Traveling Light Blog

You’re probably in great standing with your boss, but with the economy so tight, many people have been telling me they’re nervous about their jobs and they want to be sure they’re picking up the signals, if there are any being sent.

Interestingly, this is one area in which I do not advise clients to listen to your “gut feelings” because I find that employees often fill in the empty blanks with the worst possible scenario when it really isn’t so bad.

Instead, start by looking for the clues that you have fallen into poor standing with your boss:

1. You have less access than your peers. While their requests for time with the boss result in a meeting, yours are turned into an email thread or ignored.

2. Your boss begins to avoid eye contact. For some bosses, it’s difficult to maintain eye contact for long when they know they need to have a difficult conversation with a subordinate. Some bosses don’t make much eye contact in the first place, so what’s important to notice here is not the sheer volume of eye contact, but rather the relative volume of eye contact. If it’s less than it used to be, it’s a sign.

3. You are no longer tapped for important projects. As with Sign #2, it’s essential to look at this from a relative point of view. If your department isn’t getting any essential projects, the department is the problem, and you’d best be looking to get out of there and go where the action is. However, if key projects are still coming in, but they are going to your peers, it’s not a good sign.

4. Responses to your ideas take on a needlessly negative tone, with phrases such as, “You need to understand that I’m trying to run a business here,” which implies that somehow you are oblivious to the fact that you work for a business.

5. Your boss tells you that you need to work on a few things. The odds of this happening outside of a mandatory annual performance review, sadly, are quite low.

I often see even the toughest of bosses shy away from direct feedback, so don’t assume that you’re getting it. If it’s been a while since you’ve had a performance discussion with your boss, ask for one.

It’s no guarantee that you’ll get back in good standing, but it’s better than letting the problem go, living with the endless stress, and either slipping into an unsatisfying role or losing your job altogether. In tough economic times, it is particularly important to show your willingness to take tough feedback and work hard to improve.

As you read this, I’m attending a professional development seminar on internet marketing with my assistant, Janet Smith. With both of us out of the office, please forgive me if my replies to calls and emails are not quite as quick as usual. We’re deep in a meeting room in sunny L.A., grateful for the learning, but also yearning to enjoy the sun!

While I paid for this seminar well in advance, I wouldn’t hesitate to sign up and pay for it right now, in the middle of this terrible economy. One of the biggest mistakes I made during the last recession was to under-invest in my professional development.

Ironic, isn’t it, considering that I’m in the professional development business? I’m reminded of the cobbler’s children who have no shoes. I was relatively new to consulting, having re-entered the profession two years earlier during the heady days of the dot-com boom, when all any of us did was work, work, work. After the bubble burst, I was feeling my way and learning by trial and error, filled with uncertainty and scared to death.

As a result of my under-investment in professional development during that stressful time, I suffered from burn-out and even fell behind for a while on the latest developments in leadership and management. When I finally allowed myself to invest in my development again, I was like a woman coming out of the desert into an oasis, just gulping down the water and filled with happiness and relief.

Professional development is essential. If you can’t swing the same investment in professional development that you had last year, focus your development and get creative to make sure you keep it going.

For reminders on how to do this at the organizational level, read my article, “The Five Best Ways to Improve Your Organization During a Recession” available at here.

Are you feeling the squeeze? With so many companies bracing for a recession, leaders find themselves under pressure to stop investing in organizational improvements. But we all know that acting rashly causes problems. Morale goes down, and when the economy improves, you’ve got to start over from scratch.

It amazes me how otherwise rational leaders will just start hacking away at an itty bitty leadership development or training budget with more attention than they devote to other operational expenses 20, 30, or 100 times higher.

Here are five ways you can intelligently s-t-r-e-t-c-h that development investment during a downturn, and avoid all of the problems caused by indiscriminate budget cuts:

1. First things first: get crystal clear about the competencies your organization needs in order to execute the business strategy. Let’s say your organization is shifting from being a profit center to being a cost center in support of bigger business units. This is not an unusual scenario in a downturn, as leaders ask their organizations to line up around the biggest bets instead of experimenting with multiple, smaller, and unproven bets. There’s probably a gap between your organization’s current ability to collaborate cross-functionally and what is now needed, since they’ve been encouraged to work independently in the past.

Check to be sure that’s true, and if it is, focus your organizational improvement efforts on enablers of cross-functional collaboration such as creating interlocking processes, establishing clear lines of accountability, and honing your leaders’ ability to collaborate with other leaders.

