Lessons for CEOs

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Creating an Environment of Innovation

This is the third in a three-part series on Innovation. The first part discussed the need for innovation, with examples of companies like 3M that have achieved success by continually innovating. The second part was on encouraging innovation in the workplace by hiring Idea Generators.

I’ve written about the need for innovation in the workplace and provided some tips on how to hire Idea Generators. In this post, I’ll discuss how to create an environment in your business that encourages innovation and creative thinking.

In some businesses, employees are blatantly or subtly encouraged to keep their thinking squarely inside the box. The most creative they are allowed to be is when it comes time to order lunch.

If you want innovation in your workplace, and trust me, you do, you need to actively encourage it by following these suggestions.

Plan your space to allow for easy collaboration

As Margaret Heffernan, a former CEO of five businesses said, “For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.”

If you’ve read anything about the history of Pixar, you know that Steve Jobs influenced the design of the building to encourage interaction and unplanned collaborations among departments. He went so far as to suggest that the large campus only have one set of bathrooms in the atrium so employees would be forced to go there several times a day. (That idea was quickly vetoed.)

“If a building doesn’t encourage [collaboration], you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity,” Jobs said. “So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.”

Give employees time during the week to explore their passion projects

In my first post on Innovation, I wrote about 3M and how it’s grown into a multi-billion dollar company through developing innovative products. The company has done this by implementing their 15 percent time rule, one it has had since 1948. 3M allows its people the time to investigate their ideas. That time has resulted in products such as Scotch tape and the Post-it note.

They also reward the best of these. Twice a year, six to eight ideas are awarded Genesis Grants, and the employees receive from $30,000 to $75,000 in seed money for 12 months of research.

Host a Hackathon

Started in the software industry, a hackathon is an event that pulls together people from different departments. It may last from one day to a week, generally with a specific purpose in mind.

Hootsuite hosts Hoot-Hackathons, two-day casual events for employees to meet new people and pitch ideas. “These events foster a culture of innovation and gets people enthusiastic about new ideas. Plus, it doesn’t cost a lot,” wrote Ryan Holmes in the article “Innovate or Die: 3 Ways to Stay Ahead of the Curve.”

Don’t punish failure and mistakes

Failure and mistakes are the steppingstones to mistakes. The Japanese engineer Soichiro Honda said, “Success is 99% failure.” I’m not sure I’d agree with that high of a percentage, but you get the idea. If some ideas don’t pan out, you’ve learned something. Remember what Albert Einstein said, “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there will be no hope for it.”

Have your employees on board with the concept

Even those employees who may not be your most creative can take pride in working for a company that encourages and embraces it. And besides, you never know where that next great idea will come from. Let your employees know that you are looking for creative thinking.

The American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers – poets, actors, journalists – they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don’t fight science and they don’t fight technology.”

Management Consultant Peter Drucker said, “Business has only two basic function – marketing and innovation.”

Companies tend to spend a lot of time and attention on marketing. How is your company handling the function of innovation?

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How to Encourage Innovation in the Workplace

This is the second in a three-part series on Innovation. The first in the series, “Innovation Distinguishes Between a Leader and a Follower,” provided some examples of companies like 3M that have stayed successful for decades by continuing to innovate. These next two parts focus on the steps to encouraging innovation.

In my last post, I wrote about the need for businesses to continually innovate. As Steve Jobs said, “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

But innovation isn’t something you can just mandate, like telling your employees they need to schedule their lunch hours at certain times. And it’s not just adding a line item to your budget under the column “Innovation.”

Ironically, results from innovation and creative thinking are often not related to the amount of money spent. As Steve Jobs also said, “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money.”

So what did he say it is about? “It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”

After reading my last post, I hope you get the need for innovation. So let’s talk about how to hire people that will help you innovate.

Hiring the Idea Generators

Any manager knows there are differences between the people who excel at coming up with ideas and those that excel at execution of those ideas. A successful company will have a combination of both at all levels. And never has it been more important to find those idea people.

As Richard Florida, an American urban studies theorist, said, “Access to talented and creative people is to modern business what access to coal and iron ore was to steel-making.”

Consider Walt and Roy Disney, co-founders of Walt Disney Productions. Walt was the big idea guy, while Roy’s expertise was in finance. “Walt had this idea [for Walt Disney World]. My job all along was to help Walt do the things he wanted to do. He did the dreaming. I did the building,” he once told reporters.

But it’s a lot easier to review a resume and determine if someone can handle the financial area of your company. How can you scout for people good at generating ideas?

