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How to Inspire “Paused” Employees

As a result of the pandemic and the recession, are many of your staff-members unconsciously “working-to-rule”? In other words, have they reverted to doing the minimum possible to keep their jobs? If so, what can you as an employer do to break them out of a dangerous rut which could drive your firm all the way into bankruptcy?

These are scary times, and with good reason. Here in Jamaica, COVID is spiking to unforeseen levels and as the death-toll mounts, even more people are testing positive. Furthermore, the economy faces poor predictions as we enter the traditional slowdown of the tourist season. Arguably, business confidence is at its lowest ever.

Consequently, most of your employees are probably stalled. Confronted by bad news and distracted by children who would normally be in school, they are overwhelmed. Laying awake at night, they are pre-occupied by the need to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.

It seems only natural: in response to a threat, you should focus on defending yourself. However, when the threat is enduring, there’s a limit to how well a good defense works. Case in point: you can’t win the football World Cup by only preventing goals from scoring. Plus, deep within the human spirit lies a steady force that drives us to do more than just survive.

Unfortunately, few corporate leaders know how to transcend the “survival” stage of the pandemic. With each spike, they reset their companies’ attention to the usual: social distancing, wearing masks and working from home. But there will always be spikes…for now. A vaccine won’t make its way to our citizens for several years.

In the meantime, your company may just go out of business.

Instead of waiting and resetting every few months, how can you take your employees out of the “pause”?

1. Think Big

A few years ago, the US Coast Guard had such a challenge. The world was changing rapidly and its old operating mode as the first-responder to sea-based emergencies was no longer working. The threats it faced were now organized: some by terrorists and others by global forces such as climate change.

The organization needed to take into account incipient trends, then rise far above them. As opposed to merely reacting, it needed to shape long-term outcomes. That could not happen in the short term.

Instead, the organization developed a decades-long scenario in which it transformed itself, creating a new, influential role in the future. From that end-point, it worked back to today, resulting in a difficult re-organization impacting thousands.

But my experience leading Jamaican companies planning tells me that the articulation of a vision isn’t enough. To some degree, we are immune from such leader-talk courtesy of politicians. Now your people are, quite rightly, skeptical of bombast.

They should be.

Research shows that overblown visions of the future can be de-motivational. Why? When a goal is too far out of people’s reach, they give up, asking themselves, “Should I waste time on a failure?”

2. Be Fact-Based and Realistic

The first way out of this dilemma is to create a numbers-oriented map of the journey from the future back to the present. Such a chart is quite difficult to craft, but it starts by defining a specific year for your goal, such as our own “Vision Jamaica 2030”.

Furthermore, it must show how critical metrics such as top line revenue, EBITDA and market share need to change to accomplish your end-point. Plus, it needs to capture qualitative milestones. Finally, projects and interventions which take months or years to implement should be added in and synchronized with the other targets.

The end-result is a detailed picture of the journey your organisation must take from now until the stated year of your vision.

Some would say that such detail is likely to be “incorrect”, and they are right. This is not an exercise in prediction or accuracy. Instead, it’s meant to galvanize your organization with not only a destination, but a realistic means of reaching it.

Why is this activity important to employees? Without this level of specificity, they won’t buy-in, and will simply add the goal to their mental list of empty promises. This is the problem with overarching, vague vision statements. They have stopped working because people are immune to the optimism of “world-class” pronouncements which are more ignorant than credible.

One way to tackle this challenge is to involve all your staff in your data gathering. After all, this is their future you are crafting. Take care to address all the facts and assumptions they deem important.

The fact is, in these difficult times people want to be inspired…but moreover, they don’t want to be disappointed by a CEO’s pipe-dream. Focus on creating a vision that’s realistic and you’ll replace their unwanted fears with a motivation that enlivens and lifts them to extraordinary achievement.

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How to Listen Productively in a Negotiation

The task of negotiating with other people is part and parcel of business-life. However, many hate having to do so, and a large percentage do so ineffectively. One cause is that most focus on the quality of their speaking, fixating on what they need to say. By contrast, masterful negotiators take a different approach: deep listening.

Years ago, I had the fortune of picking up “Getting to Yes” by Roger Fisher and William Ury. This classic book on negotiations outlines several principles; one of which is to listen keenly to uncover the true intent behind someone’s position.

The idea is simple enough: when people are in a negotiation, the job of making requests of their counterparts is unavoidable. On the surface, it seems to be a battle of wills: each side asks for what it wants repeatedly, until the other concedes or refuses. The best tactic is to figure out how to get what you want, while giving away as little as possible.

