I start my days early.  I am normally starting my work day by five am, sorting through the overnight emails, collecting my thoughts for the day, assembling my to do list, reading the news, and enjoying the magical powers of a full city roast coffee.  My early morning habits started when I was responsible for the preload operations at UPS, drinking vending machine coffee while a great group of folks with similar job imposed sleep patterns made sure the drivers could get on their delivery routes by eight am. I never got out of the habit of getting up early. I also love the peace and quiet the early morning hours bring. A good time to reflect, which is what I did this morning.

I was thinking back on my career and how fortunate I have been to have met and worked with some of the real thought leaders in business.  At the risk of unintentionally leaving someone off the list, here are the names that came to mind.

Tom Peters.  I admire intelligence and passion.  Tom may be the smartest guy I ever met, and no one can doubt his passion for excellence.  My time in his organization has helped me to see the world of business, and life, through a different lens. And it is nice to be able to let your freak flag fly.

Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner.  Authors of the Leadership Challenge, a body of work I am most proud to be involved with. Jim, a mentor and friend that has made me a better consultant and Barry, a brilliant researcher who can make data tell a compelling and necessary story.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming.  From the first time I heard Dr. D tell a group of senior automotive executives that they were “all hacks”, I knew it was going to be a fun ride. Eighty plus years old and he tirelessly pushed, supported, educated, and even screamed at us to understand the statistical nature of work.

Peter Block.  Early in my organization development career, I happened upon his white paper titled, “The Positive Use of Politics”.  It was the precursor to Peter Block’s great model of understanding influence in organizations.  Listening to him speak to our group at GM, I remember just thinking how suddenly it all made sense. It still does.

Chip Bell.  Not only brilliant, but very kind!  I remember him working with my group at a midwest utility. He helped a group of young consultants understand professionalism and service.  He was the first Navy Seal I had met..love those stories of plucking astronauts out of the ocean!

Robert Frame.  Perhaps not as well known as some of the others, he should have been!  Bob was one of the first to assemble a practical guide of interventions for the organization development practitioner. I got to work with him at GM and I still use his transition management model.

Jerry Hirshberg.  Unbelievable. Painter. Clarinetist. Speaker. Author. Leaves design at GM with a passion for getting innovation right, starts and builds Nissan Design Institute. His book, “Creative Priority” should be required reading for anyone involved in product innovation.  He has this cool house he designed with windows in the roof that lets you track the sun throughout the day! He designed my favorite car I have ever owned..the Infiniti J30.

Red Motley. President of Parade magazine.  Met him while at UPS. I admire great salespeople and he gave me one thought that has always helped me sell. He implored us to be want creators, not need fillers.

Tom Peters said you can judge a person’s chance of success by the size of their rolodex.  I am so fortunate to have these names in mine.  Reflecting on them this morning was an inspiring way to start the day.  Time for another cup of coffee. Added sending out thank you notes to my to do list.

I have observed that most reductions in force have not been based on objective study of work loads and actual resource requirements. More often than not, supervisors are simply directed to reduce their team. That is repeated again and again until the system reaches it breaking point and work cannot be accomplished on schedule.

Because of that, many employees I speak with are feeling stress levels unheard of just a few years ago. I hear them talking about burnout and just trying to make it through the week without any major problems. Most are pinning their hopes to a bounce in the economy so that staffing levels can be increased. Disengagement levels are increasing as survival, not excellence, becomes the new norm. Of course, most executives deny this is happening in their organization. How would they know?

I do think there is a fair amount of truth that staffing levels have reached the point of stressing the resources. I also believe that employees need to realize that in this economy, there is a new normal. We are competing globally, and that means we have to be willing to work as hard or harder than our competitors.

I have been fortunate to work internationally and have seem some striking differences in the work effort, especially in developing countries. For instance, I conducted a session in Hungary where most of the participants were engineers. The session started at eight. By seven, the majority of the class was there, and they were studying the class materials. I was surprised to see them taking notes on everything I said. At break times, most stayed in the room and studied their notes or came up to ask me questions. At the end of the session, you guessed it, they stayed in the classroom to study or ask questions to make sure they understood the content.

Contrast that to some, certainly not all, similar sessions in the states. Those of us who train or facilitate in corporate America often joke among each other that we can predict the first two questions we will get. “Where are the doughnuts?” and “What time will we be finishing today?” I generally tell participants that their breaks are five minutes shorter than what I have planned. I know they will be late. And schedule a session on Friday that runs until five??? Forget about it!