There’s no particular college degree that would indicate a person’s creativity. Some of our generation’s best innovators famously didn’t finish college — I bet you can name three right away. (Think Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.)

And the people who did come up with great ideas aren’t always recognized for them. Ironically, the person who invented the fire hydrant remains unknown because the patent was lost in a fire at the patent office in D.C. in 1836.

Here are a few tips to find and hire these Idea Generators:

Ask your current employees

The people you have on staff, particularly the more creative ones, probably already know some people they admire as idea generators and would like as co-workers. Let your staff know of your efforts, recruit among their recommendations and offer a referral bonus

Tailor your interview questions to identify them

Ask questions that will reveal a candidate’s creative past. Ask for ideas they have come up with and implemented at previous workplaces or any organizations with which they have been involved. You may find someone who volunteers at an organization who came up with a killer fundraising idea.

Add innovative features to the interview process

A friend’s son recently underwent an hour-long interview exclusively devoted to brainteasers. In a previous post, “Tips on Hiring from the Corner Office,” I wrote about a company that leaves a candidate with a calculator, pencil and a sandwich and returns in two hours. That’s for analysts positions at a $2 billion hedge fund, but you get the idea. Just as you are judging your candidate, they are judging the innovation of your company starting with the way in which you hire people.

Present an environment that encourages creativity

Idea generators want to know they will be in an environment that will foster their creativity, not stifle it. For tips on how to create such an environment, read the third part of this series.

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Innovation Distinguishes Between a Leader and a Follower

That’s a quote from the most famous innovator in recent history — Steve Jobs. To be successful, a company has to continually innovate. Here are just a few examples of companies that did and are thriving.

Will Housh was a member of the third generation of a family-owned HVAC business. While it was successful, he saw that e-commerce was coming to the HVAC industry while others in the business were unwilling to embrace the new technology. “Even though our family business was generating sales of more than $12 million in a good year, just how sustainable are mom-and-pop businesses in the age of the Internet?” he wrote in the article “How to Make an Unpopular Decision.”

He saw the industry changing. Customers were starting to use the Internet to connect with contractors and get lower prices. So he started an online and retail business, eventually selling his grandfather’s company to focus on his new business, Housh Inc.

“Whereas our old school HVAC business never made more than $12 million in annual revenue, Housh, Inc. has doubled revenue annually in the past three years and expects $20 million in revenue for 2014. In 2011, our business had three employees–it now has more than 20,” he wrote.

In 1909, James McGraw, a former schoolteacher and founder of The McGraw Publishing Company, and John Hill, founder of The Hill Publishing Company, merged their companies to form McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. Despite being primarily known as a textbook company, it was always at the forefront of changes in technology in education.

In 1989, it introduced the first computerized publishing system to instructors who could use it to customize their textbooks. In 2006 it became the first to offer online assessments and in 2009, it created a Center for Digital Innovation, launching McGraw-Hill Connect, an all-digital teaching and learning exchange for higher education. In 2013, McGraw-Hill completed a sale of its education division to Apollo Global Management for $2.5 billion. It’s doubtful a textbook company could have generated that kind of sale.

3M started as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company to mine a mineral deposit for grinding-wheel adhesives. It struggled in its early years but then invested in technical innovations, such as the world’s first waterproof sander. In 1925, a lab technician invented masking tape, followed years later by cellophane tape, both with the brand name Scotch. (Fun fact: the story goes that the lab technician asked a painter to test an early version of the masking tape and it fell off. He told the lab technician “Take this back to your stingy Scotch bosses and tell them to put more adhesive on it.”)

Ensuing years brought new electro-mechanical products, with the pharmaceutical, radiology and energy control markets added in the 1970s and 1980s. Last quarter, 3M set a record with $8.1 billion in reported sales.

Continued innovation is vital to the success and growth of a company. As the physicist William Pollard said, “Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”

In the next column, I’ll discuss ways to encourage innovation at your company.

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Getting the Most Out of Your Advisors

Welcome to part two of my three-part series on working with advisors. Last week, I discussed How to Find the Best Advisors for Your Business. This week I share my top tips on utilizing their expertise to foster the growth and success of your business.

  1. Be clear about your expectations and create accountability

A new advisor may have been planning on a phone call every quarter, while you envision monthly face-to-face meetings. In the article “How to Use Advisors to Supercharge Your Business,” Eli Portnoy writes about giving up some equity in his company to his advisors and getting nothing in return. “Our advisors were fantastic and really wanted to help. The problem wasn’t them, it was me. My advisors were brought on at random, and furthermore, I failed to create structure and accountability.”

