Love ’em or Lose ’em

We all know the phrase “blind panic.” Since the economy began its sickening plunge, no one, not even your top talent, is immune to being too scared to think straight. Managers who can prevent their people from panicking are worth their weight in gold.

In tough times, people skills can be more critical to long-term success than strategic initiatives such as innovation or cost cutting. Commonsense practices, such as listening, empathizing, and coaching, are always valuable but never more so than during high-stress periods. You and your lieutenants can do a lot to strengthen team engagement just by showing a genuine sense of concern.

Paradoxically, these so-called soft skills often are muscled out by the hard realities of working under the gun. Without a conscious effort to emphasize the importance of people skills and contact points, many team leaders hunker down in their offices and isolate themselves. To be sure, good people skills can’t be instilled overnight, but managers can and should be reminded of the importance of reaching out.

Susan Silbermann, currently regional president of Latin America for Pfizer, offers a simple way of ramping up touch points in these stressful times. With a team of two hundred people spread over several countries, she feels she doesn’t have the bandwidth to cultivate close connections with every team member and needs a way to leverage everyone’s—and especially her own—precious time. So last year she began holding monthly “birthday breakfasts.” The framework is straightforward: once a month she invites everyone whose birthday falls that month to join her for an hour-long breakfast. As a result she has managed to meet and connect with most of her team in informal breakfast groups that cross the usual divides of gender, rank, and function and, as she says, “the ripple effect of holding these breakfasts has spread like wildfire.” Morale and engagement has improved dramatically, and Silbermann has been able to solve a great many problems by the sheer act of connecting with a broader range of people. Impressively, Silbermann was able to do all this in about eighteen hours per year. That’s a time commitment we can all aspire to.

Lynn Utter, president and COO of Knoll, tells us that what she loses sleep over is figuring out how she can better engage her talent in these difficult times. She has learned that a little goes a long way in this regard. Every week she e-mails four senior managers and asks them for the name of one person on their staff who has been exemplary. She then calls each person to thank him for his effort and congratulate him on a job well done. This practice has made a significant impact on performance across the company as her top performers understand that she appreciates their hard work and dedication. As Utter says, “If I can’t make four phone calls a week to make this kind of difference, then I’m not doing my job.”

Take Charge of Your Talent

In part I you learned that for top talent, the four most important motivators are challenge/stimulation, high-quality colleagues, recognition/respect, and compensation. You also learned that money is not the most important motivator. What then can team leaders do to strengthen the three other motivators so that top performers will disregard a slashed bonus or overlook the absence of a pay raise? Put yourself in the shoes of your high performers: in a year when comp packages are dwindling, what makes you want to pour yourself into your work?

High performers thrive on acing challenges and surpassing goals. In tough times, many of the performance measures set up in rosier days no longer apply. Asking your top performers to pursue them anyway only sets up your best people for failure and creates bitterness and distrust. Smart managers therefore channel team energy toward goals that are achievable in the current environment.

For example, it may be impossible for salespeople to meet the preceding year’s quotas when half the market has suspended new purchases and customers have nixed product upgrades. When people cannot control external factors, you need to give them something they can control. This may mean shifting employees’ performance goals from, for example, increasing revenue to reducing costs.

Don’t assume that everyone on your team knows the most productive use of her time. Under stress, even talented people often make bad decisions about which projects to focus on and how. Many employees waste time, money, and energy on perceived priorities rather than on activities that make a real difference. You may have to become more of a micromanager to ensure that people are working not only hard but also smart.

Refocus your team on the tasks that matter, advises Adam Quinton, managing director and head of global macro research at Banc of America Securities Merrill Lynch. In his context that means servicing clients. “We don’t know how long the downturn will go on or what the consequences will be, but helping clients and doing a great job is the best insurance policy for your career,” Quinton tells his team. “If the worst happens, satisfied clients can be valuable sources of future employment opportunities in that they can provide contacts at potential employers, serve as references during a job search, or may even become a laid-off person’s next employer.”

And remember, even as an organization seems mired in trouble, team leaders can turn lemons into lemonade by channeling energy into tangible accomplishments.

In the summer of 2008, even though Lehman Brothers was clearly heading south, Anne Erni, then chief diversity officer, pulled her team members together, identified three priorities on their annual to-do list, and insisted they accomplish those specific goals.