However, Fisher and Ury advocate a different frame: a “Win-Win” in which both parties benefit. As you may imagine, there are a number of positives to be derived from this approach, even though it requires more skill. Among them is the ability to listen powerfully to what the other party is not saying aloud.

The fact is, each of us asks for stuff we want all day. However, especially when the stakes are high and emotions are raw, we unwittingly hide our true needs and emotional wants behind words. It simply feels too risky to be honest.

But we aren’t being sneaky; it’s just that emotional intent doesn’t translate neatly into actions or objects. For example, a husband who asks his wife to make a cheesecake for his birthday isn’t necessarily asking her to procure a baked good, and may be upset when she purchases one from a store.

For him, the intent is to experience her love and care which means seeing her sacrifice time and attention in the kitchen making the cake from scratch. He may unwittingly want to relive a memory provided by his mother.

But his actual words: “Would you bake a cheesecake for my birthday?” don’t convey his entire intent. Therefore, the mismatch between the two could result in a marital spat, or in the business world, a failed negotiation. How can you get past this sticking point if you find yourself in a similar spot?

1. Notice the mismatch

Skilled negotiators know how to use their intuition to discern such subtle gaps. Something deep inside them indicates that all is not well. However, you may find that your MBA-like training leads you to pay attention to the logic of what is happening: the discernible facts.

But that’s not enough. Furthermore, detecting uneasy feelings is necessary, but not sufficient. Once the inner shift is realized, you must translate the sensation into accurate words.

“It seems that we are making progress, but something inside tells me that we are missing a big part.”

This is a bold step: it’s a request to stop the negotiation in order to investigate a mere hunch based on intangible emotions. Unfortunately, most people self-censor, telling themselves: “Don’t be silly – just move on!” When they do so, everyone loses.

If you’d like to move past sticking points in your difficult conversations, it pays to tune in to your inner feelings, and speak up.

2. Probing for Underlying Commitments

If you do call a time-out, and things seem stuck, it could be that you are giving the other party exactly what they are asking for…but it’s not enough. This is a moment when your intuition can help you probe for deeper reasons.

“I know you asked for cheesecake, but why do you want that for your birthday?”

This is a masterful move in any negotiation because you are probing behind the stated position to see why it was raised in the first place. But this is more than curiosity.

Going deeper opens up the range of possible solutions. For example, the smell of home-cooked cake on a special day could be satisfied by other kinds of baked goods which are easier or less expensive to make.

When you expand the number of options, a Win-Win becomes far more likely. Plus, when you probe their hidden commitments it shows that you care. It’s as if you are setting aside the overt demand for cheesecake in order to give the other person what they really want.

In this context, this kind of listening is powerful as it invents brand new outcomes which neither side could predict beforehand. Without explicitly saying so, the two opposing sides are now working as a team.

For a breakthrough in negotiations, start by deeply listening beyond the words to yourself, and the other person’s true needs.

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“It Bruk” – How to Get Past an Everyday Lack of Responsibility

How does a Jamaican executive create a culture of accountability in his/her company? While it’s clear that this trait is deeply correlated with success, why is it so hard to inculcate?

I remember returning home once to a surprising silence: the raucous sound of the grass being cut had stopped. When queried, the gardener remarked: “De lawnmower…it bruk.”

This everyday local comment isn’t remarkable, but there are a number of hidden meanings it conveys which deserve a deeper look. What does this commonplace remark: “It bruk” really mean?

Meaning #1 – “I apologize for breaking the mower and will see that it gets fixed.”

Perhaps we can agree that this particular motivation is almost never present. It’s a manager’s dream: that when something goes wrong, someone always steps up to be fully accountable. Whether you are the chairperson of a conglomerate or a homeowner who employs a helper, the yearning for accountability is the same.

Yet, there are merely a few, rare individuals who willingly take responsibility. Consequently, they are extremely valuable to their organizations. In fact, success (and profits) can be traced to the presence of such high performers. Conversely, in the worst companies, these people cannot be found.

But if this interpretation happens to be uncommon, what’s the normal one?

Meaning #2 – “It broke itself when I was very, very far away.”

This is the popular answer. I suspect that its prevalence in the Caribbean indicates that it was perfected in slavery days: a survival technique to avoid Massa’s ire. When people say “It bruk” they intend to assign the blame to a location that’s as remote as possible. It’s a way to create some psychological distance from the threat of harsh punishment.

In that coercive context from our history, the tactic was understandable. If you ever have a chance to read slaveowners’ letters complaining about lazy workers, you may notice something familiar. The tone sounds surprisingly like a contemporary manager’s email messages on the same topic.

What are the consequences for an organization whose staff has adopted this meaning as a mantra?

