Tag Archives: Ideas

How do you Maintain Morale in the Face of Uncertainty? Four Guidelines

Situation: Industry is changing and the CEO must adapt both the structure and focus of her company. Adaptation will include a 10% layoff of staff not aligned with the new focus. It is critical that this adaptation be executed in a way that is not disruptive to the remaining employees. How do you maintain morale in the face of uncertainty?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Ask for employee input as to industry trends and what possible directions for the company. Employees are closer to the customer than the CEO and have valuable insights. Gather input in small group meetings to prompt discussion and ideas. Make this a research talk. Leverage the “wisdom of the crowd”.
  • Research other industries that have undergone similar changes. What strategies did the most successful companies pursue? Could these work for you? When faced with protracted uncertainty, what did others do while waiting for market clarity?
  • Conduct the layoffs in one day. Monday is better than Friday. The benefit of a Monday layoff is that you will see everyone on Tuesday and the team can continue to address their concerns. Do it early in the day. Give final checks the day of the layoff. Provide instructions for filing for unemployment assistance via the Internet. Hold a company meeting for remaining staff immediately after the layoffs. Focus your message on the future and positioning the company for the future. Prepare a brief summary of your message. Distribute it as a take-away from the meeting.
  • Be prepared for a grieving process following the layoff. Consider utilizing an expert on grieving to overview the process. Following the company meeting, have key employees conduct smaller group meetings to lead discussions and allay fears about the layoff. Fully prep these individuals about the situation with written responses to likely questions.

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How Do You Assess Team Morale? Five Points

Situation: Given current uncertainty about the future of the economy, a CEO wants to assess team morale. In the past, as the company grew, she received lots of input on how people were feeling about their jobs. As the company has grown, she no longer receives this. What can she do to gather more input without alarming people in the process? How do you assess team morale?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Find opportunities to spend time informally with your employees. Talk to them one-on-one or in small groups in the lunchroom or while getting tea. Organize, or have others organize company events where individuals can be more relaxed and open about their feelings.
  • If you have lunch in the lunchroom 3 times a week, and sit with different employees each day. Over the course of a month or a few months you can talk to the majority of them – perhaps several times.
  • Ask how they are – family, friends, relations, and their neighborhood. They may be hesitant to talk to the CEO about their jobs, but it is possible to get a sense of how they feel indirectly by asking about family and friends. Listen to what they have to say. Be sympathetic.
  • Be open to others. MBWA – Manage By Walking Around.
  • Ask supervisors to be your ears. They work with their teams on a daily basis and will have a sense of what is going on and how employees are feeling. They may have good ideas about improvements that the company can make in employee relations.

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How Do You Improve Communication with a Key Employee? Three Points

Situation: A CEO has a challenge. While a key employee does excellent work and has fresh, new ideas, he can be overly protective of these and how they are implemented. The result is that conversations often become combative. How can the CEO better lay out alternatives and improve these conversations? How do you improve communication with a key employee?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Have a conversation with the employee about communication and competitiveness.
    • Be honest. Acknowledge your own combativeness during previous conversations. Discuss and develop alternatives to avert this in the future.
    • If future communications take the same turn toward combativeness, be conscious. Admit what’s happening and shift the tone. Keep the conversation civil.
  • When this employee offers an idea, listen and repeat the idea first to confirm that that was said was understood.
    • Ask questions to clarify specifics of the idea prior to offering a different perspective.
    • When offering an alternative, ask for the employee’s thoughts on that perspective and whether this would complement or conflict with his idea.
    • The objective of the conversation is to develop alternatives which will benefit the company and its operation. Keep the focus on this.
  • Take some time and sketch out your own thought process before responding to his proposal. Ask for some time to consider this, if necessary.
    • Repeat his words and objective as you heard it and ask whether you heard correctly.
    • Identify any challenge that may arise implementing his suggestion, and ask whether he sees the same challenge. Could his suggestion be tweaked to avoid this challenge.
    • Present another alternative only after the previous steps, and ask what the employee thinks about this alternative. Work together to design and decide on the appropriate solution. Assure that he receives credit for his idea.

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How Do You Enhance Teamwork and Leadership? Six Suggestions

Situation: A CEO wants to enhance teamwork and improve leadership at all levels within the company. Occasionally there is an attitude of “not my job” in response to a request. Differences in direction from leadership within the company has led to confusion of priorities. A common issue is the need to assure that priorities are aligned and consistently communicated across teams and the organization. How do you keep everybody on the same page? How do you enhance teamwork and leadership?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Conduct daily and/or weekly meetings to assure that everyone is aligned and on message. This has the additional advantage of bubbling up more ideas from deeper down in the organization.
  • Develop clear action items within these meetings. Confirm at least verbal understanding and agreement on each item.
  • Involve all team members in team meetings. Enforce participation.
  • As facilitator, take charge of the meetings.
    • Reduce long, drawn-out meetings to short, concise meetings.
    • Prep ahead of the meeting – let all participants know that they are expected to come prepared as well.
    • Stay on focus during the meetings.
    • At the end of important discussions, and again at the end of the meeting, summarize action items and responsibilities, and confirm understanding.
  • Other things that help:
    • Reduce the use of buss words during meetings. Speak in language that all understand.
    • Speak in terms of outcomes, not tasks. If the discussion is derailed, refocus on outcomes.
  • This works effectively in meetings with all levels of employees.

