Why Burnout Should Alarm Executive Leaders

Guest Post by Ben Fanning, the Burnout Specialist:

Let me share with you what happened when I started my job at the largest sporting goods retailer in theworld.

I took over a supply chain team just a few months before the largest sales day of the year…Black Friday.

It’s called Black Friday because it’s traditionally the day that stores move into the “Black” and become profitable for the year.

But if you’ve worked for a retailer, you know it as Black Friday because of all the pressure and late nights that result.

The team I took over had been through the Black Friday cycle for years and hated it.

In fact they were all burned out in their careers--- fried, fizzled, and done.

You could see the burnout signs within the group:

• Sharon was listening to praise music and praying at every break.

• Susan was lashing out at anybody that questioned her knowledge.

• John was crouched over his computer at his desk with shoulders slumped forward.

The team burnout was obvious and couldn’t be denied.

I knew if I didn’t do something quickly to help the situation that I’d be lucky to keep them even a few more weeks.

My leadership capabilities would be pushed to the brink.

Our survival as a team would be tested.

Burnout is Impacting Your Team and Costing You Money Right Now

Based on statistics you’re leading a team that’s burned out.

The workplace is filled with burned out employees and as far back as 2000, 1 in 3 employees expect to burnout on the job.

That makes job burnout more common than getting the flu (with much longer term effects).

With the pressures of the job mounting and the digital stress of computers, phones, and blackberries; it’s just getting worse.

This doesn’t even take into account the hit on your employees’ personal lives.

Imagine your employees falling asleep in their recliner every night instead of playing with their kids; and how they’re yawning their way through another date night for the 3rd month in a row.

It’s just not healthy.

Moreover, burnout is also showing up in the bottom line of the company and having a shocking impact.

Work stress cost businesses $300 billion per year in absenteeism, loss of talented employees, health costs, and programs to reduce stress.

Sounds like someone should do something and fast!

Burned Out Teams Equal Burned Out Leaders

When it’s your team that’s burned out, it’s has extremely negative consequences on you and your career.

You’re responsible for the cumulative goals of your team, and you’re under pressure to deliver.

It’s one thing to have a team that can’t perform but when your team is burned out, it actually “can” but just “won’t”. 

This leads to a huge amount of leadership frustration.

You might even experience guilt that you’re not able to do more for your employees.

As their leader, you feel responsible for their work day experience.

If they’re leaving work resentful, it can make it difficult for you to sleep at night knowing that your employees are likely taking home the stress with them.

The frustration, pressure, and guilt can leave you feeling sad and even defeated at the end of your work day.

That’s not sustainable for your career over long haul, and it’s surely no way to get to the next level.

Team Burnout can Transform You into a Better Leader

The good news is that job burnout does not have to hang over you and your team like a black cloud.

In fact, burnout can be your leadership crucible that forms you into a stronger, wiser leader.

It can also be an experience that connects your team on a much deeper level and ultimately leads to a more cohesive team that delivers big results.

Here are 7 Keys to Helping your Team Reignite from Burnout

1. Build Awareness – When you see the signs of burnout in your team, call it out. They may not be familiar with it and it makes a difference to let them know what they’re experiencing is common but doesn’t have to stay that way.

2. Clarify Why – Connect your team to the big picture. Just “making money “is not an adequate reason to sustain a career for the long haul. Help your team get in touch with why they’re working in the first place. What are their big goals both professionally and personally? How can they look at their current role as part of their future career path?

3. Amp up Communication – Find ways to open communication on a routine basis. This gives a daily forum for your team to share new ideas and also bring up what’s not working to the group. Limit them to 15 minutes though. You’ll be amazed how efficient these meetings can be when you have them. You’ll find if they can count on this on a daily basis the team will be more connected and focused on results. Plus you’ll get a lot less interruptions yourself.

4. Forget the Butts in the Seat Mentality– Very few jobs these days actually require you to be in a desk chair 9-5. Consider adding some flexibility to their schedule. Have an overlap or work time by a few hours but see how you can adjust to accommodate a better lifestyle.