Leveraging the lessons he learned the first time around, when he brought on new advisors he made it clear what he was looking for from them. He drew up a two-year contract that stated they would meet or talk on the phone every other week and have an in-person session or dinner once a quarter. If all obligations were met, they would receive equity in his company after the two-year period.

  1. Be honest with them

To get the most out of your advisors, you have to operate in an arena of mutual trust. That means you have to share the challenges you are facing and your financial situation accurately.

This may be uncomfortable at times if things are not going so well. But perhaps especially in bad times, your advisors can prove crucial to weathering a difficult situation by first forcing you to confront the issues.

I devoted an entire chapter to facing your harsh realities in my book, “How Not to Hire a Guy Like Me: Lessons Learned From CEOs Mistakes.” Failure to do so is one of the major mistakes I have seen CEOs make, time after time.

If you share your information honestly, your advisors can be the ones forcing you to face your harsh realities before it’s too late. Maybe you are having a cash flow problem and aren’t sure how to resolve it. One of your advisors may have dealt with a similar scenario and have suggestions on the best way to deal with the situation. You can’t get the best advice without revealing the true picture of the financial situation of your company.

Your advisors may have some other great ideas to share with you even when it’s not a time of crisis. Let’s say you’re having your most successful year yet. Your advisors may have ideas on how to build on and leverage that success.

  1. Listen to their advice

While this sounds like just common sense, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve dealt with who had ended up in dire financial shape and it wasn’t because they weren’t getting good advice. They just didn’t listen to it.

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal last week, “Tuning Out: Listening Becomes a Rare Skill.” The article cited a study done in 2011 in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes that found that the more powerful the listener is, the more likely he is to dismiss advice from others.

You can gather the best advisors in your industry and share details about your business. But none of that will do a darn bit of good if you don’t actually follow it. These leaders are those that John Steinbeck was speaking of when he said, “No one wants advice – only corroboration.”

Finding the right advisors and working with them in the best way possible can make a huge difference in the success of your company. Eli Portnoy, the young man who made mistakes the first time around and then instituted structure and accountability, saw a huge difference in his company. “Thinknear took off within months of creating the new advisory board and structure. My personal weaknesses as a CEO became strengths and with the help of my advisors I was able to supercharge our trajectory.”

Advisors can make a big difference in your business, but there are still professional advisors you need to hire. For part three of this series, I’ll talk about those.

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How to Find the Best Advisors for Your Business

A trusted team of talented advisors can be essential to the success of any business. But how do you go about finding the right ones for your business? And after you have identified them, what is the best way to utilize their expertise?

In this three-part series I’ll share tips on how to find good advisors and after adding them to your team, the best way to leverage their skills to foster the growth and success of your business.

For the first two parts, I am focusing on hiring for an advisory board. While advisory boards can be invaluable, any successful business needs to hire professional advisors as well. In part three, I’ll discuss what professional advisors you need to hire.

  1. Don’t hire advisors from your fan club

You may have some friends and colleagues who listen to your business ideas and respond with enthusiasm, cheering your every decision. These are not the people you want advising you. You want to find people that challenge your ideas, present opposing sides of view and are not afraid to play devil’s advocate.

A good advisor will bring up issues and concerns that you may not have considered, laying the groundwork for you to deal with those issues now and travel down the right path, rather than pay for those mistakes later.

While it may feel more natural and certainly more comfortable to surround yourself with people who share your outlook, they will function more as “yes” people than advisors. You need someone to challenge your less viable ideas and present alternative viewpoints.

  1. Look outside your existing network

Seek out new networking opportunities to expand your circle and find people with successful businesses who may be able to help. Finding the time to make and foster these contacts can be particularly challenging during high-growth periods for your business, but networking can pay off in ways you can’t foresee. As author Jared Kintz said, “Unless you are a pile of cat hair, you can’t succeed in a vacuum.”

  1. Hire advisors with different areas of expertise and skill sets

Identify areas of expertise where you are less than proficient and seek out advisors with relationships and experience in those areas. Maybe you have a great product, an excellent design team and people with marketing experience, but not the necessary expertise to reach your target market. Find an advisor who has those contacts.

Having access to skill sets your business lacks is crucial. I once worked with a university that was in dire straits. One of the issues it was facing is that senior management was trying to handle areas that were outside their expertise. That does not go well.