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How Do You Manage Company and Board Dynamics? Four Points

Situation: A company started as a collaboration of friends. Upon incorporation the leader became the CEO, and some of the original team became members of the Board. The CEO struggles with the responsibilities of being CEO while wishing to maintain the friendships that drive the company. How do you manage company and board dynamics?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • While the company was formed as a collaboration of friends, once it incorporated the nature of the relationships necessarily changed. While away from work the CEO may remain friends and close to the others; however, within the company there must be one CEO who is responsible to the shareholders for operating the company according to that individual’s vision. If the CEO and company are successful, all will be rewarded.
    • Shareholders are not partners – a partnership entity is inherently different from a corporate entity based on share ownership.
  • Within a corporate structure, majority control is critical.
    • While one should never trample on the rights of other shareholders, having 51% is better than having 47% ownership. Majority ownership makes it unnecessary to assemble a majority to drive the company in the direction that the CEO seeks.
    • That said, it is important to encourage the ideas and creativity of minority shareholders who are also employees. There is an art to recognizing and incorporating the ideas of others while the CEO, in the end, maintains final say.
  • The CEO’s job – and preferably within a small company as both Chairman and CEO – is to develop the CEO’s vision of the company and drive this through the organization.
  • Having a key employee report to the Board rather than to the CEO is likely a mistake. Employees do not do well long-term reporting to a committee.

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How Do You Transition to a New CEO? Four Strategies

Situation: A company founder was advised by her Board to help them hire a CEO with more experience to run the company. This new CEO is now in place. As the founder gains more experience, the Board has indicated its willing to consider her as CEO. How do you transition to a new CEO?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Become the fire hose! Build a tight relationship with the new CEO and together build the future strategy that will enable you both to win.
    • Others will focus on past issues. Keep your approach and advice positive. Position yourself as a partner, not an adversary. Emphasize your supportive and collaborative capacities.
    • Become the new CEO’s go-to person: trustworthy, objective, knowledgeable, reliable. Nurture the development of chemistry with the new CEO.
    • When the new CEO asks what needs to be done, produce the plan. Leverage your knowledge and expertise to become his greatest resource.
  • Enlist the CEO’s support of one or more of the focused strategies that are already in play within the company. Build the support of the Board and focus on boosting company value to 2x sales. The Board won’t forget who produced the original initiatives.
  • You have more power than you imagine – both with the Board and the new CEO – due to your knowledge of the marketplace and the business. Use it wisely.
    • While there is a new CEO, the company has already been profitable and company operations are clean. The Board will remember this.
  • How do you boost the chances to eventually be named CEO by the Board?
    • Tie yourself very closely to the new CEO – be this person’s more important resource. Build and cement your position as his most important ally within the company. It will help you to gain his support for implementing your ideas.
    • Segue your relationship with the Board members to become the company’s next CEO.
    • At the same time, grow your successor within the company so that you will be ready to move up to CEO when the opportunity arises.

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How Do You Simplify Access to Knowledge? Five Factors

Interview with John Kogan, CEO, Proformative

Situation: An organization that provides an online network for senior financial executives has an immense amount of content on its web portal. To improve the user experience of their target audience, they want to simplify access to this knowledge. How do you simplify access to knowledge?

Advice from John Kogan:

  • We have a rich portal with an immense amount of content potentially valuable to senior corporate finance[K1]  executives. We have many ways to access this content – perhaps too many. Our objective is to get the highest quality answers in front of the user with the least effort on their part. Google has done a very good job of pulling the best content to the top given a million possibilities to each query. If we can do this, we become the Google of finance and accounting!
  • Most people know what they want when they come to a site. We have started by creating a clean user experience to allow them that good “line of sight” to what they want.
  • Our objective is to help the user identify the right content with the smallest number of queries. From the user perspective, exposing the wrong content is a waste of time. We want to show them high quality, compelling content which directly addresses their need.
  • To develop quality content, you must have an open mind. It’s not about what we want to say, but understanding the user’s needs and addressing these. You have to be guided by the data to tell you what’s happening on the site and what the user wants to see, and then provide them relevant information.
  • Achieving this means that we must find people who are smarter than us in these areas and gain their input. In the end, your company is no better than the ideas that you can either dream up or gather from others. We constantly seek fresh perspectives from investors, advisors, users and potential users.
  • Finally, you must take action on the data you gather. Too many companies suffer from information paralysis. The solution is Vision plus Will plus Doing it!

You can contact John Kogan at info@proformative.com

Category: Strategy, Technology

Key Words: Strategy, Technology, Content, Portal, Access, Simplify, Knowledge, Google, User, Experience, Triage, Sticky, Relevant, Ideas, Execute

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