Unwanted Results

In today’s workplace, we routinely accept “It Bruk” as a rational response. In fact, we shouldn’t. It’s insidious.

Those who make such utterances are doing more than avoiding blame: they are actually reassigning the twin tasks of resolving the issue now and preventing it from happening in the future.

In other words, they render themselves powerless. They demote themselves to that of a bystander, making commentary on things they pretend to be separate from. As such, the problem is likely to recur.

The typical Jamaican manager knows exactly how to respond. Like a red flag to a bull, “It bruk” makes them swing into action, to take charge of the situation. Many become bullies, dominating others with loud commands and barked orders until a solution is put in place.

Skilled managers know better. Instead of taking the bait, they may ask: “And what will you do about it?” and “How will you prevent it in future?”

How to Get Past an “It Bruk” Culture

I have seen companies undertake a transformation by giving each employee the ability to own the “It Bruk” tendencies in their lives. However, this path is slow and expensive, relying on individual interventions.

Alternately, a group approach can help employees realize the corrosive power of non-accountability. In the same way that cursing in a convent is unacceptable, they can learn to hear “It Bruk” statements as if it were a foreign language unsuitable for the workplace.

The truth is that no-one wants to be told an “It Bruk” by anyone: not by colleagues, family members or political leaders. However, most of us are weak, unable to catch ourselves in the midst of this language. We need help. This aid can come from a strong corporate culture which teaches people to recognize the many varieties of “It Bruk” thinking.

But it won’t happen by edict. This is the job of a learning experience which offers a safe space to explore fresh ideas. But that would just be the start. This unusual transformation has to be reinforced with regular discussions between managers and their direct reports.

After a period of practice, your staff may see “It Bruk” expressions as the impediment they really are. Now, your organization can create a new language of responsibility to replace the old. Your intervention could support this outcome from every direction, making it easy for employees to step up their game.

The truth is that a culture of accountability launches everyone to higher levels of accomplishment, not only in their families but in all areas of their lives, bar none. It could be a transformational gift that changes their daily experience and your company along with it.

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On Breakthrough Strategies vs. Coping Tactics

In these distressed times, should your company be focused on more than its survival? While this approach may get you through months of struggle , it could be the recipe for your eventual demise.

Many executives are exhausted. All they can do each night is drag themselves from their laptops to their beds. The demand to keep their organizations afloat is at its peak and they give it their all: energized by the immediate challenge.

But lurking in the background is a future they believe they just don’t have time to consider. In fact, they see energy spent focused on the long term as a competitor to the job of saving their organization from destruction. It’s something to put off for later, when more hours become available.

However, if articles like the Board of Innovation’s “Low Touch Economy Report” are to be believed, there are permanent changes underway. Economic, health and behavioral trends are overtaking Jamaican economies. Some just won’t make it.

The fact is, there is a long term, low touch reality that COVID-19 has imposed on us. Consequently, companies which are too busy, distracted or weak to re-define themselves are going to lose. In effect, they have focused on an old habit: developing coping tactics rather than breakthrough strategies. This is a favorite excuse of local executives who scoff at looking at anything other than short-term tactics because “things change so fast.”

Their need to be right about their predictions clouds their judgement. They don’t understand that envisioning a preferred future is all about choosing a specific long-term outcome, rather than allowing circumstances to dictate it.

Case in point: GraceKennedy’s 2020 vision, created back in 1995/96. While there have been numerous devaluations, recessions, hurricanes and pestilences in the last 25 years the company is currently celebrating the successful completion of the two+ decade effort. Significantly, the competitors who failed to engage in the same exercise have either shrunk, collapsed or disappeared into other industries. The company’s P/E Ratio, profits and shareholder value have made quantum gains.

As Douglas Orane, former CEO, shared in a recent webinar, the vision led the company to stay focused even in turbulent times. Having a pre-defined, 25 year outcome helped allay fears when a number of rude surprises popped up.

However, the act of creating a credible 20-30 year vision is just one (necessary) element of a breakthrough strategy. Here are two others you could use.

Crossing Functions

While it’s possible for your CEO/MD to create a breakthrough strategy on his/her own, or hire consultants to do the same, there’s a pitfall. No single person (or outside outfit) is able to understand the limits of what can be implemented in your company.

The number of potential bottlenecks which exist are numerous. In an organization of 50 people or more, there are facts which cannot be known by those at the top which must be included in the deliberations.

Furthermore, excluding your leaders from the process means that they will have to be sold (or told) at a later date. They would need to understand the underlying rational for the strategy, then convinced to play their part.

Unfortunately, even if they do their best, their second-hand knowledge is likely to become an impediment. In other words, you would not produce a breakthrough strategy.