Finding a good, functional advisory board takes some time and effort. Some business people forego it altogether, perhaps believing as Judge Arthur Goldberg did, “If Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock.” While that may be true of some advisory boards that seem to serve as more as hindrances than boots to progress, if you find the right team of advisors you’ll have a better chance of smooth sailing.

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Lessons From the Marshmallow Challenge

In 1988 Robert Fulghum wrote the #1 New York Times best-selling “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” It contained such gems as “Play fair.” “Put things back where you found them.” “Clean up your own mess.” “Live a balanced life.”

The simple reminders of the book seemed to resonate with many people across the world. That book, plus his seven other non-fiction books, have sold more than 17 million copies in 103 countries.

I was reminded of that book recently when I watched a fascinating TED Talk by Peter Skillman, formerly the VP of Design at Palm. He talked about an experiment he conducts with marshmallows and spaghetti and the surprising results he learned from one group.

The Marshmallow Design Challenge is conducted with teams of four that each has 18 minutes to create the tallest freestanding structure possible with 20 pieces of spaghetti, a meter of tape, one piece of string and one marshmallow.

photo (4)He had been conducting the experiment for years with groups that included engineering students from top U.S. schools, telecom engineers from Taiwan, business school students and lawyers when he learned something that shocked him.

While architects and engineers consistently built the tallest, most stable structures, he found that kindergartners, on every objective measure, scored higher than every other group of adults.

The lowest performing? Business school students. Many of them got zeros on the experiment. Lawyers didn’t fare much better.

So the question is why did five years olds perform so much better and what can we learn from that? Peter found two key factors that differentiated the kindergarten teams.

• They don’t waste time seeking power. “Kindergarteners do not spend 15 minutes in a bunch of status transactions trying to figure out who is going to be CEO of Spaghetti Corporation. They just start building,” he said. “This gives them a better and immediate understanding of the structural properties of spaghetti.”

• They don’t sit around talking about the problem. They just start building to determine what works and what doesn’t. If something doesn’t work, they discard it and try another method, employing what Silicon Valley refers to as “Fail fast, fail often.”

Here are a few more lessons Peter says he has learned from conducting this experiment with almost 1,000 people.

  • Building develops your intuitions about how process and materials are connected.
  • You learn by doing, discovering problems you can’t predict in advance.
  • Simultaneous iteration allows you to see a lot of good ideas.
  • Being first to market isn’t always the best.
  • Multiple iterations usually beat a commitment to making your first idea work.
  • All projects have resource constraints; however, you can often get additional resources. But you’ll never get them if you don’t ask.
  • Exercises like this illustrate the value of deadlines.
  • Encourage wild ideas: What if I tied the structure to the ceiling?

Many corporations have used the Marshmallow Design Challenge with their teams, which takes less than an hour and costs just a few dollars to conduct.

Tom Wujec, a Fellow at Autodesk, is a big believer in it, and gave his own TED Talk on it. “I believe the marshmallow challenge is among the fastest and most powerful technique for improving a team’s capacity to generate fresh ideas, build rapport and incorporate prototyping, all of which lie at the heart of effective innovation.”

If you’d like to conduct your own Marshmallow Design Challenge, you can find the rules here. Chances are you’ll have fun and learn something to improve your business. And you can always make S’Mores after you’re done.

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Tips for Dealing with Office Gossip

This is the second in a series on office gossip. In my last column, I wrote about how harmful office gossip can be to your business. This column focuses on how you can deal with it.

Office gossip can be harmful to your business and to the reputations of your managers and employees. It can cost you money in lost productivity and turnover when employees who don’t like the negative environment leave.

Here are a few tips on how to deal with it so your business can be a healthy, happy and productive place to work.

Set the standard

This is so important that I devoted a section of my book, “How Not to Hire a Guy Like Me: Lessons Learned from CEOs’ Mistakes” to it. As the head of a company, you must lead by example. It doesn’t matter whether you want your employees to emulate your behavior — they will.

Don’t talk about negative rumors about your competition or any of your vendors. If you hear others spreading rumors, request that they refrain from doing so.

Avoid the all-employee approach

Sending an email to all the employees or announcing at an all-company meeting demanding that office gossip stop will not work. The ones who are spreading the gossip will continue to do so, and those who are not engaging will wonder what they are missing, and may even start to gossip so they can catch up.

If you can determine the source of negative gossip, meet with those individuals one-on-one to explain the repercussions of their behavior and that further gossip will not be tolerated.

Create an environment of open communication and trust

This is my number 1 tip for stopping negative office gossip. If you create an open environment where employees trust the management and feel free to communicate with their supervisors, there is no reason to spread gossip.

