived and moved forward in daily business.