Crossing Levels

Now more than ever, it’s important for your organization to include employees at multiple levels.

Without their inclusion, your company would probably just take the lazy approach: use what has worked in the past, then project it into the future. For most companies, these coping tactics offer little more than a continuation of business-as-usual.

COVID-19 offers you a significant opportunity. This is a global pandemic: a once in a lifetime chance to engage workers in a grand reset. The fact is, staff is already concerned about the future of their organization and your leaders should leverage this attention.

But how can this be done at scale?

Use focus groups and surveys to poll employees regarding their view of the future, and the role the organisation should play. While every staff member may not have an insightful opinion, my experience shows that the act of asking for input is, by itself, empowering. Furthermore, it grants each of your people a certain level of respect.

Ultimately you’ll demonstrate that the organization isn’t relying on a few (older) leaders to produce a breakthrough. Instead, it’s everyone’s job: a way for each person to arrive at the future destination (like GraceKennedy 2020) and say “We have done it ourselves.” If those who achieved such results are to be believed, this is the kind of inspiring outcome that people long to experience.

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Kickstart your Digital Transformation

What’s an easy step to begin your company’s digital transformation? This may sound simplistic: Start by collecting your customers’ contact information.

Why is this a powerful place to begin?

Think of what it’s like to meet someone for the first time and quickly develop a romantic interest. In order to develop a multi-faceted relationship in which you could get to know each other, you need contact information. It’s a signal that you want to go further than the immediate moment, in order to learn more about his/her life and vice versa.

After all, who wants to date someone who is one-dimensional? And who wants to do business with companies that can only do one thing?

The best organizations understand the need to go much further: instead, they re-invent themselves using the idea that companies offer several categories or dimensions of offerings.

Four Dimensions

1. a product – a tangible or digital object.

2. a service – an act performed on the customer’s behalf.

3. a relationship – a partnership for mutual gain.

4. a transformation – a learning experience which improves the customers’ intrinsic capabilities.

For example, a company that sells exercise equipment (a kind of product) could add offerings such as:

– assistance in helping customers set up their home gyms safely and efficiently (a service)

– two months of participation in a weight-loss boot camp with a group of similar people (a relationship)

– a training programme that teaches them how to vary their exercise regime with age (a transformation)

These three additional dimensions can be used to convert a single, momentary transaction into an ongoing source of revenue. It may seem paradoxical, but a company which thinks about these dimensions is more likely to ask for contact information. Why is that? Like serious dating, knowing how to reach the customer is the way for them to build a mutually beneficial, multi-faceted relationship.

However, here’s the baffling reality: most companies don’t even ask for this information. Instead, they focus on whoever happens to walk in next,

If your organization isn’t executing this important function, perhaps one of the reasons below might apply.

1. The Overall Mission is Lacking

Asking for contact information from a stranger is a delicate matter. It’s somewhat intrusive, and a customer service representative (CSR) in your company who can foresee a possible rejection is likely to skip this step. Why?

More often than not, they simply don’t appreciate the importance. After all, the person who wants the data is far away in your marketing department. The CSR doesn’t report to them and has probably never been given the big-picture point of view.

Consequently, when the customer asks, “What do you want my contact information for?” they are met with a blank look. Your CSR’s have not been prepared with an answer.

2. The Means Aren’t Provided

A company that provides its staff with only a clipboard, paper and pencil to collect contact information has done the bare minimum. However, it creates a problem for someone who must enter the data at a later date. Furthermore, they send a signal to the customer that the effort isn’t a serious one.

Instead, your organization should set up a landing page on its website, and supply its staff with a tablet or smartphone to be used on the spot. This solves many problems at once and allows the customer to receive a response in real-time.

3. A Focus on Mass Marketing

In most companies, the marketing department hasn’t made the transition to thinking about its customers as the single best source of future business. Instead, your company may still see advertising to the public as the primary channel. However, if it were to make the switch, then finding more about customers’ specific, future needs would be a critical objective.

Reconsider the case of the gym equipment store. If the managers have a hard time imagining services, relationships and transformations to offer, then it could simply ask its past customers: “Thanks for shopping with us. We are interested to know what you might want next in your journey towards a fitter version of yourself. Please answer a few questions to help us meet your needs.”

As ordinary as these ideas may sound, I can’t think of three local companies who use them. Even those who have my information don’t contact me as a prior customer: I find out about their offerings from the newspapers, television or internet.

I imagine that they are wasting millions, reinventing one campaign after another, chasing after the same members of the public each time. The solution to this dilemma? Collect contact information from their customers and use it to develop deeper relationships. This approach may kick-start the digital transformation that keeps them alive.

