Strategic Questions for Strategic Planning

If they aren’t planned and facilitated effectively, strategic planning meetings can easily become one or all of the following:

• Snooze fests
• A game of Liar’s Poker
• Boxing matches
• Coffee klatches

Not one of these is worth your time or money. To base your strategy session on substance and get started on a real plan, be sure you gather the following data from your partners:

• Do you want more of a specific type of work?
• Do you want stronger people to do the work?
• Do you want to rid yourselves of certain clients? Can you afford to?
• Are you content with the money you make?
• Do you want to work more or less?
• Will your current managing partner remain in that position for the foreseeable future?  Has a successor been named or even considered?

It’s critical to find out what the firm’s owners want, and then determine how those desires intersect with marketplace and operational realities. This isn’t all you need to do to chart your firm’s course, but if everyone can agree on the answers to the questions above, you’re on the right road.

Choose Discomfort

• A senior level person in your company comes to work grumpy as a crocodile one day and perfectly pleasant the next, dealing with co-workers according to his mood.
• One of your employees has trouble understanding that personal calls are just that: personal. She’s on the phone in her cubicle several times a day, sharing the details of last night’s date. Everyone within earshot gets to know, too.
• Your best business developer pitches a scathing fit in his secretary’s cubicle when things don’t go as planned.

Lucky you. As the owner of a business, you have the challenge of deciding whether and how to respond to situations like these. And they happen every day. Each situation is different; each requires its own thoughtful response. It also requires a willingness to enter into a potentially uncomfortable conversation.

It’s interesting that most business owners feel fully capable of dealing with the technicalities of running their enterprises. The internal issues, however, cause plenty of stress. Owners know through experience how costly internal drama can be, both in terms of short-term productivity and longer-term morale and turnover. Ultimately, though, business owners are just like everybody else: they avoid conflict because it’s uncomfortable. They sit on their hands and hope the situation will resolve itself.

Rarely do conflicts like these resolve themselves. In fact, it’s likely that the perpetrators don’t even realize they’re doing something wrong. Why? Because no one tells them. Sure, they might receive one of those useless emails that tries to correct everyone’s behavior while achieving nothing at all (except perhaps to irritate those who aren’t misbehaving). And they might hear something about their general attitude in an annual evaluation, if their supervisor remembers to mention it. But they don’t receive the most useful thing of all: a one on one conversation that clarifies the immediate issue and seeks a resolution. They don’t receive it because you, the business owner, don’t want to be uncomfortable.

It is well worth your discomfort to confront difficult internal issues. By having what may be an awkward conversation with an employee or partner, you help the other person become aware of his or her behavior and offer an opportunity to change it. Valuing your own comfort over clear communication and prompt action creates backlash: your challenging employees continue their inappropriate behavior, because they are unaware; productivity decreases because everyone else is dealing with the challenging employee except you; and morale drops when your best employees see that bad behavior is unacknowledged and sometimes even unintentionally rewarded when you do nothing.

The next time an internal issue arises, take a deep breath. Then have a face-to-face conversation with the employee about your expectations and how they’re not being met in a particular situation. Be specific. Make it clear that you want improved behavior and ask for their cooperation.  Tell them how much you value their good work and that you want to see them focus on doing more of it. Find a way to leave the conversation on a positive note.

Though your palms may sweat and your heart rate may increase in the knowledge that you have a situation to deal with, deal with it anyway -- sooner rather than later. It’s the best way to change things for the better.

We Need a New Clause in the Social Contract

The latest display of rage (in this case, a fed-up flight attendant) ought to stop us all in our tracks. The picture of a you-have-tap-danced-on-my-last-nerve flight attendant hurling invective over the PA system at yet another rude (not to mention uncomfortable, cramped, stressed) passenger, then escaping via the emergency evacuation chute is kind of funny. I’m sure it will be fodder for the joke writers at every late night talk show.

While it’s easy to smirk, we need to think beyond this single incident and consider that it’s only one of many acts of rudeness and incivility that occur every day. Life is more stressful, more crowded, more noisy than it was even ten years ago. Put a lousy economy on top of that, and you have a recipe for rudeness and, as Mary J. Blige so aptly describes it, hateration.

All this hateration causes pain. It hurts the person who reacts to rudeness with rudeness and it taints everyone who has to witness it. Hateration benefits no one, not even the hater. So what’s a society to do?

Instead of instituting a Politeness Police, let’s simply agree to monitor our own behavior. Let’s insert a clause into our individual social contracts that clearly defines how we will conduct ourselves – not just when things are going well, but when we’re thrust into stressful situations rife with potential rudeness and conflict.

Let’s choose civility. Let’s choose kindness. Let’s take the high road, shall we? Because the low road is awfully crowded.