Re-writing the rules of business (Part 2)

With so much negativity around there is a danger of us becoming hypnotised by the continuous emphasis on 'bad news' in the papers and on TV. This is similar to what happened during the past few years, only then we were hypnotised by positive thinking, by believing that the good times were going to last forever. However, we may still have not learned the lesson from this era. The lesson is not to throw out risk and speculation, the lesson is not getting hypnotised by one-sided thinking. The first three letters of hypnotised are the first three letters of the word hype. There was too much hype around how well we were doing and how good we were. We are now in danger of being hypnotised by how bad things are and now there is a lack of perspective. A Different Approach So how do we counteract those tendencies? The answer is to be able to live with paradox. Management is all about tensions in the organisation. Be able to see how things are 'bad' yet be also able to see new opportunities and be grateful for the glass being half full. Be able to deal with tensions between reducing costs and investing in new products/customers/markets, knowing we can challenge employees to improve while catching them doing things well, give people more freedom to take risks/make mistakes yet insist on accountability for getting results. When we are hypnotised by one side we do not see other dimensions- we lack balance. We block out or filter out messages that do not meet our beliefs. If we had more awareness during the 'good' times we would have read the signs that house prices were too high relative to the rest of the world and also we were borrowing too much money. Equally now we need to see that this is a period of adjustment, though a painful one. However, business is still happening. Other countries are picking up. People are still going to work and spending money. Potential for this change People have an extra ordinary capacity to live and work with paradoxical thinking. As a parent the fundamental paradox with your children is love and discipline and nobody ever has to tell you 'for now we're just going to focus on discipline then we'll get to the love thing later". You put your child in a corner, you give them a time out and you give them the hug simultaneously. I think we often underestimate the ability of human beings at all levels in company, if you give them the right information, they'll understand the pressures on the company to cut costs but also go and make investments in getting new business. We can let them make the trade offs - giving discount while making better margins, reducing cost while improving service, We don't have to make those choices for our employees, we can trust them to make them themselves. However, we must then hold everybody accountable for the bottom line results. There must be feedback between actions and outcomes. To do that the company must see all actions as experiments. By their nature experiments have an inbuilt failure mechanism. You cannot experiment without some failures. The answer is to keep the failure level low. The ultimate paradox is to get rid of the fear of failure, while making everybody accountable for the bottom line results. Kevin Fahey And Associates Ltd is a midlands company which supports medium and large companies to achieve measurable improvements in their business. Check out his blog at http://www.kfaheyandco.ie/index.php/blog/ He can be contacted at 090 6472974 or by email at info@kfaheyandco.ie