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The Shock of Low Standards

There are a few moments in your employees’ careers when they go into a shock. However, it’s not because too much is demanded of them…in fact, it’s the very opposite.

In prior columns, I shared what sometimes happens when a recent college graduate joins the full-time workforce. Coming from an education system with extreme demands and standards, they encounter a rude surprise: individual efforts to excel are attacked by one’s peers. At the same time, their management rewards vague, dubious achievements.

Unfortunately, most newcomers fall right into place, frittering away whatever fresh energy they once had. They become like everyone else: comfort becomes the paramount goal. In fact, some firms set “making employees comfortable” as an all-important concern.

Not surprisingly, this is the very opposite of the way people relate to each other in high-performing organizations.

For example, military boot-camp is designed to expose raw recruits to an environment of impossibly high standards as quickly as possible. This immersion is intended to surprise them – to provide a shock. When it’s done well, it isn’t sadistic or destructive. The best rise up to meet the challenge, while others are excluded.

I’m sure at some point in history, a well-intended general experimented with a more “comfortable” path to basic military training…only to see it rejected. Why? A battlefield is no place to discover that your colleagues are more interested in saving their skins than bravely following the mission.

The truth is, society doesn’t admire someone who “seeks my own comfort above all else.” However, this is a low standard that many companies promote during the onboarding stage. But that’s not the only instance where the battle is lost. Here are three additional episodes in employees’ careers which could be carefully crafted to show excellence.

1) Their First Meeting

Sharon, a new employee, bustles into her first meeting to ensure she’s not late. As she opens the door with moments to spare, there’s no-one else in the room. Five minutes later, the second person arrives. The meeting eventually starts 15 minutes late with several missing, including the convenor. The top executive, whose presence is required to make decisions, stumbles in even much later still talking on his phone, without apology.

This everyday scenario teaches Sharon to surrender her college standard of arriving ten minutes before others to sit in the front row. Instead, she’s encouraged to join a sloppy, mediocre majority.

2) Their First Project

After a few months on the project, Jerome is confused. He can’t define the mission and the last two status meetings have been cancelled. While he continues working on his deliverables, his manager has never asked for an update.

With extra energy and bandwidth, he turns his efforts to a startup – a side-hustle he has launched with friends. That feels more real for some reason, even though not a single penny has been earned.

3) Their First Promotion

Fred was just promoted to the executive suite. While HR makes sure that all frontline employees have their annual performance reviews, their advice is ignored at this level.

He discovers that the Managing Director has been too busy (for several years) to schedule feedback discussions. She seems happier giving out random, public “Big-Ups” to low-level staff than having substantial, confronting conversations with her direct reports.

As such, he has no idea how to improve his performance. Consequently, when a headhunter calls, he jumps at the opportunity to move to a different organization which, he hopes, has higher standards.

No Excuses

Perhaps you are reading this article, arguing that “My company is not an army.” True, but what would it be like to find and emulate the best-run organizations in your industry? Maybe you would discover a common thread in all high-performing service clubs, sports teams, NGO’s, statutory bodies, corporations and even bible-study groups.

Consider that there may be something in human nature that instinctively seeks comfort in relationships with others, rather than accountability…and that it destroys performance.

As such, your book-club which skillfully causes (or “forces”) its members to read the assigned books is one that thrives, where others fail. This core ingredient – accountability – is the secret sauce that wards off the drift towards mediocrity. When you fail to repeatedly burnish it brightly, the worst will always happen.

The alternative is to craft high standards around key events which offer their own shock and surprise. While you’ll definitely lose those who are committed to their personal comfort, each one who remains has the opportunity to push others to excellence.

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Stop Mailing In Your Participation

Have you ever been part of a project or organization in which a colleague is giving only a minimal effort? This behaviour, which some call “mailing it in”, may be killing your team’s success.

For several years in the 1990’s, I participated in a programme in which I was trained to teach 50-150 person seminars. The head trainer was the most effective instructor, consistently receiving the best scores, but new trainees like me had a tricky challenge trying to figure out exactly what made him outstanding.

One of his traits was an uncanny skill: he could lead each event as if it were his last, giving attendees a fresh experience each time. As a high performer who took each seminar to a different level, he found new ways to make things compelling even when they were, on the surface, mundane.

While I couldn’t replicate his ability, it was fascinating to observe someone who never once “mailed it in.” The phrase refers to the human tendency to do the minimum possible to get by, thereby providing only a weak substitute. According to Wiktionary, the term means “to fulfill a responsibility with a minimum, rather than appropriate, level of effort”, aka “phoning it in”.

