The president of a rather large technology company recently told employees he wants them to be fungible, or so a correspondent reports.
This might actually means something, although probably not. The term “fungible,” meaning interchangeable, is generally restricted to non-sentient beings after all.
Company presidents often say things to employees that aren’t worth a lot of scrutiny. The interesting question isn’t fungibility. It’s why this president chose such odd locution. My guess: Because of the economic downturn he wanted to reassure the troops (a good idea) but didn’t have any real news or anything reassuring to say (that happens), so he chose to say something vague and hard to understand (bad thing).
Companies are dealing with downturns right now. Many have leaders who have never experienced anything except prosperity — some even believed we’d see nothing but growth for the next fifty years or so, and figured they’d never have to handle hard times.
But hard times are upon us, folks, at least by the standards of the last eight years or so. And hard times are when leadership is both most important and most conspicuously absent in most organizations.
It’s easy to be captain when the weather is sunny and the wind is at your back. All you have to do is to raise the sails and enjoy the ride. It’s when the wind shifts that it takes skill to reach your goals.
So what’s it going to take? The first, and most important step is to get through your personal mourning period quickly. Yes, your personal mourning period. The world has changed, and not for the better. You’ve lost the good times, and whether you realize it or not you’re probably grieving for your loss right now.
Remember that the first stage of grief is denial and you’ll understand a lot of the behavior you see, both in others and in yourself. Right now, many leaders are in denial about the need to change perspectives, goals, strategies, and priorities. Most of all, they’re in denial about the end of an era in which growth was pretty easy to achieve.
Once you’ve stopped grieving, the next step is pretty obvious: Your company needs a strategy suited to these new economic circumstances. That’s the CEO’s responsibility, of course, but CIOs and CTOs now have a seat at the planning table, so you’re in this up to your neck.
There just aren’t all that many strategies suited to a downturn. A business can: Batten down the hatches and ride things out; buy weakened competitors at bargain prices to acquire new customers cheaply; cut margins to aggressively acquire competitors’ customers; redefine its marketplace, emphasizing its core, highest-profit customers and new segments unaffected by the downturn; or find a buyer, which changes nothing, but the top executives get a golden parachute while the situation becomes someone else’s problem.
Sadly, most leadership teams simply react to events as they happen instead of formulating a clear strategy. If your company’s leadership team is one of them, your company has chosen a “batten down the hatches” strategy by default.
That’s okay, because your most important job is visibility, which means answering questions. Any strategy will equip you to answer them, so long as your company has one. Even hatch-battening.
Now, more than when times were good, you need to be visible. Why? Employees right now are worried — about their jobs, their departments, their projects, their friends. They need you to answer their questions, even if the answer is that you don’t know yet. It’s perfectly fine to say, “Right now, our strategy is to ride this out. I don’t know how it will affect your project yet. There are no guarantees right now because the situation changes month-to-month. What I need from you is to be flexible.”
Are you visible? If you’re meeting in closed rooms, involving only headquarters staff to make decisions that affect everyone in the field, you aren’t visible, nor are you wise — the information you need to make good decisions is in the field, not at headquarters.
If you announce your decisions from a podium and then leave, you aren’t visible either. You inspire confidence by chatting with employees individually, not with a barrier between you and them.
Leaders who aren’t visible — who make decisions in private, involving only their inner circle, and only communicating by emerging to give a speech — aren’t leading.
They’re hiding.