You’ve probably heard the term “the mushroom treatment.” It’s when employees feel like they are kept in the dark, fed a lot of manure and when they are big enough, they are canned.

Although that term originated more than 40 years ago, many companies still operate this way. When I am brought in to run a company, one of the first things I do is talk to employees at all levels to get their opinions on what is happening and what needs to be done. More often than not, when a company is in dire straits, the employees are not getting the real story. They are being kept in the dark.

Guess what happens when employees know a company is struggling but no one is telling them the truth? They begin to manufacture their own perception of the truth from what little is being shared. That’s how the office gossip train is fueled. The less they know, the more they talk. And when your employees are engaged in a rousing game of “What Did You Hear Today?” guess what they are not doing? Their jobs.

When employees are left to play the guessing game, morale and productivity take a dive, putting your company in even more jeopardy.

Generally, when I take over a company, I am walking into a toxic environment of distrust. One of my most important jobs initially is to regain the trust of the employees, and I do that by making honest communication with them a top priority. It may take a while for senior management to regain their trust, but once we do, you’d be surprised what a difference it can make in turning around a company.

Employees gossip because they are kept in the dark and feel powerless. Telling them the truth, no matter how dire it is, can make them feel empowered.

As Will Rogers said, “Rumors travel faster, but it don’t stay put as long as truth.”

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How Office Gossip is Hurting Your Business

This is the first of a two-part series on office gossip. Today, I focus on the dangers of office gossip and my next column will share my top tips on how to deal with it.

I’ve talked about my nickname, Monty Hall, because I engage in “Let’s Make a Deal” on a daily basis in my career as a turnaround authority. Sometimes, I also feel like a contestant on the game show “To Tell the Truth.”

When I take over the management of a business and speak with employees at all levels of an organization, I sometimes hear wildly varied stories of situations in the company, which may or may not be true. It becomes my job to separate fact from fiction.

I often determine that a lot of what I’m hearing is not based on reality, but is actually office gossip. If you think that employees hanging around the proverbial water cooler is a harmless break in their day, you may be shocked to learn just how much that chatter is costing you.

BusinessInsider.com compiled a list of surprising ways that employees cost companies billions in the workplace. The article cites that “smartphones, time-wasting websites and gossip can cost U.S. companies an estimated $650 billion a year.”

In addition to the time wasted, office gossip is also dangerous to the health of your company in these ways:

• It reduces productivity

It’s common sense. If employees are spending their time spreading, listening to and trying to verify gossip, they are not focused on their jobs and are not working.

• It undermines morale

If employees hear rumors about trouble with the company, they may start to feel anxious about their jobs. Instead of focusing their attention on excelling at their jobs, they may instead start looking for another one.

• It creates a toxic work environment

Gossip can create cliques in the workplace and can be destructive to the teamwork necessary to complete projects, as employees take sides and begin to distrust each other. Employees who don’t want to work in that toxic environment may leave to find a more positive workplace.

• Reputations can be destroyed

Let’s say an unfounded rumor started that one of your employees has been missing deadlines on an important project. Managers may be reluctant to work with that employee in the future, damaging her reputation and limiting her career opportunities.

• It can cost you customers

It’s happened to me several times. I’m waiting for service at a store or have a meeting at an office and I hear the employees gossiping, apparently oblivious to the fact that I can hear every word. They complain about their long hours or that a fellow employee was taking off early that day. Gossiping employees can make dealing with your business an unpleasant task and people may be tempted to take their business elsewhere.

There is no doubt about it. Office gossip is detrimental to your company and to your employees. Read my next post for my top tips on how you can cut down on the gossip and its destructive effects.

 

 

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Dump, Delegate or Deal: Tips on Delegation

I read a quote recently by Daniel Doctoroff, CEO of Bloomberg L.P., who said, “I either delegate something, I dump it, or I deal with it.”

In my last column, I mentioned that the problem with many CEOs is that they end up dealing with tasks they should have dumped or delegated. Many never learned how crucial delegation is to the success of their business. The simple truth is that you can never grow a successful business unless you learn to delegate.

An article on Forbes.com references London business school professor John Hunt who says that only 30 percent of managers think they can delegate and of those, only one in three is considered a good delegator by his subordinates. I’ll do the math for you: only one out of 10 managers know how to delegate effectively.

Here are a few tips if your delegation skills could use some refining.

