Prevailing in the Recession and Thriving in the Aftermath

Geoff Colvin, Senior Editor at Large for Fortune magazine recently wrote The Upside of the Downturn, in which he considered the strategies that companies need to prevail in the recession and thrive in the aftermath. Colvin concluded that

Managers must avoid falling back on outdated models in their rush to respond to today's stresses. For example, they should not obey ancient instincts from the industrial age and treat workers as expendable. The best companies will take a more enlightened view, using the opportunities created by the downturn to being practices they should have been using, to improve the quality of their people, to increase employees loyalty and motivation, to build the culture.

Each of these - motivation, loyalty and building culture - are at the heart of the work that FranklinCovey does with our clients, but I was particularly struck by his observations on the 'ancient instincts of the industrial age', which brought to mind a current project with a group of 200 Emerging Leaders. The theme of one session with this group was 'Sizing Up People', and one of the unskilled characteristics we considered was using 'simplistic models of others' (which reflects the industrial age model of employees as subordinates, driven by external motivations and under a management that exhibits a control mindset).

To contrast this, we then introduced an alternative model which involves a 'Whole Person Paradigm', and suggests employees as volunteers driven by internal motivations and whose outputs are best leveraged through a management mindset of 'release'.

As regards 'thriving in the aftermath', the concensus of the groups we worked with was that if this 'whole person' approach could be adopted, the productivity gains (especially in high complexity environments) could be measured not in single or double digits, but in the hundreds of percent.