Be A Unifying Leader In A Chaotic 2017

All organizations are exposed to the winds of change. Those forces are beyond the control of any leader, but effective leaders can protect their companies, team, and themselves.

Jonathan Sands, Managing Partner of New-York-based boutique investment firm Artist Capital, recognizing the heightened scrutiny of the workplace culture in tech, added a tech investor perspective as well, saying “it is equally important for investors and board members to exhibit ethical leadership as it is for founders.“. In fact, leader missteps are amplified no thanks to social media, which makes it all the more important to right the ship in times of economic difficulty.

Engaged teams can be 22% more productive, have 25% less voluntary turnover, and earn 21% more profit compared to disengaged teams.

In the face of economic uncertainty, there are psychological stressors on teams that go beyond startup failure. 10,000 staff reported that 4 basic needs have to be met at work, namely: Trust, Hope, Compassion and Stability.

Every manager affects their team in an outsized manner along the 4 abovementioned factors. The trickle of positive or negative interactions influencing staff along the 4 factors strengthens or erodes engagement, which in turn affects financial performance.

In 2009, Dr James Harter did a study showing that even in a depressed economic environment, companies are incented to maintain employee engagement levels. Companies in the study with an engaged staff recorded 2.6 times higher growth in earnings-per-share than companies with low engagement.

Build Trust

Good advice bears repeating. Trust-building is a particularly old golden nugget that has withstood the test of time. Build trust in the workplace in these 4 ways:

Workplace Transparency

When in doubt, overcommunicate.

Wharton’s Peter Capelli, Director of the Centre of Human Resources advocates framing the situation to your team as quickly as possible. VC at Point Nine Capital, Michael Wolfe adds that leaders ought to disseminate crucial information such as meeting notes, finances, company targets, hires, feedback and more.

The information that comes through early and often paints a credible picture of what is being done to pull through difficult times. Ultimately your startup team is smart and ambitious, thus they will expect and appreciate the transparency that comes with your open communication, which will only go to strengthen the bonds of trust between you and your team.

Pull Together

The biggest scapegoat for failure at the workplace is a lack of collaboration and its conjoined twin poor communication. Salesforce found the above in a 2012 study, with an unsurprising 86% of leaders concurring.

Norwegian loan comparison website Loans.no found themselves in a tough spot in 2008 / 2009. While much of the world was suffering from the effects of the financial crisis, Norway actually posted GDP growth of 2.2 percent, a unicorn result. In that time, the company had to pull together not just for it’s own sake, but to work in accordance with government policy that was directed towards greater consumer spending. “Business was good but hours were much longer than usual, and everyone was anxious about the economy”. Company leaders however, kept talking to the team, ensuring that everyone was pulling in the same direction. The experience strengthened relationships. Today most of the team then are still present at the company.

Relationships need to be nurtured between teams when times are good, so that they may be resilient enough to endure when times are bad. Against that backdrop, a downturn is the worst possible time to slash team-building budgets. It is self-sabotage right when togetherness and team effort are needed the most.

Make Goals Public

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is the trending business catchphrase. What are your organization’s OKRs? If the answer isn’t immediately obvious to you, congratulations! There is a clear and straightforward opportunity for improvement.

OKRs, and company values in general, ought to take the form of concentric circles. The innermost circle contains the OKRs held in common by the entire company, and cascade outwards into department-specific OKRs.

These specific OKRs, congruent with the overall company OKRs, foster greater accountability, but also increase trust between teams as well as management. Done right, all within the organization can see how everyone is on the same side, pulling in the same direction.

Ask Specific Questions

DBS Bank is one of Asia’s largest banks, and Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS, found that once he became CEO, he felt that all of a sudden he was the person who knew least about the company. The organization did not change, but his team’s relationship with him changed tremendously.

Eschew the boilerplate “How are things going?”, in favour of “I noticed that X is happening. Do you need any additional support?”. Subtly inserted into regular conversations and automated feedback, specific questions such as these elicit a sliver of truth that can be an early warning system for people challenges.

Best of all, greater knowledge is a facilitator of greater trust. A leader who knows about the challenges facing the team is in a better position to offer help, and will be trusted far more than a leader who does not.

Show Compassion

With trust as the bedrock of your relationship with your team, compassion is the humanizing attribute for your leadership. When times are bad, your team knows to expect bad news. What they are looking for, even subconsciously, is how the bloodletting is handled. This is especially true for experienced members of the team who have been with the company through both good times and lean.

Seek To Understand

Stephen Covey of the “7 Habits Of Highly Effective People” fame asks that we “seek first to understand“. In the crucible of the workplace going through hard times, this takes on special importance. If we are to avoid mistakes such as rash separation decisions through irreversible snap judgments, this is a skill worth practising.

In the heat of the moment, practice ‘active listening’. Say less than you think. Stay silent if unsure whether what you want to say is the best thing in the circumstances. Always have more questions than statements. Lastly, listen to understand, not just wait for your turn to speak.

If you are able to paraphrase your conversation partner’s words back to them and get their acknowledgement that you have understood, you are on the right path to understanding.

Be Fair

Babies as young as 15 months have been shown to exhibit a moral sense of altruism and fairness. Unsurprisingly, all of us are sensitive to perceived unfairness at work. After all, we’ve had a lifetime to fine-tune our expectations.