Note how modest this line item can turn out to be, if you play it right. You may need a process redesign pro to help with the development of interlocking processes, an OD or HR consultant to help think through how to establish clear lines of accountability in a cross-functional environment, and an OD consultant to hone skills in collaborative leadership. You’ll also probably need someone to handle internal communications about the change.

All of these people could work behind the scenes as advisors if your internal people can take the advice and run with it, saving a lot of consulting fees. Maybe you even have one or more of these internal resources available and need no line item at all.

Either way, the return will be huge relative to the investment, because you’re focusing very specific and limited resources to address an essential business need. In this particular situation, we’re not even really talking about solving a problem, we’re talking about raising the bar and enabling significant change, which is an exciting place to be. Who knew you could actually have exciting organizational development during a recession?

2. Identify the root causes of any significant problems before agreeing to a budget number. Do not settle for, “Cut the technical training budget by 20%,” which is a silly request because it has no bearing on the business. Figure out if your internal training is solving — or at least helping to solve — the most critical problems of the business. If it’s not, chuck all of it, not just 20%. Believe me, you’ll be the CFO’s new best friend and employees who have been stuck in irrelevant training classes will cheer. Then figure out which training, if any, will help address critical business needs, and rebuild your budget from the bottom up. It’s never too late to get this right. If you’re too late in the game for this year, start the process with an eye on setting next year’s budget based on real need, not just the previous year’s number.

3. Get creative about continuing your business-critical organizational development investments, with the goal of sustaining and moving forward until better times allow you to take bigger leaps. For example, it’s essential to develop your high-potential leaders on an ongoing basis, during good times and bad, but do you really need to fly them all to Tuscany, or would an easy-in/easy-out business center like Frankfurt do? How about focusing on local rotational assignments instead of bigger development “events” that increase opex? How about utilizing other technologies to develop them? Even something as dirt-cheap as a quarterly book club is a way to keep the process moving forward until better times. You could host it via Webex, or a conference call, or a blog, or a wiki (o.k., maybe a wiki is a stretch…).

4. Don’t compare apples to oranges. The $25,000 investment to coach a new senior leader in a mission-critical role may create more return than a similarly priced generic training program for the masses. Be relentless at evaluating the return you can expect from every organizational development investment.

5. Where possible and feasible, switch from individuals to groups. Again, in the leadership development realm, group coaching can be quite effective, and costs less than coaching 15 or 20 leaders one-on-one. You won’t reap the full benefits of 1:1 coaching, but you’ll have the benefit of building relationships between up-and-coming leaders and you’ll keep the process moving forward. Nothing kills credibility like a repeated pattern of excellent programs that launch with a big bang during good times and then unceremoniously get the ax during bad times. Far better to keep it going on a shoestring than to let it die.

Here I am giving my talk at the Portland chapter of the International Association for Psychological Type, and committing the cardinal sin of looking at my slide instead of my audience. I thought my clients would find it fun to see me do what I constantly tell them not to do.

The second shot is with Pam Rechel, the dynamic and engaging president of P-APTi. Thanks again to Pam and all the wonderful folks in the Portland area who helped to make this session a hit.

Nobody trusts a silent leader, and yet, during troubled times, so many executives roll up their sleeves and get to work, alone and with each other, to address the challenges of the business. They feel like they are spending a huge amount of time communicating (and, boy, does it seem like a real pain), but on a scale of 1 - 10, it’s actually a 2 or a 3, when the stakeholders need a 9 or a 10.

In order to lead, you have to open your mouth and let the words come out, over and over and over again - even if the business environment is quickly changing. If you do, others will trust you much more than if they have to guess at what you’re thinking. The leader who speaks up clearly and frequently about challenges and opportunities gains a trusting and loyal following, extending far beyond his or her immediate network.

Another key reason to communicate frequently right now is that if you don’t, the informal network known as the grapevine will communicate on your behalf. Don’t leave it to the grapevine to explain your strategy for managing through a challenging situation.

Despite studies many years ago indicating that the grapevine is generally accurate, I have not found this to be the case, and I believe these widely-quoted studies are outdated. Sure, some facts may move through informal channels relatively unscathed, but in the Information Age, the interpretation of these facts goes wildly off course at lightening speed.

There’s no reason to stay heads-down in your office. Your silence and absence from public view feeds everyone’s worst fears. Even if you’re not in hiding, odds are you need to communicate a lot more, right now.

