Crisis management

We are in a pretty deep hole right now. Jun didn't spend too much time to convince me that the worse thing to the current economic situation is our children, and children's children will have to spend considerably long time to pay for the economic debt we are creating right now. Increasing public spendings, lower the saving rate to encourage personal spendings and investment are all trying to stimulate the spending power, consequently create needs for working with sufficient cash flow. All these spendings will need to be balanced or paid back one way or another from either tax policy or decrease of benefits which our offspring will have to face with. This is what I could comprehend so far.

What I would like to talk about here is more of a miniature within a business organisation, which I call it crisis management to distinguish with terms like risk management, budget management etc.

We are all witnessing what is the unavoidable effect on individual business under current circumstance - decreasing budget, shredding jobs, cutting head counts, shrinking investment. All other things being equal, I could not easily find a logical outlet with such reactions. I also do not see how these reaction would help a business and positively produce contributions to global economy either. All the immediate reactions could only destroy consumer's confidence and power to spend. It is more like the start of the snowball. We can only pray for that at certain point in the future, the slope starts to slow down and things will pick up slowly.

Instead of reacting, there are at least certain things we could do. Economy climate change always has a hint, a signal of some sort. Honestly, as naive and dummy as I am in finance, the first time when I picked up the news that greedy mortgage lenders sell mortgages to customers without any appropriate evaluation, there was a voice in the back of my mind that something was not quite right. As an organisation, there are many signals, measurements could be used to trigger the alarm system. Management decisions should really at least be rehearsed before the crisis really hit us. One thing we should have learnt from the bank and logistics is that to simulate all different scenarios before hand is not a trivial job, which should really be the focus of our strategical management, if that really happens.

Personally, it is just not good enough to tell the people working for me that I do not know where we are heading towards, nor do I have better ideas or directions of what we should be doing other than simply react to the bigger environment. Let's face it, reaction, as one of the fundamental biological behaviour, is rather rudimentary. It can hardly be considered as intelligence. Rather than only being honest with employees, a good leader should do his homework - knowing what options we have, what are the fallback positions, and this is the time when the rehearsed strategy could be put in effects. A good leader also should realise that crisis could also be good opportunity to redefine the market, revisit your product portfolio, restructure the team, basically, you can create a whole new game, given that you are well-prepared enough and tough enough to get through the winter. You may not be able to keep the company going no matter how many heads to be cut off. That alone will not help you to push the ball uphill. We need to bear in mind is that the goal is not to save cost, which is only means, arguably may not be the best one though. Rather than destroy the morale completely, it might give you different perspective by fight with all backs against the river.

So, whenever I have free time slots, I keep reminding myself of the importance of home work - always be prepared before the rain comes. All those boring figures, charts, predictions, numerous versions of plans of attacks (no doubt most of them will go to the bin), they are worthwhile.

How to motivate a team

If we don't scrutinize it, we might not be aware at all of the importance of morale. It is so easy to forget, or simply choose to ignore. Unfortunately, as a team leader or manager, to realise the importance of morale, to quantify the difference it will be produced from a highly motivated team in terms of development deliverables, is absolutely necessary.

What you would find out from some motivation speech is thing such as "attitude = 100" (count a=1, b=2 etc, plus them together you will get 100, sorry I know this is a bit cheesy :)). They are not wrong! But this is not what I am interested. I want to find out how to quantify this effect.

So, what would happen if morale is changed? Efficiency, communication, motivation etc. These aren't measurable. What are things will be affected and can be put on pretty graph?

• Quantity of Deliverables in code, sensible notes, tests, documentation, parts, drawings ...
  
• Quality of Deliverables in design, code, test, documentation (write a blog when you are happy and do another one you are messed up, you'll see what I mean.)
  
• Satisfactory level. Most of the organisations ignore the other possibility that some engineers always deliver good quality work on time, however, they aren't happy. Of course you would argue as long as you got the result investors were looking for, who give a damn about one's happy or not - mature people know how to deal with it themselves. Unfortunately, the whole industry has soon realised that at the end of day, people, is all that matters. If people can't feel satisfied in they daily jobs, most important hours of an average day, you might as well just let them go, or most usually, they choose to move on.

This is blog is really trying to talk about how to motivate a team. You have to bear with me - I have this habit of wasting large part of a chapter in perusing the background, history orreasonings to things I really was planning to talk about...

Motivate a team is significantly different to motivating a person. Motivating a team means you have consider the dynamics within the team and how they would develop and affect each other. For instance, if you are trying to motivate a person you can help him to realise that he has the unique capability or potential to compete in a resource constraint environment; however, you can't possibly simply adopt similar approach to motivate a team - that way you would unintentionally cause conflicts and negative competitions.

To motivate a team, you need to understand the team goal and team development path, team skill set, team ambition, team structure, team morale. You need to help the team realise the common goal and develop the skill set, structure, tailor team ambition in a realistic and challenging way. To motivate a team is also to establish the right incentive scheme to encourage the practice which would help the team achieve its goal, to find out the strength and weakness hence development opportunities for each individual, resolve conflicts and encourage constructive competition and avoid unnecessary frictions or distractions.

There are certain subtly in achieving balance between coherence in the team and personal development. Imagine you inject a great deal of heat into a chemical element and you will find that more likely the instability of this element will increase. Similarly, the way you can motivate each individual is inherently different. Naturally these directions won't be the same hence the sum of those effects will not necessarily do the team any good.