As a manager, this is a quality unquestionably worth cultivating. It transcends all cultural and language barriers.

Show Appreciation

Warren Buffett has said that showing appreciation for others is an important pillar of his success. While we can’t all be Warren Buffett, we can all be appreciative bosses who give a lift to team members with a few well-chosen words.

Some engagement research claims that every nugget of criticism ought to be counter-balanced with 5 instances of praise. Naturally, your mileage may vary. What is beyond dispute is the directionality of the argument. All things being equal, praise will elicit a positive response from its recipient, with no downside.

While skeptics may rightly retort “Should I line up my team every Monday morning and say good job last week?”, that is a question of method rather than principle. The same goes for objections such as complacency due to praise, or praise inviting requests for a raise.

The smart boss is correct to withhold praise from easily complacent employees, and to dodge pressure for a raise. However there will be a time when praise will lift deflated spirits, and a wise boss will know to keep praise in their arsenal.

Introduce Stability

Author Mike Wyatt opines that “stability is something we don’t often think about as a leadership quality – that is until it is absent.” In a crisis, leaders who bring stability to an unstable situation can rally people around them, inspire confidence in the future, and offer their team a sense of security.

Sharing about the unprecedented downturn in oil and gas, Dave Taylor, CEO of specialist recruitment site Drillers.com, cast a light on the downright brutal conditions he is witnessing. “The downturn has resulted in job losses in excess of 400,000“. Calmness in the face of overwhelming adversity is a basic requirement for work in drilling at this time.

In order to be the stable leader that your team needs, moor yourself to these ideals:

Have A True North

Stable leaders have a strong set of convictions while being capable of keeping an open mind. Bill George and Peter Sims wrote extensively on the subject. Stable leaders with a clear ‘true north’ possess a high degree of self-awareness.

There are free resources that offer guidance on the self-development process for discovering one’s true north, perhaps none more authoritative than Bill George’s worksheet here.

The assessment begins with an evaluation of one’s own strengths and weaknesses, purpose and values. Thereafter, conducting your actions and thoughts in accordance with the same purpose and values builds stability both for and within your team. Having a vision resting on clearly stated values, as well as conviction to hold people accountable to values over outcomes builds on this.

Psychological Safety

The corollary to cultivating a workplace where people have the courage to innovate towards success, is to nurture a workplace culture where people have the freedom to fail. Psychological safety is the top factor for team success according to Google’s internal study with over 180 active teams internally. A team that feels safe from embarassment and insecurity is a team that is willing to take risks to achieve more.

There is a finer point to be made about mistakes. Mistakes come up 100% of the time. Some mistakes are made as the “price of admission” to transformational change. These are errors of omission, and are inevitable.

There are also errors of commission which are made with full knowledge that they are wrong. Intuition tells us that these are not acceptable. However, looping back to the earlier point about “seeking to understand“, we ought to ask some specific questions about the reasons and circumstances surrounding the error. There may be reasons that we are not privy to. For instance, a new workflow may actually be causing problems unforeseen by management. Errors of commission are rare and ought to be treated as such.

Care That Matters

One of the ways in which great managers set themselves apart is by how they care for their team. In a study of people staffing phones at a company, researchers investigated if employees would falsify reports to boost their pay.

Should the business monitor employees more closely to reduce cheating and maybe spend additional money to audit work done? Or trust their staff to be honest, and absorb some cheating as the cost of doing business? Researchers found that conscience of the individual was not the biggest factor in predicting cheating.

Instead, worker perception of how the company views them was a better predictor of cheating. Workers who felt that the company is looking out for them were less likely to cheat while those who perceived and unfair and uncaring employer were likelier to cheat.

Positivity Through Hope

In “Hope: How Triumphant Leaders Create The Future”, author Andrew Razeghi writes that “Hope sets objectives, ignites will, focuses the organisation in turbulent times, renews energy, displaces boredom as it succeeds, fosters creativity and innovation, and hope inspires people to want to do the right thing.”

Hope defines what your team grows towards, in the way that plants reach for the sun. Bear the following in mind when casting that glorious shine:

Base It On Fact, Not Fiction

“Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard” by Chip and Dan Heath is one of my all-time favourites. The book describes “bright spots” in a company, representing where the company is thriving. Lessons can be learned from the bright spots, and in turn be applied to other problems in the company, according to the Heath brothers.

With the lessons learned from bright spots, companies have firmer footing to communicate a message of positivity and hope to employees facing their own challenges. A message that is grounded in reality but points the way to an as-yet unrealised one.

Learn From Failure

Facebook popularised the mantra “Fail fast, fail often”. While you may not possess the same level of enthusiasm for failure as Mark Zuckerberg did, there is a universal truth within. All companies with no exceptions have to learn from failure. Learning rapidly what does not work will accelerate your journey towards what does.

Before commencing a risky activity for the day, make a note of these 3 steps:

1. Before: Lay out what you’re testing for. What does success look like?
2. During: Track your metrics. Pay attention to unexpected outcomes.
3. After: Review results with honesty. Honesty aids learning.

The above is as close to a generalised explanation of the Facebook fail mantra. May you fail your way to a spectacular success.

Be A Great Boss, In Good Times And Bad

Being a great boss in bad times is less Herculean, more Churchilian. You don’t have to persuade people to move mountains with a carrot, they know that survival depends on it.