5. Encourage a Social Director – It’s not always easy for the boss to plan a social outing. Encourage someone to step up and plan lunch out for a break. As the boss, offer to pick up the bill.

6. Teach your Team to Disconnect – If you’re on your work email at night and weekends, then it’s likely that your team will be too. Model behavior that you’d like your team to emulate versus “do as I say, not as I do”.

7. Define a Simple Process – Find a coach or mentor that offer an outside perspective. Learn from them and deconstruct their process. Take what you learn and build out a simple operating plan for your team. It’s huge stress relief when you realize that you’re not along and you don’t have to recreate the wheel. 

Bonus Tip: Celebrate the Small Wins – Find something to celebrate with your team every day. Even the smallest of wins can help build momentum to achieve bigger goals.

Ben Fanning is a burnout specialist that helps frustrated executives and teams rekindle their passion for the job and get to the next level in their careers. He burned himself out working in several Fortune 500 companies, and now’s leading the movement against career burnout. He's reignited his own career, and you can now apply his wisdom to your own by clicking here.

The Art of Firing or Job Change

Over the last 6 months I have talked to many people who have either been displaced in the workplace or have been told their current job responsibilities will be changing. The latter is mostly downgraded responsibilities. For the most part the theme from these individuals is how they were communicated to, or how the change was presented to them - not well or badly.

I was told early on in my career that however you have have to deliver news, good or bad that you should use this axiom " talk to them how you woulds want to be talked to or communicated to". Thank you Bruce Bunten, my first HR manager at Stone & Webster. I have always operated by that axiom in HR but this current trend is disturbing.

As I said in the paragraph above, the people I have spoken to who have either been displaced or position regraded, at several non-related companies, have said the following on how things were communicated:

• my manager set the meeting but did not show only to find an HR person there instead
• the HR manager curtly said we are eliminating your position, you have 15 minutes to get your stuff and leave
• the HR person gave me a letter and said read it, and do you have any questions
• the manager and HR person met with me but the manager said XXXX (that's the HR person again) will tell you what has changed
• I was told via email
• I got a call from my manager and HR and was told my job was eliminated - they where just down the hall from me
• Hr & my manager were not prepared for my questions and I was told to send a letter outlining my concerns.

Does this sound familiar? So who is at the root of the issue here, the manager or the HR person? My take is that the HR person should totally educate the manager on how to handle RIFs, reductions-in-force, terminations (you name your word here) position downgrades, and upgrades. Further, the HR person should show compassion for the displaced worker, treat them with respect, save their dignity, at any level and not be cold and callous about it. But when I hear these stories it really ires me to no end because HR gets the knock. 

So what am I really saying, well I'll go back to my first HR managers saying " talk to them how you woulds want to be talked to or communicated to". No wonder why people have a certain disdain for HR.  

I would really like to hear your thoughts on this subject, email me at wgstevens2@gmail.com or leave a comment.

How To Manage Change During An Acquisition

There are many theories about how to manage change. Many come from change management guru, John Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School. Kotter introduced his eight-step change process in his 1995 book,"Leading Change."

Step One: Create Urgency - 

Kotter suggests that for change to be successful, 75% of a company's management needs to "buy into" the change. So for change to happen there needs to be a shared a sense of urgency around the need for change.

And this will result from honest and open dialogue with your people about what's happening in your market and with your competition. If many people start talking about the change you propose, the urgency can build and feed on itself.

Step Two: Form a Powerful Coalition

To successfully persuade people that change is necessary takes strong leadership and the very visible support from key people within your organisation.

This isn't just about managing change - this has to be led and you have to be seen to lead it.

To lead change, you need to bring together a coalition, or team, of influential people whose power comes from a variety of sources, including job title, status, expertise, and political importance.

You can find effective change leaders at all levels within your organisation - they don't necessarily follow the traditional company hierarchy. It is important to get an emotional commitment from these key people as you build a team to support your change initiative.