There are many means to go about it, such as:

• Weekly managers meetings
• Bi-weekly all-hands meetings
• Weekly or bi-weekly email updates
• Teleconferences or webinars
• Blogs
• VODs and podcasts

The list could go on, but these are the most common tools. You need only pick a few that fit your style and the needs of your employees and other stakeholders. In general, the more distributed and virtual your organization, the more tools you need to use in order to reach them. Notice that weekly or bi-weekly communication is not too frequent in many cases. The less people hear from you, the more nervous they get, so speak up. For many businesses, the situation is changing rapidly, and the worst choice is to wait for the time “when things settle down” so you can “announce something substantial.” Remember that everyone in the trenches realizes that the situation must be fast-changing, and they trust you more when you communicate about ongoing changes than when you remain silent.

When you communicate, be sure to cover what’s going well in the business, challenges presented by the economy, and your plan to address these challenges.

Provide context to ensure that everyone understands that this is a quickly changing environment, so the information may change from one communication to the next as you respond to these changes.

Talk about what you anticipate will happen and how you’re planning for it. If you need to cut certain projects or programs, explain why.

Ensure that you allow at least 30% of your time for Q&A. It’s helpful to collect questions on an ongoing basis or 1 to 2 days in advance of meetings so you have a sense of what is on their minds and can prepare your comments accordingly. A number of simple, readily-available tools manage this task, such as Zoomerang and Survey Monkey. This is easily done with employees, not so easily done with outside constituencies.

In the last issue of Traveling Light, I wrote about the Chinese word for change, Wei Gi. Wei means danger and Gi means opportunity. Change = Danger + Opportunity. In uncertain times, your stakeholders can readily see the dangers in your business. It’s up to you to ensure that they have accurate, objective information about the dangers and opportunities provided by the changing economic landscape.

It’s been a whopper of an economic ride lately. Your net worth is down. You’re more worried about your job security than you were a month ago. You may even be afraid your bank will fold and you’ll lose your money.

Several years ago, I facilitated a global off-site meeting for a team of engineering leaders. After the session, one of the Chinese leaders shared with me the Chinese symbol for change, which is not an individual word, but a composition of two words: Wei and Gi. Wei means danger and Gi means opportunity.

It strikes me how this fundamental truth has been known for thousands of years, and how easy it is to forget the opportunity when all we sense is the danger. Danger and opportunity are intertwined, and how we deal with the danger defines how we will see and benefit from the opportunity.

No surprise, Wei Gi is on my mind quite a bit these days.

I’m no economist so I won’t predict when this particular change will end. But I sure can tell you how to uncurl from the fetal position and calm your fears so you can see the opportunities when they present themselves.

If you are experiencing a sense of loss right now, you’re in the first emotional stage of this change. Every change model with which I’ve worked defines this early, initial stage as loss and/or fear, and my work with clients confirms that we do in fact start from this place. In this stage, you are aware of what you have lost, and you are fearful about what will happen.

Your primitive brain takes over, and it’s typical to freeze like a deer in the headlights, attempt to flee the situation, or just squish down the feelings and work harder, except that you feel like a hamster on a wheel, since you’re not going anywhere.

You may even feel uncharacteristically sorry for yourself, like you’re just a helpless victim of all of these economic disasters. Believe me, this is not the whole you talking. If you’re a reader of this eZine, you’re not someone who runs around with a victim mentality. This is your primitive brain doing its thing. It’s just trying to keep you safe. It can’t tell the difference between a recession and a saber-tooth tiger. It just knows something nearby seems threatening.

As journalist Dorothy Thompson said, “Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.” It’s time to calm that primitive brain so you will no longer be afraid. Here are five excellent tools you can use right now to calm your fears so you can see the opportunities presented by the change and begin to live again.

1. Learn more about why the change happened and about the specifics of the change. I finally understood the mortgage meltdown after viewing a hysterical (if obscenity-laden) stick figure presentation deck my husband forwarded to me. It was clearer than all of the Wall Street Journal analyses combined and it helped to calm my fears simply by increasing my understanding of the key dynamics that led to the financial crisis.

2. Spend time with positive, healthy people whom you find to be calming. This is good for your mental health at any time, but is particularly important when you are in a state of shock. An alternative some individuals prefer is to write in a journal. Others find a combination of the two works best.

3. If you are in a long-term relationship, don’t keep your feelings to yourself. Talk with your partner. Begin by sharing your feelings of loss, fear, and anxiety, and asking how he or she feels about the changes. Then take it from there. Being in it together is often superior to being in it as two isolated individuals.

4. Count your blessings, not because you feel you should, but because they are really, truly still there for you. It is natural to focus on what you have lost. However, by consciously focusing on what you have, you can begin to bring a broader and more balanced perspective to the situation. What do you still have? Resourcefulness? Creativity? A loving, supportive relationship? Great kids? A manageable car payment? A good book to read this weekend? Large or small, these blessings are still in our lives, no matter how bleak the rest may be. Write them down.

