Taking Stock: (Don't Just) Do Hard Things

Economic turbulence forces business leaders to question things they could previously take for granted, from the reliability of suppliers to the certainty of customers honoring spoken agreements, from the ability to fill open positions to the continued tenure of key employees.

It is the responsibility of company leaders to manage the long hours, complex analysis, difficult conversations, and judgment calls required to face those toughest of challenges head on.

But don’t forget the easy things that can help employees deal with uncertainties.

Sometimes the easy-to-solve challenges can be just as important to your company as the hard ones. Simple steps may not be clamoring for your attention, but you owe it to your company not to overlook them.

Quarantine uncertainty: I once heard a wise CEO say that no one expects leaders to eliminate uncertainty, but it is reasonable to expect them to contain it as tightly as possible. For example, you will never know in advance what the results of the next stock appraisal will be. Before you read the appraisal, you probably have a guess, and you probably figure you are unlikely to be off by, say, more than 10%. You might even be wrong about that, but what if some people in the workforce are worried about it being down 50%? Or 90%? You can help them narrow the scope of uncertainty a bit by giving some history, by talking about the stock of your comparable companies, and by reviewing some of the main inputs to the valuation process.

One of my favorite ways to quarantine uncertainty is the business contingency plan. It can be simple. Being 20% below budget can be scary, and some may start to wonder if layoffs are coming. At the NCEO, our staff can look at our business contingency plan and see that being 20% down puts us in a “stage 1” downturn. They can also see what steps we take in that case (one of them is an “organized staff search for unnecessary expenses”) and, more important, they can see that layoffs would not be on the table (layoffs show up if we get to a “stage 4” downturn).

Listen: You may feel like you need to simply do more when times are uncertain, but consider taking some time simply to listen. Spend a little time talking with people who do not report to you, and you may well hear about fears and uncertainties that you can easily address. No matter how well-designed your corporate communications are, they can be sent off track by rumors, exaggeration, or misunderstandings.

Give people targets: One of the best ways to reduce the stress caused by uncertainty is to make sure people see a role for themselves in contributing to things working out for the best. A sense of powerlessness is exhausting. As an employee-owned company, you have a potential advantage, especially if you’ve already invested in business literacy and a strategic plan people are bought into. If you have a business contingency plan, it also shows people what measures need to change by how much to move out of a downturn.

Remind people of the positive: Many of you have struggled with high turnover, and that makes it easy to forget that research by us and others shows that non-employee-owned companies tend to have it worse. Your challenges are real, but they might not be as bad as they look in context.

You can also remind people of the cliché that chaos and threats are opportunities. Economic turbulence can shake loose new opportunities for you, and quarantining uncertainty among your own workforce can make it more likely for people to have the clarity of mind to see and act on those opportunities.

Uncertainty and chaos can destroy morale and cause people to make bad decisions. Even as you wrestle with the biggest threats, step back to think
about the things you could most easily do to lower the general level of uncertainty throughout your company’s workforce.