Move quickly
The faster you advance from merely identifying problems to actually solving them, the better.
“Don’t drag it
out,” Campbell says. “You could spend a lot of time doing a bunch of analysis or you could just decide over the next week or two what to do and do it. And if you make mistakes, you can fix them later.”
No matter how he looked at it, Standard Pacific’s financials were out of whack. So Campbell’s first step was cutting annual overhead costs from $280 million in 2008 to $160 million. Initially, he didn’t know if it would work or not. He just knew, given the dire circumstances, if he didn’t do something, the company would fail anyway.
Maybe your situation isn’t as extreme, but the point is you need conviction.
“You have to do it quicker than you think you need to, and you have to provide people with a solution that they can believe in. Otherwise it won’t stick,” Campbell says. “You can be wrong about the solution, but you have to be convincing.”
You’ll start to build buy-in by asking employees to participate by offering input and ideas.
“You make them part of the solution,” he says. “I just sort of state the obvious and ask them, ‘OK, so what do we do?’ Part of the trick is making it their solution, not mine.”
The rest of the buy-in comes when you convince them that they’re capable. They don’t have to do the right thing — at least right away. You just have to get them to do something.
“In order to fix a company that’s in lots of trouble, you have to force people out of their comfort zone and then give them some confidence that they can actually do this,” Campbell says. “Part of that is removing the fear of failure. In other words, if you try something and it’s the wrong thing to do, that’s OK. If you don’t try something, that’s not OK. Sins of omission are worse than sins of commission because if you’re losing the race, you’ve got to change the strategy. If you do things quickly and aggressively, even if you make a mistake, then you’ll fix them faster.”