I don’t intend to be unkind here. Of course there are many, maybe even a majority, of people I work with that have upped their game. I believe that we need to accept this new normal of working harder and probably longer in this new economy. Perhaps we can tap that great American competitive spirit again and outwork the competition.

This will be tough. We will need to rethink work life balance. I recently had a chance to be part of a conversation about that balance with a group that included one of the highest paid speakers in the world. He listened politely, but finally offered his take. He said that he understands the need to balance work with family life, and that he probably had made some choices to work when he could have been home that he might now question. Then he paused, and added, “but if I choose to work when you choose to be home, don’t bitch about me making a lot more money than you.” I think he may be right.

I have got to get to work!

My career started in operations and one of the things I liked about it was the availability of real time, objective performance data. I would generally know within twenty-four hours what my cost per piece was, how we did in meeting schedules, and the quality of the product we produced. This data allowed me to manage my resources well and produce realistic plans for improvements.

The dark side of this visibility is that it encourages organizations to target operations for improvements when the real opportunities lie in the staff areas where knowledge work is performed. Today’s economy demands greater efficiencies and cost improvements. Yet, I rarely find a staff area that has a handle on their real costs. Knowledge workers do not have performance metrics that define what a fair day’s work is for a fair day’s wage.

I am increasingly asked to provide team building for staff areas that are facing performance pressures. The symptoms that I am asked to help with often involve issues between the team leader and the team members. The team leader is under pressure to produce more with less and that puts him/her in a position of asking more from each individual. This is often manifested by increasing work loads and working hours, including overtime. Team members complain about not having enough time to do their work and the negative affect on their work/life balance. My advice to most of my clients is to treat this issue at the cause, not the symptom.

The cause is the lack of a defined standard for what is a reasonable expectation for the knowledge worker’s productivity.  You can’t count how many pieces were made. There are no industrial engineering time studies available. Rarely are there true quality metrics. Performance appraisals are excessively subjective and usually skewed toward the positive.

My recommendation is to begin leading your internal staffs as if they were external providers to the company. What are you providing of value back to the organization? What would they pay for that if they purchased it from an outside provider? Looking at your internal costs, would you make a profit if you charged the same?  Are the internal customers of your staff’s work happy with the quality and timeliness? How do you know?

So maybe for your next team building meeting, put away those personality style assessments, those conflict resolution games, those “can’t we all just get along?” activities. Instead consider an agenda focused on:

• Moving beyond each individuals job description, what is it that you offer to the organization that produces real value? Benchmark external providers of the same services and get a sense of what they charge for the same. Take this down to an individual team member level.
• Lead a discussion to get a real sense of what it costs your team to produce those products/services. Go beyond salaries and include all the overhead; the office space, utilities, equipment, furnishings, services from other areas, etc. Prepare to be shocked.
• What quality indicators do you have? How do you know whether you produce inferior, adequate, or excellent service?
• Same thing here for delivery standards.  How do you know whether you are producing on time? What is world class for this from outside providers?
• External providers are used to increasing demands to lower our prices.  Internally, are you prepared to lower your costs?  If you want a merit increase next year, can you justify it b¥ market pricing?

Lastly, and maybe most difficult, talk about the role of knowledge workers as professionals focused on output, not hours worked. I see too many staff people thinking their value is the amount of hours they work. Those of us that provide services as external providers watch our hours as well, but we understand a client rarely accepts a delay because “we are already working too hard”.

I am convinced that the key focus for helping our economy is improving white collar productivity.  Don’t worry about the factory…chances are the supervisors are reviewing their operations reports even as you read this!

Recessions do end. The economy has historically rebounded after eight to fourteenth months. They are cyclical. The International Monetary Fund suggests global recessions are on an eight to ten year cycle. As we prepare to exit this latest recession there are some things worth considering that could help you get the most from the expected bounce upward, and be more able to handle the inevitable return to recessionary cycles.

Leadership in many organizations became much more directive as they tried to get their financial house in order during this recession. This will make it more difficult to enable other members of your managerial team to lead their teams. Whether intentioned or not, the message has been sent that when the organization faces critical challenges, the executives need to take over. This is a very good time to reflect on why you may have felt the need to direct the recovery from the top rather than relying upon the leadership down the ranks. What skills need to be bolstered in middle management ranks so that they will be trusted to lead without the almost parental guidance from above?

