Therese Duplessis works in the jungle of Brazil. She is a  registered nurse who has volunteered to work at an aids clinic for two years; her clinic services 3 villages very hard hit by aids.

The patients line up starts at 7am, and she hands out the cocktail of pills in the strangest of ways until 9am, at which time she takes a break until blood testing hours begin, from 930 am till 1100 am.

During her first month on the job, Therese would take a stroll during her morning break, coffee in hand, and walk on the paths that surround the clinic. To her surprise, she noticed that all the pills she had dispensed, except the red ones, had been thrown out.

Astute as they come, Therese learnt that the locals were ok with any medicine, as long as it was red. And to add a log to the fire, no medicine could be blue, because blue signified death. Two of the pills she had been  dispensing were blue.

Within a week, Therese was handing out the pills stuffed into a meatball which had been soaked in tomato sauce. Each patient received one red meatball, and downed the meatball in her presence.

Therese noted in an email to her family that “we sure did not learn that in school”.

It’s 2000. I am in Thailand sitting in an executive sales meeting as a facilitator with Javier, who is Head of Far Eastern Revenue Generation for an Israeli software company. Javier is a Cuban-born Canadian with an Israeli wife.

Javier has just asked for sales forecasts for the next quarter from his area VPs. Liang, VP of Key Accounts in South China, told Javier that the next quarter looks great! Then, in a coffee break, Liang told Javier that he would not meet his numbers and sales were way below target. Javier was furious. “Allon, Liang is blowing smoke up my ass”.

Javier told me to give a short talk about the importance of transparency and open communication about “early warning” signals when bad news is possible. I did so, since openness is such a core value in OD.

Liang came up to me at lunch and asked me to have supper with him. After a few (many) drinks, Liang (and Wu who had joined us) told me that he did not understand Javier. “I cannot give Javier bad news in public-that would be so rude; how I can I MAKE HIM LOOK BAD”. Wu added that he did not think that “Mr Javier has a thick face”. (He pronounced Javier as Ah-Wu-ya).

That was it-from that point on, I realized that I need to find my own road, far from the beaten path of traditional OD, to make OD relevant in a global setting.

Like Therese, I started cooking my own sort of meatball. Taste one.

Do you need to cook meatballs? Check here.

Roi (m) is overwhelmed by the issues facing him. His board is asking him to trim down the cost of labour by 14% in 2022, a impossible feat given the fact that he cannot downsize 64% of the people who come from a company acquired 4 years ago.

Roi’s CFO has just threatened to resign unless the recent order he received to replace the external accounting firm is rescinded. This ‘order’ came from a major stakeholder in the board and the Mayor’s office in the city where his firm is located.

To make matter’s worse, 35% of the employees, parents to young kids who have been exposed to the virus, are still in quarantine, many for the umpteenth time.

Materials that have been ordered are stuck in a Chinese /or German harbour, or stranded outside one of Israel’s ports, as port workers, themselves short-staffed, struggle to deal with the load.

Thus, important deliveries to key clients are postponed. Following are a series of comments Roi made to me in our last conversation on Monday, and my comments.

Roi-Allon, we have several processes that are stuck: end-of-year performance reviews; 2023 strategic planning session; end of year lessons learned. This is a nightmare because not only are we way behind, but I would not like to do any of this stuff remote.

Allon-If you decide to ditch any of these plans this year, or “rituals” as I perhaps they might be called, it does not mean you are doing so forever. For example, does it make sense to do a lessons learned with all this shit still happening? Why not go a bit easier on yourself and others? By the way, 2023 strategic planning is nice to have, Roi, but isn’t it better to focus on the urgent now as you are doing-after all, this is a crisis.

Roi-That’s not my role. Everyone is focused on the crisis. I need to see beyond the crisis. You and I do not agree on that; we have discussed that before.

Allon-Roi, we agree on that totally. The challenge is that you cannot do what you think you need to do, because the crisis has totally changed the rules of the game for the meantime. And it’s a long, long, long and mean meantime. And while you think you are think that your plans are “stuck” because of crisis you are dealing with, you actually are very effective. What is not effective is that you believe that you are not doing the right things by firefighting.

Roi-I wonder if speaking to you, old man, is doing the right things. (Laughs and hugs me)

Roi-What about the accounting firm? Should I cave in?

Allon: Roi, for politicians, time is money. This is a political power play. “Feigned agreement” along with  asking for a delay might be a wise choice. After all, you know this city better than me and we both know about how very long-lasting a temporary agreement is in Israel.

Roi-The board is really holding me by the balls.

Allon-Roi, do you think anyone really wants to get rid of you now? The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on.

Take aways:

• 1-It’s a new ballgame with new rules, or no rules.
• 2-What was was. Irrelevant for the time being.
• 3-In fog, focus on the next ten meters ahead of your car.
• 4-You can only do what you can do. Not one iota more.
• 5-Delaying the decision may become a strategy in crisis.
• 6-Yes, you can ignore some ridiculous external pressures  because no one really wants you to go.

*Published with agreement with client.

..it was the winter of despair.

Charles Dickens- a Tale of Two Cities

This is probably one of the most difficult times to manage effectively in recent history. Supply chains are chaotic, much of the work force is in quarantined or about to be quarantined; there are more resignations and loss of knowledge than in the past and doing even easy tasks is much much harder than ever.

I have been very lucky to be blessed with more work than ever. It appears that expertise and experience now count for something.

Over the past year, I have focused my work with managers on a very few  and focused messages-and I want to share them with my readers.

