Your email address:


Powered by FeedBlitz

« Positive Crisis; what is it? | Main | Action-based Decisions »

Comments

Chat

I’d be interested in an updated GoogleAnalytics chart (may be two with about six weeks coverage), just to see if the effect did wear off after a while and also, did others link to your new name with the same link-text (allinurl:…). I hope you will publish a follow up.

Chris Emerson

Tom

Having read the piece on positive crisis (which provides great insight on the topic of how to motivate/drive change within an organization) I have one question, driven in part by my own experience.

A leader can use crisis to his/her advantage to create a climate for change that will allow a company to make the bold strategic decisions required to survive. To your point, once the tribe sees the opposing army coming over the hill they can unite, forget their diferences and move forward together.

However, in many large organisations there is another constituant (outside of internal employees) that needs to be on board before major strategic changes can be implemented; the customer.

While employees may gather together once they see "the warrior tribe coming over the hill" customers may choose not to fight.

In short, how do you include your customers in the positive crisis?

Response: A business's problems, if they're serious, will be known by your customers in one way or another, either a leaky salesperson hoping to gain rapport by letting the customer in on the dark secrets or by competitors. The problems will be known but the customer will hear it through these highly imperfect channels. Frequently a management team hopes that by being silent with their customers they can "get by"; but that doesn't work.

So the right thing to do is (a) let your customers know your problems directly at the highest level, (b) put them in proper perspective and have answers ready for expected questions, but most importantly (c) let them know your plan for whatever recovery is underway, and (d) let them know you'll be back with progress reports.

If you choose to remain silent, you'll silently lose customers who are reacting to an informally delivered and most likely incorrect statement of your problem with no accompanying solution.


Quentin Lilly

Reviewing the selected/critical characteristics of companies (and management teams) gravitating downwards (due to their inability to identify and successfully react to the "crisis" before them) makes me certain that the insights provided by Tom Epley in this blog will be of material value to managers at all levels.

Instead of academic rhetoric, it is clear that tangible, proven managerial actions and insight are what will find their way to the reader of Tom's blog.

Having had the benefit of working for/with Tom Epley in the past, I have seen Tom's insight in "real/successful action" on numerous fronts. And instead of high-level/common sense managerial approaches (which we can all read in the multitude of management "how to" books), Tom's success across a multitude of industry segments brings a wealth of pragmatic, direct and defined actions which all of us can benefit from.

Presently serving as head of a relatively large business unit of an international, publicly traded company, I see on a day-to-day basis many of the "non crisis mentality" characterstics Tom has outlined in his full and summary postings to-date. All too often, the circumstances are as Tom has noted - managers failing to see the crisis before them, or wanting to avoid the "crisis environment" for fear of change or critical review. As noted, and as I have seen in prior dealings with Tom, embracing a culture of "continuous crisis" can and will serve to drive successful/continual change (versus the all too common environment of managerial comfort and mediocrity).

The comments to this entry are closed.