Be clear about what is necessary for the success of your business

In an article I read recently on FastCompany.com, “A Reformed Workaholic on How to Work Smarter,” author Kate Matsudaira wrote, “Take a long, hard look at your to-do list and your big-picture goals. Some of these items are critical and must be done by you, but most likely many aren’t. Ask yourself, ‘How does this grow my business?’ and be ruthless about cutting out anything that doesn’t fit.”

Don’t micromanage

Hire the right people and let them do their jobs. Being micromanaged fosters bad morale, resentment and employees feeling that they are not trusted. Employees want to feel like they “own” their work and feel trusted to get their jobs done.

Learn from the example of K.T. Keller, cited in the article “History’s 10 worst auto chiefs.” K.T. was president of Chrysler from 1935 to 1950 and put himself at the center of an organizational chart that resembled a wheel. All communication went through him and he involved himself in details of design, much to the detriment of the company. He thought cars should have roofs high enough so people could wear hats inside them, which led to unfashionable cars and declining sales.

Give employees the ability to make decisions

In addition to delegating work, also delegate responsibility for that work and the authority to make decisions regarding its completion. Your employees will feel empowered, trusted and more positive about the work environment. And guess what? They will also be more productive and the company won’t waste a lot of time sending decisions up the organizational chart that could be handled at a lower level.To get started, try these four steps from the article “Delegate now, before it’s too late.”

  1. Define and hand over the full responsibility to the identified candidate(s) as an experiment.
  2. Step back, do not interfere and observe the process for a few weeks.
  3. Iron out the kinks, pull back some tasks or give extra responsibility based on the observations of what went right or wrong during the period.
  4. Stabilize the process, get the documentation in place and set up reporting timetables and templates to get ongoing feedback on the delegated process.

Repeat as necessary, and watch your business grow.

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Communicate, Negotiate and Delegate in a Turnaround

This week I’ll be in Jekyll Island at the Turnaround Management Southeastern Conference, where I’ll be on a panel called Titans of the Turnaround. I chuckle about being called a Titan, as I was for an article written about my book, “How Not to Hire a Guy Like Me: Lessons Learned from CEOs’ Mistakes.” I never played football for Tennessee.

But it has me thinking about the skills that I have found to be the most useful in my career in the turnaround business. These include the ability to communicate, negotiate and delegate.

Communicate

I’ve written several times about the need for communication, because it doesn’t matter how smart or visionary you are, if you can’t communicate to your employees you will not be a successful leader. As Lee Iacocca said, “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.”

When I am hired as interim CEO or consultant at a company in trouble, I stress the need to senior management to communicate openly and honestly about the situation. I often have to work hard to open up lines of communications with employees at all levels, as they may have become accustomed to being kept in the dark.

Some employees work night shifts and may feel particularly left out of what’s going on. At one company, I hosted a midnight barbecue and chatted with the employees as I grilled hamburgers. In addition to enjoying my superb cooking skills, they left feeling listened to and informed.

As a “Titan” I also have to communicate effectively with everyone involved with the company, including lenders, vendors and customers.

Negotiate

I’ve written about my need to negotiate as the Turnaround Authority, which has earned me the nickname the Monty Hall of business. Every day is a game of  “Let’s Make a Deal” for me. You cannot be successful in the turnaround field without the ability to negotiate effectively with all interested parties.

In the negotiation process, I employ communication skills while always searching for creative solutions. Because I have not been involved in the company as it began to suffer financial difficulties, I can clearly see the situation, while the CEO has often become too emotional to determine and handle what needs to be done.

I worked with one company that had lost control of its brand and entered into licensing agreements with substandard manufacturers. It was embroiled in trademark issues and meanwhile had accumulated large debts.

I was able to renegotiate licensing agreements and default substantial licenses, getting the company back on track and focusing on its fantastic design department.

To read more about negotiation, please see my previous post, “A Key Ingredient to a Successful Negotiation.”

Delegate

I’ve seen it more times than I can remember in companies in crisis. A CEO who should be focusing his time and talent on getting his company back to financial health is instead working on tasks that could easily be handled by someone else. Usually it’s because he has not learned to properly delegate and let go of tasks that are not the best use of his time.

This inability to delegate is often one of the reasons the company has ended up in trouble in the first place. The CEO did not know how to let go of tasks or was micromanaging those that he had delegated.

All CEOs and business owners have to learn the art of delegation. That involves giving clear instruction on what needs to be done and when the deadline is. Another key is making sure you delegate the task to the right person.

The CEO needs to see himself as the catalyst to get the job done. He also needs to have the skills to communicate, negotiate and delegate.