Small Business: The Chaos of Change

The winds of change continue to blow.  I often remind clients that the work of ‘change’ is very difficult and fragile.  Yet, when managers are waist-deep in the change process, they remark about how much more difficult change is than they anticipated.

This is a very common occurrence regarding the change process.  We know change is squishy, difficult and oftentimes uncomfortable, but we get surprised with how it impacts us personally as the organization’s leader.

Adding to this mixture of squishiness is the accompanying chaos that drifts throughout the organization.  While I advocate that managers need to carefully ‘respond’ from a position as Change Agent vs. a knee-jerk ‘reaction’ to chaos, many managers become unglued in the midst of the chaos.

Chaos in our organization feels wrong.  Depending upon how insecure we are, it often translates into a feeling that “we are doing something wrong”.  And then the ‘IF ONLY’ tapes begin playing:

• IF ONLY you were a better manager the staff would be more on board…
• IF ONLY you were more competent the business would not be experiencing this level of chaos…
• IF ONLY you had acted sooner…
• IF ONLY…… IF ONLY… IF ONLY…

So what can we do?

The greatest step we can take is to realize that chaos is part of the change process.  If we are going to be a strong and vibrant organization, we must adapt to our current economic reality while we have an opportunity to innovate.

With change there will be a season of awkwardness, uncomfortableness, squishiness, etc.  Acknowledge that these feelings are a part of the change process and not the result of something we are doing wrong.  Give ourselves and our staff permission to feel the discomfort, but not get stuck there.

Responding to the chaos we feel and trying to ‘fix it’ is the fastest way we can sabotage any successful and sustainable change work within our organization.   Managers are continually blind-sided by how strong the emotions accompanying change can be from our staff and department heads.

Correctly identifying the chaos surrounding change is a healthy step in making sure that we are focusing on the right stuff in a season of change within our company.  Communication becomes king.  The more clearly and frequently we can communicate the positive future we are building, the quicker staff will navigate through the chaos of change successfully.

Surviving as a Business in a New Economy

Business Week recently had some statistics on Business Innovation that caught my attention.  The article in part read, “Building a great business and operating it well no longer guarantees you’ll be around in 100 years, or even 20.  In 1958, the average length of time a company remained on the S&P 500 was 57 years; by 1983, it had dropped to 30 years; in 2008, it was 18 years.”

Shorter business life cycles are a part of the norm in doing business today.  It requires leaders to provide more adaptive leadership than ever before.  Somehow in our business model we need to build in the flexibility to adapt to ever-changing criteria while attempting to remain profitable.

So what can we do?  Here are three starting points:

1. Create a Business Dashboard.  When many businesses were launched, they thought of accounting and bookkeeping only as a means to keep track of transactions and keep the IRS at arms length.  Many companies today only utilize their record-keeping in an historic fashion (i.e. how did we do last month, year-to-date, compared to last year…)  The challenge today is to go deeper and think through what are the critical items that we need to measure on a daily or weekly basis and create a Dashboard that can at a quick glance tell us how we are doing at any given point during the week or month.

2. Become more aware of our industry niche and what changes are happening around us.  The world continues to be more connected than ever before.  For some of us, that opens up huge windows of opportunity to sell well beyond our geographic boundaries of the past.  For others, there have been changes in the delivery of the goods and services that we provide and perhaps the economy in our industry niche will not rebound exactly as it was before and we need to change some of our business deliverables to meet the needs of our potential clients.  Let’s not assume that business will return to “the good old days” but that we have an opportunity to enhance some of our deliverables and become more profitable.

3. Get the right people on your bus.  As the economy recovers, employees will be looking for new opportunities.  It is currently being estimated that over 30% of our current workforce will be changing jobs as the economy recovers.  With that in mind, begin evaluating your current and future staffing needs.  Do you have the right people on your team?  Are the employees in the right spots providing the right deliverables for your organization?  Utilizing assessments can help correctly match employees to positions to get the best possible return on your investment.

Lets not waste a good recession.  Utilize this season to strategically get your company positioned for growth in whatever areas you desire.

Small Business: The Role of “Learned Helplessness”

Ever wonder why in this land of great opportunity we have so many poor people?  I am not talking just about those who have had a series of tough events in life that have knocked them for a serious financial loop, or even those on Medical Assistance (or some other government assistance program) who can’t seem to quite get ahead financially.

I’m thinking about those people who live below their full potential… who have a lot of promise, but never reach the top of the hill.   Why is it that some people never have the breakthrough they desire and only believe that in order to change their fate in life that they will have to win the lottery?

Psychologists call this “Learned Helplessness” and it works like this: When we attempt to change something and fail in our attempts on more than one occasion, our brain creates the mental grove that ‘success is beyond our control’.  Once we believe that, we quit trying.  What then manifests in our life is the fulfillment of that quirky belief system… we learn to become helpless.

So what can we do?  First, we take on a belief system that we will ‘fail forward’.  The only real failure in life is to quit trying.  We can attempt any type of new endeavor and have the results turn out to be ugly.  We can either internalize this and say we are failures and will never do anything right (i.e. ‘Learned Helplessness’), or we can acknowledge things did not go according to plan and dissect what went wrong while pondering what can we do differently next time.

Secondly, we can celebrate life and what opportunities are currently in front of us.  I know that control is an illusion, that there is very little in life that I can indeed control.  But, I can choose to have a continual attitude of gratitude and appreciation for life on a daily basis.  I can celebrate the good things of every day life.  I find that when I have an appreciation for today and celebrate the good things that are happening in my midst, more good things happen (or is it that I just recognize more of them?).  I can literally feel positive energy and momentum is moving me forward.

Next time you are feeling a little blue, make a quick mental check to see if you are falling into the mental default of Learned Helplessness and know that you do not have to go there unless you really want to!