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<\/a>The big project fails, the company begins to struggle and before you know it, the board of directors replaces the management team. Sound familiar? But crisis doesn’t have to spell the end of the company itself.<\/p>\nMost companies and teams in turnaround situations focus on the obvious and important factors of balance sheet, cash flow and net income health. Teams also usually get to work quickly on market analysis that ultimately results in new product and business strategies. These actions are almost always necessary, just not always sufficient. Here are four often overlooked tactics that, if successfully employed, are critical to rapidly and successfully turning around a struggling enterprise:<\/p>\n
1. Facilitate Closure<\/strong> -\u2013 When a team has been through an extended period of hardship, it needs a sense of closure before it can start moving forward again, and closure is often best facilitated through a cathartic event <\/a>that symbolizes the end of the perilous and painful journey. But while closure commonly necessitates letting a person or team go, don’t rush to find a “fall guy.\u201d Be very precise about identifying what was holding the company back — it could just as easily have come in the form of an ineffective process or out-of-date strategy. Approach its removal the way you would a tumor: Excise carefully, and be wary of damaging any healthy surrounding tissue.<\/p>\n 2. Set a Vision<\/strong> \u2013- According to intentional change theory<\/a>, there are five steps to achieving sustained desired change. The first is to identify the ideal self, which for an organization is usually embodied in a collective vision consisting of its members’ dreams (to be recognized as the best in the industry? world domination?), their desired future (market penetration? profitability?), and their strengths or values (high quality? extraordinary customer care?) Identify these in order to establish a shared vision that resonates with each team member on a deep, even emotional, level.<\/p>\n 3. Find an Enemy<\/strong> \u2013- The easiest way to solidify an \u201cus\u201d is to identify a \u201cthem.\u201d As Tajfel and Turner\u2019s social identity theory<\/a> makes clear, people need to be part of a group, but in a company the result is often conflict between groups. The conflict that most often occurs in a crisis is affective and role-based<\/a> and therefore often negative and value-destroying. There is no better way to rally the troops than to embody the fight with an external nemesis. Identify for your team an enemy outside the company and focus on beating or staying ahead of it, using everything from its press releases to its product launches to spur the team into action.<\/p>\n 4. Tend the Garden <\/strong>-\u2013 In our recently published book, \u201cThe Art of Scalability<\/a>,\u201d we talk at length about how leadership is like gardening. Leaders must hire or seed the team with the right people and mentor its members just as gardeners feed their plants. And when team members aren\u2019t working out, they need to be weeded out.<\/p>\n The time period between Microsoft\u2019s release of its XP desktop operating system and Vista marked the longest in the company\u2019s history between product launches. Jim Allchin, Microsoft\u2019s co-president, admitted in a Wall Street Journal interview<\/a> to telling Bill Gates at one point that \u201cIt\u2019s not going to work,” describing the development as \u201ccrashing to the ground\u201d due to haphazard methods of feature integration.<\/p>\n To recover from this, Microsoft enlisted the help of senior executive Amitabh Srivastava, who rooted out the process that was holding the project back. He then had a team of architects establish a development process that enforced high levels of code quality and reduced interdependencies. Once the new process was in place, the vision was set for what was ultimately a successful product launch, at least in terms of getting the product out the door and meeting the expected sales volumes.<\/p>\n There are entire books and domains of research dedicated to turning around failed projects and distressed teams. This list is in no way all-encompassing but if you are ever faced with the daunting task of turning around a team, these four tasks will be critical to its success.<\/p>\n The big project fails, the company begins to struggle and before you know it, the board of directors replaces the management team. Sound familiar? But crisis doesn’t have to spell the end of the company itself. Most companies and teams in turnaround situations focus on the obvious and important factors of balance sheet, cash flow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3286,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-282023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3286"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282023\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n