Step Three: Create a Vision for Change

You need to create a clear coherent vision that people can grasp easily and remember and that can help everyone understand why you're asking them to do something.

When people have clarity about what you're trying to achieve, and why then you stand a greater chance of communicating with them

Step Four: Communicate the Vision

How effectively and consistently you share and communicate your vision will have a big influence on the success of your change initiative.

There will be resistance and competing messages from many other sources and influences within your organization so you need to communicate it frequently and powerfully, and embed it within everything that you do.

It's also extremely important to "walk the talk." What you do is far more credible than what you say. You have to demonstrate the kind of behaviour and attitudes that you want from your people.

Step Five: Remove Obstacles

There will be resistance to change. You need to identify it early and take steps to deal with it finding and resolving the root causes.

Put in place the structure for change, and continually check for barriers to it - especially with your organisational structure, job descriptions, and performance and compensation systems - it is vital that these are in line with your vision.

Step Six: Create Short-term Wins

Success breeds success - so early wins are very motivational and very important for morale and for overcoming resistance.

You can help achieve this by setting achievable and believable short-term targets.

This is very much in line with Ken Blanchard's ideas in "The One Minute Manager" of "catching them doing something right" [and praising them for it].

Step Seven: Build on the Change

Kotter argues that many change projects fail because victory is declared too early - he teaches that real and lasting change runs deep.

This is really all about building momentum and making continuous improvement an embedded part of your culture. In practice this means keeping things fresh with new ideas and regular review of what went right with each win identifying areas for improvement.

Step Eight: Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture

Finally, to make any change stick, it should become part of the culture of your organisation as this is the biggest determinant of how people will behave.

It's also important that your company's leaders continue to support the change. This includes existing staff and new leaders who are brought in. If you lose the support of these people, you might end up back where you started.

In my opinion there are many aspects to Kotter's 8 principles of how to manage change that resonate with, and are totally consistent with, the holistic and wide view perspective of a program based approach to change management.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2756472

The Challenges of Choosing the Right Way to Grow Your Company: Build, Borrow or Buy?

Guest post by Laurence Capron 

The dangers of relying on one single growth strategy

How do you grow your company ? Whether we talk about entrepreneurial growth or renewing a mature company, the wrong move can break the firm. The problem is, most firms’ growth strategies emphasize just one type of growth — some focus on organic growth (BUILD), others on alliances (BORROW), and some on M&As (BUY). When these strategies falter, the common response is simply to try harder — but firms falling into this “implementation trap” usually end up losing out to a competitor whose approach is more inclusive.

The reliance on a single growth mode is misplaced. In a research I did with Professor Will Mitchell (Duke & Toronto University) on 150 telecom firms, I find that firms prepared to grow in diverse ways outperform the ones that narrowly focus on one single mode. Specifically, firms using multiple modes to obtain new resources and skills were 46 percent more likely to survive over a five-year period than those using only alliances, 26 percent more likely than those using only M&A, and 12 percent more likely than those using only internal development. 

To succeed, therefore, managers have to learn to right way to grow their company – and also learn when and how to abandon the strategies they have grown up with. For instance, big pharma has slowly but surely made a break with their “Build” tradition as companies moved away from the old self-contained integrated model into far more open and flexible networked models. Their reliance on alliances and licenses has increased in both product development and marketing and they have become aggressive acquirers.

My aim in writing Build, Borrow or Buy: Solving the Growth Dilemma (HBR Press, 2012) is to help executives to build a powerful new business capability: the discipline of selecting the best pathways tofollow when pursuing growth opportunities. From my research with W. Mitchell, I have developed a comprehensive framework for deciding whether—under what sets of circumstances and in what combinations—to BUILD, BORROW, or BUY your way to success. The three words that comprise the title of our book each express a point of view: 1. Build: We’ll do it ourselves! 2. Borrow: We need others to help us! 3. Buy: We’ll buy our way in! 

