You are under intense pressure, trying urgently to get to grips with serious and difficult issues that have potentially far reaching consequences for your business. This is a time for understanding situations and premature for taking corrective action. It is a time for gathering specific and reliable information. You don't need philosophy. You need explanations and numbers. This is a time when your team can come into its own: a time when the recruitment, training, motivation and leadership effort that you have put into your team over the previous two years will probably save your skin - and theirs.
Shortly after '9-11', I wrote an article on how this dreadful event had caused a 'no decision' culture to sweep the country. Businesses stopped recruiting, stopped training and generally stopped making decisions. It wasn't that people had decided to stop investing. They had simply postponed these decisions, apparently indefinitely.
I criticised this attitude. Easy to do if your own performance is not being measured - a bit like being in Opposition. So this article has proven to be a kind of self -assessment to reveal whether or not I'm more comfortable in Opposition.
During the last two years since I wrote the article, my company has faced a few quite serious challenges, which were totally beyond our control. Challenges often are, and they can come out of the blue. You can't always be prepared for every eventuality. Sometimes you just need to be running the business!
It was therefore quite a surprise when a key supplier let us down unexpectedly on the supply of a highly technical product, which was of considerable importance to our bottom line. This supplier was also unable to deliver orders with confirmed delivery dates. This meant we were faced with finding a supplier for a very specific type of product and a very specific type of licence that would permit transfer of supply... and, oh yes, we had three months in which to do it.
I am old enough to remember the original Mission Impossible and therefore too old to be to be taking on impossible missions. Nevertheless, the first rule of business is to stay in business. This meant I needed to get my team around me urgently, understand the threat and consider the options. Within 24 hours we were effecting a strategy that would within one month:
- Find a new supplier
- Gain us a more secure agreement
- Gain us an agreement on better terms
- Reduce our costs
The fact that we achieved so much and so quickly astonished our shareholders.
This achievement was not a matter of luck, but of skill as a result of investing. Three people, other than myself, played key roles in making this happen. Had it not been for these individuals, the level of success might not have been reached. One, our in-house company lawyer, was relatively new to the business. His role had been regarded as an investment to improve our speed at securing contracts, and also to reduce our dependency on high-cost outside lawyers. The second was a new FD who had come to us through headhunters. Such people not always popular; they are expensive. But good ones do deliver. If you hammer down their fees, you simply persuade them to send their best candidates to companies that will pay more. I have made this mistake before, and found I had to wait longer for the right calibre of candidate. The third person was the result of an internal promotion and the combining of two jobs, one of which was vacant. The vacancy was the result of an expensive compromise agreement - another investment.
So, much of my success in finding a new supplier was preset long before I had even faced the challenge. It had been made more likely by decisions that had been made 6-12 months beforehand. I can describe a considerable number of other situations where improving the business on a day to day basis has been achieved because of investing in the people who make it happen. I now pay twice as much for an HR Manager, but she manages recruitment so well that we make few, if any, expensive mistakes. Our staff is willing to talk to her, so we resolve issues before they become problems.
Leadership is about having a clear vision and persuading people to follow it. Sound management and investment, I believe, will lay the foundations for making your vision more achievable. So, I return to the original issue. We can rationalise when things go wrong but we need always to ask the question - could we have made it different? Not for the sake of wringing our hands in regret, but to have the courage and judgement to learn for building tomorrow.