“I didn’t care if management never looked at what we did,” she says. “Even when it looked as though the game was over, I told my team to keep playing. I told them to keep hitting the flippers and maybe the ball would pop out.” By focusing her staff on concrete, doable tasks, Erni not only produced potentially valuable programs for the organization (for example, a plan to “leverage inclusion” after Barclays and Lehman merged) but also distracted her people from panic. And because Erni’s team engaged in tasks that also benefited them as individual professionals, when the ax fell, they entered the job market with impressive resumes and recent accomplishments to their credit.

Create Career Opportunities

A players have high expectations for their career trajectories; they want to excel, not only remain employed. But as budgets shrink, formal professional development courses are often cut—at a time when people want to enhance and burnish their skills to remain marketable. Team leaders can pick up the slack here. With raises off the table and promotions rare, one of the most valuable things a manager can do is make a visible commitment to a high-potential employee’s career.

Ironically, tough times offer plenty of scope for career development. When teams are operating with skeleton staffs everyone must pitch in, and a thoughtful team leader can use straitened circumstances to help strong performers gain access to stretch assignments or cross functional roles—opportunities that normally would not be available to them.

In fall 2008, in the midst of massive layoffs and defections, Dana (a fictitious name), a first-year associate at a large bank in New York, was given a large regional transaction to work on because the person who structured and sold the transaction had been let go. It was a huge opportunity, and Dana leapt at it although it meant committing to fourteen-hour days. It’s been a heady experience. In her words, “I’m running a transaction that’s a big portion of my unit’s revenue stream. Effectively, as a first-year associate, I’m doing the job of a vice president. I’ve learned a ton, and the transaction’s gone well. I now know that I can do this on my own without much guidance.”

This stretch assignment, however, has come with a downside: Dana has been largely ignored by her team leader. That neglect is eating into her motivation.

A smart manager would use this constellation of events to motivate Dana, recognizing and celebrating her efforts to go above and beyond. Best of all would be to bring her performance to the attention of higher-ups so that this stretch assignment could potentially accelerate her career. None of this has happened for Dana. Her manager is distracted and tuned out, and Dana is beginning to see her energy flag. “You say to yourself, ‘Wow, I’m taking on a lot more responsibility; I’m working really hard—staying until eleven at night. I’m not getting compensated, I’m not getting recognized. Why should I pull all the stops out if there’s nothing in it for me?’”

In addition to stretch assignments (properly managed), you can build engagement by encouraging your high-potential employees to expand their professional network of colleagues, internal customers, or suppliers. Target cross-functional projects that leverage your employee’s skill set and also introduce the opportunity to grow and learn in a new market. Share the big picture so that team members have a better understanding of the significance of what they do, and include them in the decision-making process so that they feel their voice is being heard.

Another option: let your A team loose on tough problems the organization is trying to crack. Prepare to be surprised: if you ask the right people the right questions, then a week or so later they may come back and say, “I’ve been turning this over in my mind, and I’ve got something to share with you.” It may not be a complete solution, but it could be an idea that leads to a breakthrough. Giving people a sense that they have contributed to the solution of an important problem drives ownership at a grassroots level and makes everyone feel good.

Encourage Active Mentoring

At Alcoa, Judith Nocito has started recent staff meetings spotlighting one person for something significant she has recently worked on, sharing the accomplishment with the rest of the team. It can be as mundane as e-mailing a client a well-crafted analysis of an issue, or as significant as the resolution of a complex trade compliance issue. “People appreciate the opportunity to shine in front of their peers,” Nocito says. And by leveraging teachable moments, this practice helps everyone become better at her job.

Not every boss has the array of skills required to effectively mentor and manage the careers of high-potential young employees. But getting partway there can be powerful. This is because career barriers are particularly distressing for top talent. Even in tough times, A players easily disengage if they feel their company is not maximizing their development.

Two years ago an internal survey at professional services firm KPMG revealed that many of its high-potential employees wanted to enhance their relationship with their performance managers. In response, the firm identified a team of proven mentors to give the most valuable employees—client-facing associates—more robust career guidance. These people management leaders (PMLs) are responsible for all areas of an associate’s work experience—from work–life balance issues to an optimal mix of client assignments to career progression challenges.

After a one-year pilot, employees who had been assigned a PML reported a 10 to 15 percent gain in satisfaction with career opportunities at the firm. KPMG expanded the initiative, and by early 2009 it had identified twenty-six hundred PMLs to mentor seventeen thousand client-service employees; the program now involves 70 percent of the workforce. Although this expansion was not a reaction to the recession, Bruce Pfau, KPMG’s vice chair of human resources, reports that the program is “serving the firm particularly well in this economic downturn, enhancing employee engagement when times are tough.”