Leadership in Hard Times

The truth is that no one factor makes a company admirable. But if you were forced to pick the one that makes the most difference, you’d pick leadership.  – Warren Bennis, Organizational Consultant and Author

When times are good, leading a company or a team is exciting. Resources are plentiful, customers are satisfied, and opportunity is everywhere. However, when the economic conditions are challenging, this excitement and positive energy can weaken. People feel the pressures of work, and they may even fear for their jobs. Of course, you need leaders who can control costs and conserve cash. However you also need leaders who see opportunity – and who will strive to seize that opportunity – despite all the negativity. You need leaders who remain committed to their people. And you need leaders who can transfer their positive outlook to the people around them.

 

Create New Opportunities

• Review your strategy – reconsider objectives
• Lead by example
• Add value – listen to the customers and add value without cost
• Use market conditions to create a stronger business model for the future
• Take the opportunity to trim costs
• Implement a continuous improvement plan

Commit to Your People

• Invest time in leadership skills training
• Retain your best people
• Be creative with recruitment and retention
• Get rid of poor performers
• Build a motivating workplace
  • Treat people fairly
  • Provide useful work for which people are recognized
  • Foster good relationships at work

Project Positive Energy

• Expect great things from your people
• Keep in touch with your people
• Be visionary
• Take care of yourself

By remaining positive, supporting your people, and looking for new business opportunities, you can help your company survive – and succeed – through the difficult times.

 

Six Thinking Hats

The best decisions come from changing the way that you think about problems, and examining them from different viewpoints.

Six Thinking Hats can be used in meetings or on your own. In meetings, it has the benefit of preventing any confrontation that may happen when people with different thinking styles discuss a problem.

Each “Thinking Hat” is a different style of thinking. These are explained below:

• White Hat: with this thinking hat, you focus on the available data. Look at the information that you have, analyze past trends, and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and try to either fill them or take account of them.
• Red Hat: “wearing” the Red Hat, you look at problems using your intuition, gut reaction, and emotion. Also, think how others could react emotionally. Try to understand the responses of people who do not fully know your reasoning.
• Black Hat: using Black Hat thinking, look at a decision’s potentially negative outcomes. Look at it cautiously and defensively. Try to see why it might not work. This is important because it highlights the weak points in a plan. It allows you to eliminate them, alter them, or prepare contingency plans to counter them.
• Yellow Hat: this hat helps you to think positively. It is the optimistic viewpoint that helps you to see all the benefits of the decision and the value in it. Yellow Hat thinking helps you to keep going when everything looks gloomy and difficult.
• Green Hat: the Green Hat represents creativity. This is where you develop creative solutions to a problem. It is a freewheeling way of thinking, in which there is little criticism of ideas.
• Blue Hat: this hat represents process control. It’s the hat worn by people chairing meetings, for example. When facing difficulties because ideas are running dry, they may direct activity into Green Hat thinking. When contingency plans are needed, they will ask for Black Hat thinking.

De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is a powerful technique for looking at decision making from different points of view.

It allows emotion and skepticism to be brought into what might normally be a purely rational process, and it opens up the opportunity for creativity within decision making.

Decisions made using the Six Thinking Hats technique can be sounder and more resilient than would otherwise be the case. It can also help you to avoid possible pitfalls before you have committed to a decision.