Talk about solutions
In any organization, the biggest threat to success is uncertainty.
“Uncertainty creates insecurity and fear, and that drains people,” Burns says. “It’s really a cancer beyond the unsettledness of it. It’s a cancer in the sense that employees are distracted from giving you the excellence and delivering the excellence that they are accustomed to doing.”
Clayco has developed a very strong financial base with geographic and product diversity that insulates it from being too dependent on any single market, customer or type of work. But Burns says the economy’s performance at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 has everyone concerned.
You need to talk about the concerns that employees have about how the tough times will affect their job and the company as a whole. But you can’t dwell on it.
“We are sitting down with people in small groups and talking to people one on one,” Burns says. “We are basically creating venues where people can talk about things and get answers. But then it’s saying, ‘OK, here. Now we’ve talked about it. We can come back and talk about it again, but between here and there, let’s go and deliver excellence because that’s how we best deal with this market.’”
You make the dialogue effective by being genuine and by staying away from clichés.
“We don’t sit there and say, ‘Well, I don’t know, but we’re just going to work through it,’” Burns says. “We talk very specifically about staying on task. We talk very specifically about new initiatives that we’re doing to make us better that relate to how we design projects, how we manage projects and computer software and hardware to be able to facilitate that in a way that we’ll be leading the industry.
“We’re investing the time because we believe now is the time to do it. When they see that happening, they say, ‘Look, we’re not sitting here just trying to survive. We’re pressing forward to gain market share.’ That’s encouraging to people. People want to be part of that sort of thing. It’s getting it out there, but it’s also saying, ‘Now guys, what are we going to do to get out of this and to lead ourselves through this?’”
