Happy New Year! This is my first blog post for 2013 and like everyone else I am reflecting on this new year that I’ve been blessed to see. The future is always unknown. From nature, life’s best teacher, we know the future is never all cloudy (the sun will find a way to break through). Nor, is the future always sunny (challenges and disappointments come with the territory). So, we can expect ups and downs like every other year we have lived. With the rapid rate of change, however, the ups and downs can be significant.
Last year, several managers shared with me how difficult it was for them to stick to their goals and plans in this environment. Some also shared their difficulty in managing their own frustrations and that of their team members. They feared that they will forever work in a reactive mode where they can literally wake up and find their world at work has changed. These frustrations are real and understandable. Rather, than do a post about goal setting and planning for 2013, I’ll share some of my advice that I gave these managers last year. It still applies now. The following are three critical skills every manager needs in 2013:
Experimentation
The truth is that there is too much information to know for certain what goals and plans will work and what will not succeed. As Mashable explained last year, “while only about one-third of the world’s population is connected, the amount of data we generate and consume is likely to blow your hair back.” Consider the following that occurs in one day:
- 294 billion emails are sent. (It would take two years for the US Post Office to process that amount of mail.)
- Two million blog posts are written. (These are enough posts to fill Time Magazine for 770 years.)
To deal with this new workplace reality, managers today need to learn how to test their business assumptions before investing too many company assets in a plan or goal. Experimenting quickly and often—in alignment with the strategic direction of the company—allows managers to discard ineffective goals and plans. It also allows for smarter risk taking when experimentation is done on a pilot basis. So, be open to trying multiple approaches to resolve an organizational issue. As you experiment wisely, you’ll be more likely to find effective approaches to the challenges you face.
To help your team:
Help them understand the new realities of change and the uncertainty that comes with business today. Let them vent when they need to and use coaching, listening, and questioning skills to help them manage their negative emotions. Above all, be an example of the behavior you want your team to show. Show them and help them and they’ll be more likely to accept the unpredictable nature of business planning today.
Flexibility
Planning in today’s business environment today is challenging. We can just ask MySpace and AOL how hard it is to plan for the future. At times, now, business planning can feel like taking a roller coaster ride in the dark. As a result, managers cannot hold too firmly to their well crafted plans and goals. They must be flexible and accepting of change. To develop flexibility, managers need learning agility (the ability to learn and adapt from one’s experiences) and emotional intelligence (effectively managing one’s emotions and the emotions of others).
Managers hurt themselves and their teams when they rigidly adhere to a plan or a goal because everyone worked on it. It’s better to be open to new learning and to adapt plans and goals as necessary to new business realities.
To help your team:
Help your team understand that plans and goals today cannot be rigidly followed. They are flexible activities that managers and employees need to adapt in response to changing needs. Assist your team in develop their learning agility and emotional intelligence. Use feedback (including 360 feedback) and developmental activities to improve their self awareness. Assessments can help in this area as can effective coaching from you.
Reframing
Reframing is one skill that I personally have found critical to my own success. Over the years, my ability to reframe the unexpected twists and turns that came my way has allowed me to make beneficial changes. Reframing is a skill that I encourage managers to develop in all of my business efforts.
Reframing is everywhere in our popular culture: making lemonade out of lemons and every cloud has a silver lining are examples. Reframing is finding another positive way to view a negative situation. Reframing is critical to innovation and problem solving. It is also essential to adapting to those frequent unexpected changes that are part of the workplace. Finally, reframing helps managers to be nimble as they turn problems into opportunities.
To help your team:
Help your team learn to view problems differently in the workplace. Encourage them to brainstorm potential opportunities from the problems they encounter. Encourage them to challenge their assumptions. With time, you will build a team whose first reaction to problems and challenges is to reframe them into positive opportunities.
Given the unpredictability of business today, you might ask should you stop making goals and plans? Absolutely not! Goals and plans provide strategic direction. Without goals and plans, we cannot see the forest for the trees. What’s critical is the quality of the goals and plans you create. Utilize your experience and your intuition, pay attention to your industry, listen to your customers, involve your team members, and leverage the wisdom of all of your stakeholders to make your goals align more closely with your real-world reality. With this attention, you will build plans and goals that have relevance to your real world situation. As you develop them, be willing to discard what no longer works and change your approach as necessary to stay viable. Most of all stay relevant! Everything is and will continue to change quickly around us.
Like a person who leaves home for college, business planning today is like Bill Cosby’s sitcom, A Different World. It’s very different from how it used to be. As the late blues singer Phoebe Snow sings so well in the show’s theme song: It’s a different world than where you come from!
Post image of man with suitcase-courtesy of chanpipat / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
About Robert Tanner
I really like this post because I believe it is totally relevant to today’s business economy and the world overall. One area where I think we all get stuck, particularly in large corporations is in the budget process. How are we supposed to come up with budgets when things change so quickly in the world today? It seems hard to stick to a budget when life is in constant motion. Do you have any suggestions from a upper management perspective as well as a departmental perspective? Thanks!
Mary,
I am glad you enjoyed my first article for 2013. Thanks for taking the time to comment and for your follow-up question on the difficulty of managing a budget in an environment of constant motion. To deal with this problem, organizations will need to make some adjustments to the budget process to align with the new behavior they want to encourage in the organization. A fixed annual budget process does not support an environment where change is occurring more rapidly. I talk about this process in one of my earlier blog posts, Leading Change (Step 8) – Anchor Change in the Culture.
Overall, Mary, a big problem I see in working with managers on their change efforts is that they do not take a holistic approach to bringing it about. Senior leaders will work on cultural change (encouraging flexibility and experimentation) but pay insufficient attention to the organizational processes in the organization (like budget). This leads to frustration at the middle and lower managerial levels as these managers try to respond to these important change efforts but find significant obstacles in their way (insufficient budget, inability to increase their budget, etc.)
One way to do this is to take a shorter term view of the budget period (instead of the common annual period that many large organizations use). Upper management might still use an annual process for overall planning purposes but also build in some review points that align more closely with the rate of change they are experiencing. A review of prior periods might also show that more allocation is needed in the overall and departmental budgets to respond to unanticipated costs that arise from changing circumstances. Some organizations allocate money to departments for experimentation purposes. Others give their managers some autonomy to address unforeseen expenses beyond their departmental budget allocation.
There are many possibilities but this is an area where upper management working with their managers and employees can come up with some customized solutions for this budget problem. Two-way discussion is needed between upper management and the organizational stakeholders to address the issue so everyone owns the problem. The goal will be to find the balance between a blank check budget process and a rigid budget process that sabotages flexibility and experimentation.