Finding Your Resource Pathways

Four questions frame the selection of the different growth pathways of internal development (Build), contracts alliances (Borrow), and acquisitions (Buy). Those questions are summarized in the step-by-step Resource Pathway Framework depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The Resource Pathways Framework as a decision tree

 

Source: Capron and Mitchell (2012).

1. Are you Internal Resources Relevant? Firms should start by assessing whether they can leverage their current resources to satisfy their new requirements for growth. Developing new resources internally is faster and more effective than obtaining them from external parties only if (i) the firm’s existing resources (including knowledge bases, processes, and incentive systems) are similar to what is needed and (ii) the firm can outshine its competitors in the targeted area. In such cases, internal resources are relevant to the development of targeted resources.

Thus, most companies do begin the resource search process by evaluating whether internal knowledge and organization are sufficient to develop the new resources needed. Yet many companies grossly underestimate the gap between that they have and what they need. Hence firms that are determined to develop resources internally often fail to recognize the difficulties of conducting such projects.

2. Are the Targeted Resources Tradable? Once a firm has established that it needs to look elsewhere for needed resources, it must consider which mode of external sourcing to use. The first option to consider is contracting, which amounts to “borrowing” resources that another firm has created. Contracts (e.g., licensing agreements) are often a simple way to obtain resources externally. The benefit of a good licensing strategy—compared with more complex interfirm combinations such as M&As and alliances—is that the firm can cherry-pick desirable resources from external partners without the costs of acquiring and integrating an entire organization or managing complex arrangements. Licensing strategy is more effective when coupled with the internal capacity to assess and absorb the new knowledge.

The firm must be able to recognize conditions that suit purchase contracts, which can save substantial managerial time and attention if more complicated interfirm combinations are thereby deemed unnecessary. This approach may fail, however, if the resources in question are not effectively tradable (Williamson, 1975). Determining such tradability requires a clear definition of the targeted resources and an understanding—based, in part, on trust in the relevant legal system—of how to protect their value.

3. How Close do you Need to be with your Resource Partner? When a basic, arm’s-length agreement is insufficient to meet resource needs, the firm must consider a more complex relationship with an external provider. Such strategic collaboration is a more active form of using a partner’s resources. Alliances usually involve licenses but often extend well beyond them; in a co-development alliance, for example, both partners engage in developing a resource such as intellectual property. Alliances can take many forms, which range from R&D and marketing partnerships to freestanding joint ventures. All alliances involve ongoing interactions in which independent actors commit resources to a joint activity.

Alliances can be effective tools for achieving growth—whether by obtaining new resources or achieving greater scale and visibility in targeted markets. Alliances are more likely to succeed when (i) the partners have a focused relationship with limited points of contact and (ii) they can align incentives (Gulati and Singh, 1998). However, if a high level of coordination is required (because many of the partners’ business units are involved) or if there are significant differences in partners’ strategic needs, then the costs and difficulties of collaboration usually outweigh the benefits. In that case, an acquisition might make more sense.

4. Can you Integrate the Target Firm? Acquisition is the mode of last resort – reserved for cased that don’t suit any other path. However, that doesn’t mean that you must undertake an acquisition simply because you have rejected the other modes. The key question is: Can the acquiring firm integrate the target sufficiently and within a reasonable time? Integration may transpire soon after an acquisition or be phased in over time. Creating value from an acquisition requires resource creation that draws on the skills of the combined firm, as explained more fully in the section that follows. Without integration that creates new resources, the acquired firm is merely an expensive target that continues to operate as before—much as if your purchase of its shares were a passive investment in the stock market.

If the firm decides that proper integration of a target is not feasible, then it should reconsider the less complex options. These include alliances, partial acquisitions, and creation of an experimental internal unit to pursue new resources whose development is not easily integrated into the organization’s mainstream processes. In the end, a firm that has exhausted its options vis-à-vis resources should consider redefining its strategic road map.

About the author: 
Laurence Capron is the Paul Desmarais Chaired Professor of Partnership and Active Ownership at INSEAD, France and director of the INSEAD executive education program on M&As and corporate strategy. She is currently a visiting professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. She is the coauthor of Build, Borrow or Buy: Solving the Growth Dilemma (with Will Mitchell).