5. My colleagues Mary Ann Salerno and Lillie Brock, who wrote the book I reviewed in the October 3 issue of Traveling Light, share this incredibly effective tip: write a personal vision statement in great detail: If the change turns out the best possible way, what does it look like for you?

• What are you doing?
• What are you saying?
• Where are you?
• Who is with you?
• How do you feel?
• When is this happening?

Lillie once told me the story of a great survivor of change who used this very technique, a man who comes out of every change a better person. His name is Jim MacLaren. Jim was a world-class athlete who first lost his leg below the knee in 1985 when the motorcycle he was riding was broadsided by a 40,000 pound city bus.

Although initially pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, Jim recovered and once again began setting records, this time in triathlons, where he often beat many of the able-bodied athletes.

Then, in 1993, while competing in a triathlon, he was hit by a van that had mistakenly been directed onto the closed street. He was thrown into a lamp post and his neck was broken, leaving him paralyzed.

While in the hospital, Jim created this personal vision statement: “Within one year, I am at the beach with my girlfriend when I walk at least 10 feet on my own. The feeling is like winning another race with an extra special prize at the end. My life is full and I am grateful for the lesson.”

Jim knew that his prognosis was grim and that his doctors did not believe he would regain the use of his limbs. When asked by an incredulous interviewer why he had this seemingly unattainable vision, he responded that when he woke up in the middle of the night, his visitors gone, his hospital room empty, unable to move, his vision calmed him so he could go back to sleep and face another day.

Jim did eventually regain some use of his limbs, and he went on to build a successful motivational speaking business and found the Choose Living Foundation, a philanthropic organization that supports a wide variety of causes.

Change = Danger + Opportunity. Calm your fears about the danger and you will see the opportunity and begin to live again.

Change management and organizational transformation involve, at their core, human beings — lots of human beings, who must fully align with your vision in order to transform the business. You and your team can’t do it on your own. You need everyone.

My years of experience as an organizational change consultant have taught me a great deal about what people want and need during times of change. The one thing that separates successful change leaders from the rest of the pack is that they get it, too, and they act on that understanding by providing all eight of these change essentials to the many people involved in the change and impacted by it:

1. Clear communication, always: it is far superior to communicate that which is uncertain or still changing rather than waiting until all your ducks are in a row. When you’re not communicating, you’re communicating, so choose to communicate actively and strategically.

2. Straight talk: people want you to tell them the truth about problems occurring with the change. They don’t want you to put lipstick on a pig and tell them how beautiful it is.

3. Two-way communication: elicit input and feedback from employees, customers, and partners. Listen carefully, respond to the problems, and work with them to resolve the problems. If the only employee concerns addressed regard peripheral issues, with the core issues being reserved for “experts,” people will not fully embrace the change.

4. Support: this can include training and education, FAQ’s, coaching and encouragement, and is particularly important if the learning curve is steep. This applies not only to any technical or business training but also to changes in leadership style, team management skills, vendor management skills, change management skills, conflict resolution skills, and other elements needed to make the change successful.

5. Reasonably clear expectations and measures of success: contrary to popular belief, most people really can handle expectations that are not 100% clear. However, they do need to know 80% of what is expected of them during and after the change, and how their success will be measured.

6. Context: also contrary to popular belief, most people really do want to understand how they fit into the big picture of the change, and how they impact the business. This is true to the most junior levels in the organization.

7. Continuous progress toward aligning internal systems: employees often complain that existing organizational design does not support what is expected of them after implementation. For example, members of a team may own steps 1, 4, 7, and 9 of a new process, but be held responsible for the end result. Thoughtful integration of business processes, compensation systems, and organizational capabilities addresses these inconsistencies.

8. Leadership at all levels: while many employees understand the need to work with outside experts during the course of a significant change, consultants are no substitute for effective leadership inside the organization. One message coming consistently from the top and the middle means a whole lot more than any message coming from an outsider, and good consultants know how to develop, not usurp, leadership of an organization.

Best practices in organizational change management require attention to both objective and subjective human elements. Effective change leaders pay attention to the myriad details being shoved in their faces today, but also anticipate what is coming next. By employing all eight of the change essentials, successful leaders are better able to anticipate and plan for a successful business transformation.

We had a little excitement here at Selby Group HG last week. Some Princeton students somehow got access to our private, exclusive on-line Selby Group instruction page for taking the MBTI® and FIRO-B® — and went nuts forwarding the link to each other and taking the instruments without my permission and without paying me.