In my column a month ago about governance and leadership, I mentioned that many organization’s board members are mailing it in. I wrote: “In some of our (client’s) strategic planning retreats, they either decline to attend, fail to show up, arrive late, leave early, or spend the entire caucus distracted by email.” Or Zoom. Or a live football match on YouTube…a real episode.

But what’s the big deal? Why should you care? After all, mailing it in has been a part of Jamaican history ever since Columbus met and tried to enslave the Tainos. Their response was probably typical of all oppressed people: to pretend to be doing as much as possible while actually doing the minimum.

Here are a few reasons to highlight this tendency that may help address it in your organization.

1. An Insidious Form of Corruption

We Jamaicans often treat corruption as if it’s a novel coronavirus – a once in a lifetime event that arrives out of the blue all of a sudden, shocking us all. Consider that, in your company, corruption starts with something tiny: when someone mails it in.

In other words, whenever staff members offer up “a minimum, rather than appropriate, level of effort” they are doing more than being lazy. In fact, they are undermining the very mission of the enterprise.

Strangely enough, they could be well-intentioned. The truth is, we are imperfect, which means that sometimes we miss the mark entirely. Some departments or boards do so for years at a time, eventually doing great damage to the very cause they are trying to uphold.

However, the important part that’s missing is a tool of accountability: consistent and transparent feedback, especially in those moments when you are mailing it in. In other words, when you don’t have someone who is willing to let you know when you are merely putting in a half-effort, you are likely to slide into a micro-corruption which masses into a mission-killing culture.

To illustrate: for every Usain Bolt there is another person with equal talent. The only difference is often a lack of accountability: continuous, corrective conversations between the performer and his/her coach. Without such direct help at unexpected times, it’s hard to achieve much.

In firms with such dysfunctional cultures, pointing fingers is a wasted effort. The sad fact is, whenever a group of individuals don’t practice holding each other to a high standard on a regular basis, mailing it in becomes the inescapable, mediocre norm.

2. Lack of Role Models

Unfortunately, when this corruption leaks in at the highest level it’s a different kettle of fish. Why? We Jamaicans tend to pay a lot of attention to hierarchies.

For example, a board that fails in its basic duties (i.e. to have AGM’s, regular meetings, challenging conversations, high performing members) sends a signal to the company: it tolerates corruption.

Over time, anyone who attempts to raise the bar in any part of the organization can be thwarted. They will learn or be told that they are being unfair, or unreasonable. And if they look for support at a higher level, they find the same corruption.

At that point, staff members quit. Either they start a job-hunt or worse: they remain in the job and lapse into mailing it in. They join the club.

Sometimes, a knowledge of these two costs is enough to spur a transformation. Use them to show your organization the places where it’s killing its own success by collectively mailing it in.

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Why is Email the Hardest Thing You Must Do Each Day?

What makes email the number one hated activity in corporate life? It may have little to do with the nuisance it has become, and everything to do with incomplete decisions we need to make daily.

Studies have shown that email consumes some 20% of each employee’s day. At the same time, 33% would rather clean a toilet than go through all their email. Why the aversion to a technology that’s supposed to help? Why do so many wish it would just go away?

It all comes down to friction.

Email delivers frictionless communication at scale. Today, there’s no need to use a typewriter, secretary, printer, phone or conference room to send a simple message to upwards of millions of people. As such, electronic messaging will never go away, even if it’s being slightly reshaped by apps like WhatsApp and Slack.

Its permanence and ubiquity mean that we must forever tolerate universal irritants like spam and irrelevant CC’s, but these aren’t the main reasons for all the hate. Instead, the problem we face is that of decision overwhelm.

To explain, let’s set aside messages from the non-essential newsletters, updates and birthday reminders you receive. By contrast, critical emails are ones you can’t delete with impunity: they require you to pause and think before answering.

The problem is that such messages come into our Inboxes at all times of the day, even while we are sleeping. We can’t control when people send them, so they arrive mixed in with the stuff that’s not essential. This makes it hard to focus.

However, you do have control over the following three actions. Mastering each of them can be transformational to the quality of your decision-making.

Action Mode #1 – Arbitrary Skimming and Scanning – Stop

While there are a few companies which require employees to scan their Inboxes every few minutes (thereby ruining their productivity) a clear best practice has emerged. In summary, it states one should never randomly “check” email i.e. skim. Instead, it should be a consciously scheduled activity.

What about emergencies? Savvy organizations train their staff to use other methods such as phone calls or texts for urgent communications.

The fact is, the habit of scanning email leaves you at the mercy of other people’s agendas. You end up playing electronic ping-pong, being your least effective.