Sowing The Seeds of Autonomy

Everyone wants to be their own boss and some even want to own and run their own company. Here are a couple of ways to the entrepreneurial world or at work.You should start laying the foundation to this goal early in your career. Here's how:

• earn the trust of your boss - make sure you have a good rapport with your boss, positive give and take;
• broaden your personal skill set(s) - understand the entire organization, be able to read spreadsheets, update your computer and software skills, and most of all understand the business and competition;
• stay aboveboard - don't go as Sarah Palin would say "going rogue". What that really means as don't blindside your boss or surprise him/her;
• build stakeholder support - make sure you have the right influencers on your side, and hold them close, partner with other people who make a difference.  

I hope these few tidbits help you in your goal to be a true entrepreneur. If you have other seeds of wisdom please email them to me at wgstevens2@gmail.com. 

The ROI Of Cloud Apps

Cloud applications continue to gain momentum in enterprise applications as buyers are attracted to fast deployment speeds, low upfront costs, and ongoing flexibility to scale up or down as needs change. But as firms spend more and more of their closely guarded IT dollars on cloud applications, sourcing executives must scrutinize the long-term value of these investments. Today’s cloud investments represent millions of dollars of annual IT spend for some larger consumers of cloud. Forrester's report analyzes the longer-term, five-year cost of ownership and value for cloud applications across four categories: customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), collaboration (including email), and IT service management.


Cloud applications, also known as so$ware-as-a-service (SaaS), are taking the so$ware market by storm. Cloud giant salesforce.com boasts nearly 100,000 companies in its CRM-centric client base; SaaS keeps growing at rapid pace across sectors like ERP (NetSuite, Workday, and Business By Design), IT service management (CA, BMC, HP, and Service-now.com), and email (Google, Microsoft Office 365, and IBM Lotus Live). Buyers gravitate to these solutions because of their low upfront costs and fast speed of deployment. Many SaaS solutions also o&er a more user friendly UI than their on-premises competitors due to their more recent introduction or the providers’ ability to rapidly update the UI through automatic,
seamless upgrades. For example, salesforce.com has evolved its original eBay-like look-and-feel to today’s more modern Facebook-like design. Forrester's recent budgets survey shows that 51% of firms plan to increase spending on software-as-a-service, while only 9% plan to decrease spend. But, despite such bullish growth and near-term spikes in spend on SaaS, the subscription model raises questions about its longer-term financial impact.


FOUR FACTORS DETERMINE THE ROI OF CLOUD APPLICATIONS

Cloud is certainly fashionable at the moment among business leaders, but few understand its full implications. Sourcing executives should therefore cut through the fog of misinformation and
objectively evaluate the financial impact on business when considering the adoption or avoidance of cloud applications. How? Companies can use a simplified version of Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) model to systematically consider:

1. Benefits. How will your company benefit from cloud applications?
2. Costs. How will your company pay, both in hard costs and resources, for cloud applications?
3. Risks. How do uncertainties change the total impact of cloud applications on your business?
4. Flexibility. How does this investment create future options for your organization?


Key Benefits: Cloud Applications Drive Faster Time-To-Value
Organizations that are implementing cloud applications can expect several benefits, mostly around deployment speed, subscription pricing models that align with usage, accessibility, and usability. Scale, timing, and duration of these benefits can be estimated by considering one or more key metrics and the value to the organization of improving those metrics over time. 

Ongoing benefits include: 

• Faster deployment speed
• Reduced support needs
• Simpler, more frequent upgrades
• Better utilization

Key Benefits Of Cloud Applications are: Reduced cost of adoption, Quicker adoption, On-premises cost avoidance,and Improved flexibility. 

