Strategic Thinking and Layoffs
November 14th, 2005Part of being an Effective Manager is not just focusing on your day to day activities, but thinking STRATEGICALLY about your team, your role, your company, and your industry. We find that most managers are truly HORRENDOUS at this, and that’s why we address it in this week’s podcast. We understand why - there is often a great deal of pressure to get down in the weeds, and often senior managers are delegating out un-connected tasks versus giving perspective and scope.
What got us thinking this way was our recent cast on layoffs (Oct 23). Frankly, nobody likes to talk about it, but as a manager you not only need to be ready to deliver the news of a layoff for the organization, you need to be ready to be laid off yourself. Managers who are most ready to deal with being laid off are those who have good strategic vision, and they get that by regularly scanning their environment.
In this show, we’ll talk about what you should be looking at regularly. We use layoffs as a context, but strategic environmental scanning must be done irrespective of layoffs - this is a habit that highly effective managers take for granted.
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November 14th, 2005 at 8:28 am
I think all your podcasts are really great!!
I have been able to put almost all of your ideas and information to very good use. However, I would really like to hear a show on how to deal with upper management who is resistant to these ideas. My current Director doesnt see the value in one-on-ones (gave her a copy of your podcast about one on ones and I doubt she even listened). She also doesnt see the value in policy and procedure!! I have gone ahead and implemented these and seen a huge increase in productivity but my director STILL thinks I am wasting time!
I love my staff, they are a great team open to new ideas but upper management is killing me! Anyway, thanks guys! Keep up the great work.
November 14th, 2005 at 7:18 pm
Thanks for the kind words!
We have shows about “managing up” and “persuading your boss” in our future, rest assured. As always, the key to motivating others is understanding what THEY want, and then showing them how what you want to DO gets THEM what they WANT. This is why Ben Franklin said, “Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason.” (Those are YOUR BOSS’s interestst, versus YOUR reason.)
Keep your head down…don’t crow about what you’re doing. When, after 4-5 weeks, you’ve notices better results and your TEAM is making positive comments, figure out how to delicately let your boss know that the TEAM loves it, and productivity really IS up. Forward an email, for instance…
On the other hand, can’t say whether I agree with your comments about “policy and procedure!” That can EASILY sound like “everyone should do everything THIS way, the way we have written down!” That rarely works. I don’t think of ONe on ONes as a policy, because policy has a habit of communicating a REQUIREMENT rather than showing the value of a better way. I see what we talk about as processes… and it’s been my experience that people respond to effective processes by seeing their results and adopting them as their own.
Promise - we’re going to get to bosses!
It’s a privilege to serve you. Please tell your friends and associates.
Mark
November 14th, 2005 at 8:02 pm
One more thing! Not saying you’re doing this, but just in case: professional managers and leaders DO NOT EVER speak ill of senior management in front of their teams. It’s not an excuse to say you’re “educating them.”
It’s a privilege to serve you.
Mark
November 16th, 2005 at 6:51 pm
Mark, iTunes shows this episode shows as the full 65 minutes in length but the audio stops around 35 minutes in. If you can truncate it without re-encoding it, or can re-encode from the original high quality audio, you can save your listeners a good 15MB or so of download. That aside: a great episode, as always, and a side-track well taken.
Thanks again,
Garth.
November 16th, 2005 at 7:09 pm
Wow! How did we (I) miss that??? I checked it out and you’re absolutely right. In addition to inconveniencing folks, our bandwidth costs are not insignificant anymore and having thousands of downloads where half of it is essentially empty air doesn’t help one bit!
Thanks for bringing it to our attention … I’ll resolve immediately!
Michael
P.S. Let this be a lesson to folks — No more editing the shows at 2:00am from a hotel room!
November 19th, 2005 at 1:22 am
Congrats on another great show.
I thought I’d throw my two cents in. I agreed with a statement that was said in the show about how companies never talk about layoffs in advance. In over 10 years, I’ve never seen it until recently.
My current employer actually laid out a strategy and “big picture” for all employees via an “all employee” meeting conducted by the CEO. He explained the strategy, and explained exactly what teams and positions were being moved to another location or eliminated. Note - this was notice to those impacted employees at least one year in advance of the change actually happening. My jaw literally dropped as I had never seen that before. I gained a new respect for the firm and, close to a year later, I noticed that the employees have accepted it and respect the fact that they were held up in such a high regard as to be told the God-honest truth.
November 19th, 2005 at 12:17 pm
Emad-
Well done and well said. One of the best artcles we have ever read on layoffs is called “The Hard Work of Being a Soft Manager” and describes a similar situation. Candor and eary, frequent communication are the key to doing it well, and yet it’s so counterintuitive, almost no one will do it.
Make some notes about how it happened, file them, and when it’s your turn, run THAT play.
It’s a privilege to serve you,
Mark
October 15th, 2006 at 11:14 pm
[…] Strategic Thinking and LayoffsPart of being an Effective Manager is not just focusing on your day to day activities, but thinking STRATEGICALLY about your team, your role, your company, and your industry. We find that most managers are truly HORRENDOUS at this, and that’s why we address it in this week’s podcast. We understand why - there is often a great deal of pressure to get down in the weeds, and often senior managers are delegating out un-connected tasks versus giving perspective and scope. […]