The solution is to learn how to use the following two action modes for managing your incoming email.

Action Mode #2 – Light Triage – Start

Instead of skimming, you should create a handful of opportunities each day to organize incoming messages. In these triage sessions, you are rapidly dispatching messages to parts of your system (other than your Inbox) so that they can be dealt with later.

In this mode, you only offer short replies, if any at all. This isn’t the time for making decisions about the content of email messages. It’s the time for deciding which ones require actual thought and later consideration, then putting them in position, ready for the hard thinking they call for.

Action Mode #3 – Heavy Lifting – Start

These are longer periods of time devoted to making difficult decisions related to specific email messages. They need to be pre-scheduled and heavily guarded against distractions or external intrusions so that you can make quality commitments and deliver clear communications.

In essence, you are batching the hardest work you’ll do each day into a single time-slot reserved for your very best performance.

Unfortunately, most of us jump between these three Action Modes randomly when we open our Inboxes, frittering away precious time, attention and energy.

The result? You fail to realize that the kind of intensity needed for Action #2 (quick, short decisions) is different from that of Action #3 (deep thinking and major commitments.) As such, you rarely put yourself in the right mindset to do your hardest, best work. Instead, you try to squeeze email between other commitments.

Ultimately, you create problems for yourself and others. At the volumes of email typical of a manager, you never catch up, so others form a poor impression of your ability to stay on top of what (they think) is a simple chore.

The answer is to use your calendar to block separate times for Mode #2 and Mode #3 email. It’s the only way to manage the volume of decisions your job requires.

In this context, you must be continuously improving your email management as a means for making effective decisions. Do so and you’ll continue to be a competent professional who uses his/her core tools effectively.

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Should Your Board Interfere with Company Strategy?

There’s a whole school of thought which states that boards should leave strategic thinking to executives. Instead, board members should only provide oversight. Does this point of view have merit?

The COVID pandemic has thrown companies’ strategies in disarray, whether they are NGO’s, public or private sector organizations. Suddenly, reliable bedrock beliefs have been suspended as evidence pours in that a new normal is being born.

Too many boards are caught off-guard. Believing that strategic concerns are the purview of executives, they have taken a hands-off approach to recent events. For some time, many have never been regular attendees at their own board meetings. In some of our strategic planning retreats, they either decline to attend, fail to show up, arrive late, leave early, or spend the entire caucus distracted by email.

In other words, pre-COVID, they stopped providing strategic direction. Unfortunately, too many of them are public sector bodies.

Instead, they offer to ensure that the resulting plan is faithfully followed. They don’t want to “interfere.”

The folly of this thinking has recently become apparent. Here’s why.

1) COVID has collapsed the future

Our approach to running strategic planning retreats encourages companies to look 15-30 years into the future. Sometimes over protest, we explain the pros and cons of looking too far out, vs. not far enough. The key is to choose a “Goldilocks” planning horizon: one that’s just right.

Pity the companies which have chosen a horizon which is too short. Why? They’ll have to restart their planning process.

The truth is that organizations who chose long horizons already planned for the changes COVID has made urgent. The only difference is that the pandemic has brought the future closer: collapsing it. All they need to do is change the timeline. 

However, a company with a too-short strategy would miss the ball entirely. They’d have to rethink everything simply because of a tactical error in forming their plan. This is where board members make a difference:  they are usually the ones pushing for longer horizons. Their absence makes this mistake more likely to occur.

2) Fresh New Eyes Are Necessary at the Top

The pandemic has shown us what it’s like to be completely blindsided. However, it should also predict which individuals will rebound first.

Those who are younger and newer to the organization have an advantage. Just observe how they adapt themselves to the use of an app such as Zoom which has assumed a central role in most companies.

Contrast this reality with some leaders. I once worked with the head of communications of a large company who hid a big secret – he didn’t know how to use Powerpoint. How he got to that position without picking up a basic tool of the trade remained a mystery.

Boards need to challenge executives to keep developing themselves. They should also welcome fresher, younger eyes into their ranks to prevent companies from becoming stale.

As such, boards need to properly estimate how in touch they are. Unfortunately, many fail to include digital strategists in the boardroom so it becomes difficult to provide proper guidance on the most challenging issues of the day.

3) Bringing Back the Best Employees

Today, CEOs’ are looking around the office, shaking their heads and wondering: “Why did I ever think we needed so many people?” Now, their suspicions have been confirmed: when some employees stayed home, and contributed little, they weren’t missed. In other words, their absence wasn’t a problem.

Can organizations simply cherry-pick the best employees, pay them a bit more and let go of the rest?