Risk Analysis: As Cloud Market Evolves, Buyers Should Expect Consolidation And Shakeout

No change — or avoidance of change — is without risk. Factoring this uncertainty into the analysis converts an optimistic, and potentially unachievable, plan into one with higher accuracy. Initial estimates can be refined by factoring in two key risks:

• Vendor viability as the market shakes out. #e advent of cloud platforms, such as Azure and Force.com, has lowered the barrier to entry for solutions. Many cloud start ups can get going with a small team of coders — with little or no start up costs or venture capital. As a result, cloud applications proliferate — but some may have a short life span, either because of failure or acquisition. While acquisition can sometimes be a benefit that adds stability and investment, it can also be a risk that leads to changes in contracts, changes in pricing, or even a shutdown of the acquired technology (as happened with Google’s acquisition of Plannr). Overall, vendor viability risks are high as this early market moves at such a fast pace.

• Vendor lock-in. Cloud applications are usually easy to get started. But in the longer term can be difficult — and expensive — to switch vendors. In some cases, users become“hooked” on user-friendly cloud applications. Business users may strongly resist switching from an application they like. Also, most vendor switches will require data migration and implementation costs to move to a new solution (whether cloud, hosted, or on-premises).

BUSINESS VALUE OF SPEED AND FLEXIBILITY VARIES BY TYPE OF APPLICATION

To arrive at a quantitative assessment of the economic implications of cloud applications, Forrester evaluated the key drivers of benefits, costs, and risks for an organization moving from on-premises to the cloud. We provide examples of the ROI calculation for three software categories: 1) business productivity apps including email; 2) CRM; and 3) ERP, including human resource management. Beyond considerations common to most types of SaaS, firms must consider application-specific issues as well, including:

• Impact of software usability. Solutions with large, fluid user populations will reap huge benefits from an easier-to-use, intuitive design. For example, CRM products have a high churn end user population of sales teams. In these cases, usability is a significant factor that can materially reduce training time and cost and increase end user adoption, and thereby improve ROI. Other applications, like IT applications or finance applications will usually be less affected by UI design, since they are used by a smaller population that will likely undergo application and process-specific training upon hire.

• Breadth of application footprint. The amount of application functionality will determine hardware and IT staff that can be retired or redeployed (costs saved). If the cloud solution replaces a large on-premises application (such as an HR suite like Ultimate Software or a full ERP like NetSuite or Business ByDesign), organizations will save IT resource and support costs. But if the cloud application is more of an add-on or replaces only a portion of a larger enterprise application, the reduction in hardware, support, and IT staff will be small.

• Value of upgrades. Seamless, automatic upgrades matter more for some cloud application categories than others. New, rapidly evolving categories will benefit significantly from frequent feature/function enhancements, as will those like security and compliance that need frequent content updates. Conversely, firms might be less inclined to care about new functionality in mature, stable spaces such as accounting.

R E CO M M E N D AT I O N S

SMART CONTRACT NEGOTIATION STRATEGY CAN INCREASE THE VALUE OF CLOUD APPS

Sourcing executives can help their organizations get even more value out of cloud purchases by:

• Determining the right deal length. Sourcing executives should consider planned usage as  well as the evolving vendor landscape to determine the right deal length. If they are making a significant bet on the application, they should favor longer deals. They also may like to lock-in a low rate through a longer (three to five year) deal in a maturing market like CRM. If they are in fast-growth mode or have other significant variability, sourcing executives should opt for shorter deals that give them room to change course. Similarly, in markets that are still quickly evolving, sourcing executives should sign shorter deals; new options and acquisitions mean that they will want to consider alternative options more frequently.

• Opting for the best-value license category. Cloud applications now offer more advanced pricing. Some vendors offer multiple tiers of applications (that vary by functionality or performance and disaster recovery commitments) and multiple licensing options, such as enterprise wide license options that eliminate explicit user-based pricing. With price tags getting into the millions annually for more complex cloud deployments, sourcing executives should help their firms navigate the licensing options to figure out which will create the best deal overall. They also need to consolidate contracts and put an end to one-off contracting by business, which prevents organizations from getting volume discounts.

For more information go to Forrester.com for the complete study and survey.