Make your own list — and speed counts. Your team needs to hear the sunnier side from top management now. For your good news day, plan a lunch, an afternoon session with refreshments, or if your business is on the critical list economically, simply gather everybody together in a room and start talking, sans the goodies. Put up some posters listing the top 10 things that are good or could turn positive in the future. This is the time for showmanship, some theatrics — and a bit of humor can’t hurt either.
Speak from the heart and the gut. Tell your people what they do better than anyone else does. If you need help in your presentation, all you need do is turn on cable TV in the middle of the night and watch the evangelists do their thing. (You probably cannot sleep anyway with all your problems, so put your time to good use.) These silver-tongued proselytizers make the best salesperson look like a clerk in a flea market.
It’s not practical to promise your people that there will be no more pain, be no more layoffs and that the good times are ready to roll. However, you can promise them that you will communicate with them often, always reporting the good, along with the bad and the ugly.
Most employees can deal with anything, as long as they get the facts and the company treats them like adults, rather than feeding them a lot of corporate mumbo jumbo that raises more questions than answers.
Your employees need to know that there is always hope and good stuff to come even in the darkest times. What they want to hear from you is, “this too shall pass,” be it next year or in the years ahead.
A brief hiatus from the doom and gloom will go a long way in breaking the seemingly never-ending chain of despair. More than ever before, your employees and associates need something to celebrate that accentuates the positive and temporarily eliminates the negative.
Michael Feuer co-founded OfficeMax in 1988. Starting with one store and $20,000 of his own money during a 16-year span, Feuer, as CEO, grew the company to almost 1,000 stores worldwide with annual sales of approximately $5 billion before selling it for almost $1.5 billion in December 2003 to Boise Cascade Corp. Feuer is CEO of Max-Ventures, a retail venture capital/consulting firm, and co-founder and co-CEO of Max-Wellness, a new health care product retail chain concept that is launching in 2009. Feuer serves on a number of corporate and philanthropic boards and is a frequent speaker on business, marketing and building entrepreneurial enterprises. Reach him with comments at [email protected].