I predict that the new normal will force them to do so, within the limits of the labour laws. Outsiders may complain that they are just being greedy. However, board members may

point to the need to survive the first worldwide disruption in business to occur in our lifetime.

They are more likely to switch to a more digitally-savvy workforce that can manage itself without being watched. Individual salaries may rise by so doing, but the number of total employees may fall. Overall productivity should increase even as payroll costs are cut.

Boards should also prevent executives from rushing to return to a pre-COVID status quo which wouldn’t be sustainable. They should have a well-established point of view developed from seeing the inside operations of other companies.

These are trying times, and the cozy collegiality of the board room must give way to the committed few who are willing to take a stand in an effort to keep companies afloat.

Organizations need their boards to jump into the fray wholeheartedly. They must intervene to make the best of a messy situation and play their part in crafting a strategy that serves all concerned.

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What are your executive team’s new post-COVID assumptions?

Is your company being undermined by obsolete assumptions held by some of your leaders? To move forward, they must be challenged.

In our work to develop clients’ breakthrough strategies, we try to highlight such hidden assumptions. These are often unspoken, clashing ideas which undermine the corporate strategy. When the plan needs revision, the team should uncover and sort out these differences to act as one.

Unfortunately, most companies were rushed to respond to COVID-19 and created little more than a bunch of survival tactics. Now that the lockdown is being phased out, organizations must find a way to achieve their “new normal” if they hope to thrive.

However, as they do so, they need to look past the relatively simple task of putting people back in front of their desks safely. A fresh strategy is required to suit the times. One approach is to explore the foundation assumptions which are now embedded in their old business model. For example, they should date the following common, future milestones.

  • New Coronovirus Case Level-Off Day
  • Active Case Reduction Day
  • Curfew Lifting Day
  • Employee Separation Day
  • Remaining Employee Return Day
  • Customer Re-Opening Day
  • Border Re-Opening Day
  • International Flight Resumption Day
  • End of Social Distancing Day
  • Ro Below 1.0 Day (A measure of COVID-19’s contagiousness.)

Each of these public events signals a turning point in the crisis. While they are unknowable with absolute certainty, that’s not the main challenge. The problem is that executives in your company are likely to hold different estimates for each milestone. This discrepancy could just be an interesting curiosity, except that each individual is making daily decisions based on their personal understanding.

For example, if HR believes that Employee Return Day is on June 15th, but Customer Service commits to a Customer Re-Opening Day on June 1st, there’s a big problem. The company can waste time, effort and money if the two plans aren’t synchronized.

But this list of key dates is just a start. There are a number of other assumptions which only apply to your industry, or company which need to be unearthed. Here are some of the questions I have been urging clients to ask themselves. 

Q1 – What material changes have occurred in our business? Here, I recommend you brainstorm individually and then as a team. It’s no place for group-think – the tendency for people to conform to majority thinking. Focus on concrete changes which are tangible and can be measured.

Q2 – Why does the change matter? Here you must confront aspects of your business model which can no longer work. Query what will happen if you continue the old model in this new environment.

Q3 – If the change is permanent, what were the original assumptions that must be challenged? These were embedded in the old business model, perhaps never discussed. Now, you must make them explicit.

Q4 – What are the new assumptions? Given the data you have on hand, what will you assume moving forward?

Furthermore, to make sense of your predictions, also think in terms of “confidence”. For example, if your team believes that Border Re-Opening Day will be on September 30th, apply a confidence interval to this date. You may state: “We are 50% sure that the date will fall between September 1st and October 31st.” That’s very different from being “90% sure it will fall between September 25th and October 5th. “

This additional information helps you make better decisions, introducing added flexibility where it may be needed. Of course, this is just the beginning. You should continue the regular strategic planning process I have summarized in prior articles:

  1. Create a current snapshot
  2. Set a target month/year that will allow a breakthrough to manifest
  3. Craft measurable outcomes
  4. Backcast from the future to 2020, filling the gap with necessary actions and milestones
  5. Finally, ensure that the context of the discussion is one of exploration and innovation. The fact is, there will probably never be another moment like this in your business. Discontinuities of this magnitude rarely occur more than once in a lifetime.

Needless to say, companies that don’t revise their baseline hypotheses will be left at the starting line. In like manner, those who allow their CEO to set a bunch of flaky assumptions by himself will also run last.

Take the opportunity to make the most of this crisis by challenging the assumptions that render your old business model and strategy obsolete. Get all the members of your executive team talking to arrive at a new baseline.

Feels uncomfortable? The fact is that you are making an educated guess, then taking a bet that you are right. Regardless, your organization needs you to make such commitments so it can find success within this pandemic. 

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20200516/francis-wade-post-covid-assumptions