Opportunity Amidst the Tragedy of the Pandemic
My clients report that things are both crazy busy in some ways while also being crazy slow in others. If you are finding you have some time in between trying to keep everyone safe and sane, it might be an opportunity to start looking at how you manage and for ways to improve it for when things get back to something more normal.
There is no denying that COVID-19 is going to have a fundamental impact on everyone. We will all have to find ways to reduce this impact on ourselves and our fellow citizens and find ways to learn from this event to respond better for the next one. This will no doubt preoccupy us for much of the coming months and years. But in between the craziness, you might find yourself with time on your hands.
Management is being put under a new type of stress right now, and I really don’t want to add to that. But if you find that you have time to think about how you manage, time you might have away from the workplace might be giving you an opportunity to change things for when you get back. This is all within the context of our Business Performance Excellence process.
Below are some things that you might consider thinking about, along with some links to get you started. At worst, you can some reading and videos to divert you for a while.
Upper-level management:
- What is the purpose of the company? Does everyone agree? How do we know if we are successful in achieving that?
- Are the measures of success for the company translated down to all the managers so they can make the right decisions every day?
- Is the current state of the company compared to the desired future state to determine a strategic plan based on these metrics? Is this strategic plan monitored periodically for progress, or for refactoring based on what has been learned since it was started?
- Front-line management
- Are these success metrics further translated to the individual contributor, so they know how their work is important in achieving these successes?
- Are the individual contributors being supported with a system for autonomous local control so that they can monitor, control, and improve their own area without the need for upper-level management intervention?
- Are you giving the individual contributors what they need in order to do the job you are asking them to do?
- An Employee Fulfillment Model - Part 1
- An Employee Fulfillment Model - Part 2
- An Employee Fulfillment Model – Part 3
- An Employee Fulfillment Model – Part 4
- An Employee Fulfillment Model – Part 5
- Want to see how the empowerment survey works? Try the free demo survey here: Free Empowerment Survey
First and foremost, keep yourself, your family, your workers, and your friends safe. Try to keep your businesses viable until things calm down to the new normal and you can bring people back to work. But if you have a moment now and then, you might think about how you can take the tragedy of business slow- and shut-downs to come back stronger than ever for you, your workers, and the economy.