1) Frequent changes of direction are often necessary… yet the more changes in the message, the less the folks will trust you or your messages. So ensure that messages are over-communicated. 

2) “I don’t know” is a real answer, a legitimate answer and probably the fairest answer you can provide in many situations.

3) Manage your managers aggressively, so that they don’t force you to drive your people into the ground with unachievable goals in tough times.  Show appreciation when people do what they can, even if it is not enough.

4) Avoid sloganeering at all costs. Slogans don’t make much sense in regular times, but in difficult times, use of slogans (like “develop customer intimacy)  make you look absurd.

5) Don’t idealize tragedies. Working from home is a bitter necessity; not a religion. There is very little positive that comes from #wfh with 4 kids at home, lack of infrastructure, and Zoom fatigue. Tell it like it is, and don’t perfume  the pig. (Thanks Sherry)

There are cultures that get most things done by leveraging personal relationships (and even by trading so-called favours)  to speed up or by-pass process, get things done now, clean up later and solve routine as well as stubborn, irritating problems.

Example-Simon needs an electrician to check out  wiring at station 3 after a repair. He calls Vlad, who is about to go home, to “do me a favour and check out station 3 now because I don’t want to come in early tomorrow morning for your scheduled inspection.” Vlad agrees; deal done. And Simon owns Vlad a favour.

Another example: Todd from Engineering and Chava  from Purchasing  take part in face to face management offsite for next-generation managers. Todd’s requests gets preferential treatment from Chava whilst Chava never gets push-back from Todd when she prefers a certain vendor with whom the firm has a special relationship, albeit their poor level of customer service.

And then came covid. Offsite done by Teams.  Todd and Chava’s relationship has cooled. Simon and Vlad have not had breakfast and lunch together in over a year due to “covid capsules”. Relationships have cooled. No favours exchanged. No short cuts. Nada.

Zoom calls, Whatsapp groups and other “colder” avenues of communication have taken the “warmth” away from the task. The task is a cold thing that needs to be done. No one needs to be cajoled or appreciated. Work needs to be done.

All cultures find this transition somewhat difficult. Other cultures find it crippling.

To be more exact, in cultures where relationships formed from doing tasks, the transition to the covid and semi-post covid mode is a minor and unpleasant challenge.

In cultures where good relationships served as a platform for getting tasks done, the “carpet” has been swept away and getting things done is a nightmare.

Symptoms of the “carpet being swept away” include  a slow down in getting issues resolved, mutual blaming, far more cover-my-ass-communication and lots of things stuck in the pipeline waiting for escalation.

So-what are the solutions? To be honest, I have none that bring us close to what the situation was before covid.  On-line happy hours, sharing personal experiences remotely and a million other tricks I have read about don’t cut the chase. 

(Or maybe I am too old? After all, I preferred standing in line to order movie tickets outside the theatre rather than ordering tickets on-line.)

However if you are finding it hard to do get along well with people who come from relationship-driven business culture, I suggest: travelling to meet them as soon as possible, talking about things other than “work”, sharing mutual interests, small talk before and after meetings, coordinating strategies before meetings, and trying to avoid trust-busting escalations.

Whether or not there is a long-term trend to “mass resignation” has yet to be clearly established, simply because the world is still in the throes of Covid.

What is clear however, is that the initial response to undeniable increased resignations is very misled. Recently, I have read posts and articles peddling the same “retention strategies” of the past, but simply now with a double dose and some added steroids like “do it now or die”. The most annoying thing that keeps being regurgitated is that people leave bad bosses, not bad organizations. Yes-people die in bed, but beds are not necessarily dangerous places. At present, it is fair to say that people are leaving good and bad bosses, as well as good and shitty organizations.

I want to briefly share how I view increased resignations as well as  what I propose in order to deal with increased resignations.

1) Increased resignations are a societal trend, so even if you do everything right, you will face increased resignations. Yes! Even if your managers are superb and you pay well.

2) Look at your organization’s vulnerability to resignations.

• Do you have champions upon who you are highly dependant?
• Is there a lot of oral history that one needs to learn to be effective?
• Are there jobs structured so that it takes years to master them?
• Are too many key relationships held by too few people?

Once you have mapped out vulnerability, focus, focus, focus. Do NOT apply an across the board simplistic solutions.

3) Here are a few avenues of pursuit which lessen the blow of increased resignations at your vulnerable points.

• No more lean and mean-hire reserves and/back ups.
• Outsource functions which take too  long time a time to learn to reputable firms. So called “core competencies” need to be re-examined.
• Appoint second drivers for key functions-perhaps even third drivers.
• Any job which takes more than 6 months to learn should be restructured if possible so as to mitigate the damage from churn to enable a rapid recovery time. This may be extremely difficult yet absolutely necessary.
• Abolish total ownership of key relationships. Smith owns the relationship with GE? Not any more. No more full exposure Smith’s loyalty to the firm. Because whatever you do, long term loyalty is either dead or in a coma-and you cannot change that. It is a societal trend.

Update

This post was written at the end of last year. In the mean time, I have augered more experience in dealing with so-called mass resignations.

1. It’s real, but it is not so mass.
2. In many professions, it is caused by a shortage of manpower which enables employees to jump ship and get 40% higher wage. Isn’t it better just to pay attractive salaries, for heaven sake?
3. Effective approaches are not necessarily strategic, but more targeted on roles with harder to find skills.
4. Turnover has a positive effect. Fear not. Outsourcing is not the end of the world, even for key competencies.