Real, live white collar crime, right here in my own company! O.K., minor white collar crime, but it was still exciting for this avid reader of mystery novels.

To end the crime spree, I changed the login and password, at which point one of them emailed me explaining that the login and password didn’t work and asking what she should use instead! I replied that there is a cost associated with taking the instruments, that I had no idea how these students came across the private instruction page reserved for the exclusive use of my clients, and that I was wondering where on earth she got it.

I didn’t hear back from her. Gee, what a surprise.

To their credit, Consulting Psychologists Press promptly refilled my queue of instruments at no charge, and the customer service representative laughed that there was perhaps an upside to this quirky little caper — maybe now that the students know their Psychological Types, they’ll have better self-awareness and go on to make the world a better place. At the very least, perhaps they’ll turn their backs on crime forever!

If you’re not worried, maybe you should be. In a down economy, the core and bottom performers hunker down, fearful of leaving familiar territory, but your top 20% are still getting calls from recruiters and lucrative offers from competitors or even from other recession-resistant industries trolling for talent.

So what motivates key talent during a tough economy? It comes down to five things every leader and business owner can do. You should be doing all five on an ongoing basis, but particularly now.

1. Does each top performer and high potential leader know that, in fact, he or she is considered a top performer and/or high potential leader? In many companies, there are no formal programs to identify and develop high potential talent, so how can they know they are high potential if no one tells them? I can’t count the number of times I have had confidential conversations with high potential leaders and have nearly fallen out of my chair when I realized that they had no idea that their boss saw them as high potential. Some people overestimate their talent, but others underestimate it. Never assume they just “know.”

2. Are you ensuring a good mix of stretch assignments, formal development (training, coaching, etc.), and exposure to key decision-makers across the business? High performers and high potentials give a lot and they ask a lot in return. They appreciate an employer who invests time and money in their growth and they leave those who don’t. Ninety-seven percent of coaches are hired by individuals. I am routinely contacted by go-getters who want to get ahead and are willing to invest their own money because their employers won’t invest in them. It will come as no surprise that, to a person, these highly motivated initiative-takers have already decided to leave their current employer to find one that will take their ambitions seriously and support their growth with actions, not just words.

3. Do you recognize their work? If your company is too large for you to personally recognize each star employee’s work, what are you doing to ensure that your managers recognize excellent work and never commit the ultimate sin of taking credit for their subordinates’ work? No leader has ever said to me, “I take credit for my subordinates’ work.” It’s the subordinates who tell me it’s happening. But take extra care here, because even the overuse of the word “we” can be a form of theft, as in, “we compiled this data” when, in fact, you personally had nothing to do with the outstanding compilation; you’re just the presenter of it.

4. Does everyone know his or her impact on the business? This applies to everyone, and doing it ensures that you give your top people the alignment they need in order to run the business smoothly. What are you doing to ensure that your team — and everyone on their teams — understands the company’s vision, purpose, direction, and goals? What is your team doing to ensure that every employee understands his or her impact on the business? It’s not enough that the senior leaders get it. Everyone needs to get it and be personally connected to it in order to feel motivated through good times and bad. This needs to be an agenda item on a regular basis, not just once, and you need to hold your people accountable for doing it.

5. Are you scrupulously fair? It’s great to give extra attention and exciting assignments to your high performers and high potentials. That’s actually fair, since you’re getting more from them than from the core. Fairness here doesn’t mean treating every single person exactly the same. It means objectivity.

For example, if your relatives work in the business, do you unfailingly hold them to the same standards as everyone else, or does there seem to be a disproportionate share of relatives on your high-potential list?

Do you scan your high potential and high performer lists for diversity? In this day and age, overrepresentation of any one group is a red flag that you may be failing to attract the best talent from the total population of qualified talent. Those high potentials and high performers who are not part of the dominant group will head to more welcome environments in which they are not always the odd one out.

Do you have someone inside or outside the business who will call you on it if you unwittingly show inappropriate favoritism toward a friend whose performance is just average?

Note that these tips are not costly to implement, which is also an advantage in a down economy!

Do you live in the Portland area? If so, mark your calendar for the morning of October 11. I’ll be speaking on the impact of your psychological type and gender on your financial attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

I became interested in the subject after noticing different patterns between my male and female clients, even when they had achieved equal levels of financial and career success. I went in search of studies that explained why, but there weren’t any, so I did one myself.

What I learned was so important that I share it whenever and wherever I can.

For more information, please visit http://www.portlandapt.org/.