Fighting The Downturn Silence

Submitted by mauzenne on Sun, 07/05/2009 - 19:51.
in

This cast describes how to combat the normal tendency of directs to communicate LESS during a downturn.

During economic downturns, directs communicate less to us, their bosses. They're more afraid to disagree, they're more afraid to suggest different ways of doing things. This is a natural human response to the known and unknown stresses both internal and external. Look, if someone fears the changes they don't know are coming . . . they're not going to introduce MORE change into their portion of the universe. They're going to hunker down or panic, frankly, in our experience.

If you've ever been having a bad day, and when someone asked you how you were you said "fine" in a flat low response, you know how and why they're doing it. We've seen folks literally cross their arms during a meeting when asked a direct question, based on layoff rumors going around an office.

We used strong language to introduce this cast - "How to COMBAT the normal tendency of less communication". We meant to use that word. It's our job as managers to communicate. It's our most frequently used manager tool, overall, and to have it attenuated reduces our effectiveness.

As managers, we need some simple things we can do to pry open those lines of communication. And pry we will.


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dad2jnk's picture
Submitted by dad2jnk on Mon, 07/06/2009 - 23:31.

Trouble with iTunes?

Did iTunes not get the RSS feed yesterday?  Is anyone else having trouble?

Ken

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Submitted by gmpatterson on Wed, 07/08/2009 - 16:39.

Shouldn't we usually try to do this?

Ken - Not sure about iTunes...  It worked for me.

Mark and Mike,

Congratulations on another great podcast.  I only started listening recently and the Basic Series alone has helped me immensely.

In listening to this podcast I got the impression that for many managers the usual style is to prepare the goal, action plan, etc. and present it to the team for execution.  During turbulent times, however, your suggestion is to involve the team more in the planning and to increase communication.  My thought is that we should usually (90%+ of the time) be bringing a rough vision to the team for them to complete.  It shows them that you value their input and it helps them to buy in to the eventual solution.  To be honest, it is also a lot faster to jot down a few items on the page rather than to try to finish every detail before the presentation.

In my case, this is a necessity:  I lead a team of technical people but I was not promoted up through the ranks so while I understand the technical nature of their work and I can speak intelligently on it, they are the ones who understand the details enough to make the plan work.  Even if I had been promoted up and fully understood the details it still seems that it would be better to let them have their say.

I might have missed something in the podcast so please let me know if I misstated what you were saying.

Thanks, Greg