What changes have happened to your product or service offerings during this time and are there any related effects that could hinder future growth?  There is generally great pressure to lower prices during slow economic times. Devaluing your product or service offerings might have impacted your brand image and equity moving forward. Your sales force may have grown comfortable relying on discounting instead of selling the value of your offerings. You may also have trained your customers to consider price first, value second.

There is a very different mindset and attitude in the workforce when the focus is on pursuing an exciting and ennobling future rather than the reactionary “avoid disaster” approach that seemed to dominate many efforts during these tough times. If you need innovation to insure your place in the market in the future, you will need to encourage sound risk taking and a more adventurous spirit. It will take time to convince the workforce that you are serious about this. Many in the workforce are fearful of taking risks that might jeopardize their jobs.

There are positive changes that came out of this adjustment. A renewed focus and appreciation for performance has helped to diminish the culture of entitlement so many US corporations have embraced. Longevity of service can be respected, but you cannot afford to grant special favor or career advancement simply based on years of loyal service. Results matter.  I am a little dismayed that companies are less vigilant demanding performance in the executive ranks than they are for middle and first line management. As cold as this may sound, my advice to CEO’s is to consider changes in your team. Even colder, my advice to boards is you might want to consider changes at the CEO level. Ultimately senior leadership must be held accountable for organizational results.

Finally, I might suggest that this is a good time to check the balance of your strategic and tactical efforts. For instance, finance has become the driving force in many companies. Do you need to balance that with other functions to insure a profitable future? Have you added checks and balances in your architecture that may be hindering your speed of execution? How has your brand been affected in the market?  Can you attract top talent? Retain it? Develop it?  Relying on relentless cost cutting is reactionary and unilateral.  Business is more complex and demands a more comprehensive strategy. It is time for executives to show that they understand that and prepare their companies for the next, unfortunately inevitable, downturn.

The response to the economic downturn provides companies with important information that can help them to emerge as a much stronger company when the recovery begins. Companies can reap some real benefit by examining how their talent responded to the demands of a slow economy.

Many managers have not had to guide their organizations through economic troubles like we are currently facing. Even those that have been identified as high potential talent were often given that designation under much different economic conditions. As the economy has metaphorically lowered the water in the talent pool, new previously unrecognized talent may have risen to the challenge. Human resource staffs can provide the organization a great service by reviewing how talent performed and making the necessary adjustments to the high potential segment and even reconsidering management succession plans.

The metrics of your company can certainly provide insight into how your managers guided their staffs through these times. Beyond that, there is benefit in considering the attitudinal response to tough times. Management and execution skills are critical to insure the company remains financially viable. The recovery will demand leadership to move the company forward toward its ultimate vision. That means a leadership with attitude that attracts followers and engages others, willingly and wholeheartedly, to achieve the possible.

My observations of how talent responded in the clients I serve showed some very different responses from the management team. I suggest some responses exposed some flaws, if not developmental needs, and some responses showed real leadership. First, the flaws:

• The victim, a near fatal flaw.  These managers communicated a sense of helplessness to their teams.  It was the economy’s fault. Senior management said they had to take unfavorable actions.
• The politician.  Spent an undue amount of time shoring up their personal relationships with decision makers, glad handing and lobbying on their own behalf.
• The enforcer.  While attention to adherence to standards is critical for business success, these managers used threats instead of building the case for compliance. Team members were told in one fashion or another, that if they didn’t perform, there were others waiting to take their jobs.
• The surfer. These managers were content to ride the wave.  The message they sent to their teams was that they had to go with the flow to ride out these times. Doing what was necessary to keep safe, minimizing risk, and of course missing the benefit that can be achieved by well thought out risks.

The leadership responses:

• The business leader.  These managers made real efforts to understand the business concerns of the whole company, not just their area of responsibility. They kept their teams informed of the issues and performance factors important to the organization.
• The team leader.   They understood these were new conditions for many of their team members and took time to acknowledge and address the fears and concerns. Time was spent with the team jointly problem solving issues they were facing in the difficult economy.
• The example.  These managers demonstrated through their own behavior a positive role model.  They faced business realities making sure values of the company were visible in their actions.
• The collaborator.  Instead of blaming other departments, their default approach was to ask “what can I do to help?”

This is not a complete picture of all the possible responses, but are the ones that caught my eye.  What are you seeing?  What indicators are you using to assess how your talent is handling these tough times?