Investing
in the future
A new industry is emerging on ‘how
to survive the downturn’. The focus is on cost
cutting, sharing the pain with suppliers and customers,
battening down the hatches, taking fewer risks. But
surely these actions are synonymous with creating
smaller, less confident and less flexible organisations?
Of course, for many organisations taking
drastic action – downsizing,
stopping car production until May, merging with a competing
bank – is unavoidable. But what might you be
doing at the same time to get the best out of yourself
and your people right now, and in preparation for the
upturn?
Keeping your talent creative and productive
is at the heart of doing well now and gaining ground
ahead of the upturn. The key is to maintain a positive
climate in which your people feel supported even whilst
tough decisions are being made. One of our team worked
with PwC in the last downturn. At that time PwC focused
on two things: people and brand. Leading humanely led
everyone to feel valued – even those who had
to leave the organisation did so with their heads held
high. PwC rose to be the number 1 recruitment choice
for graduates and goodwill amongst those who left was
reflected in them choosing PWC as their supplier as
the economy recovered, read more »
So how can you actually gain
advantage during the downturn?
Firstly, the complete leadership and
management group needs to create a shared vision of
the long term future. Living the values and respecting
everyone in the organisation form the central canvas
on which leaders at all levels need to concentrate.
But there are other, specific things you can be doing,
no matter what your level in your organisation…
But
there are other, specific things you can be doing,
no matter what your level in your organisation: specific
ideas are offered by this link.
Keeping a mature balance
between short term expediency and long term opportunity
will leave you stronger than others to take advantage
of the coming upturn. Creating a long-term focus need
not be complicated. At a management forum we were facilitating
the company’s leader came one day to address
the group. He said ‘I love downturns: weak competitors
will fail whilst we’re well organised and positive.
At the upturn we’ll emerge much stronger than
them as a result’. This visibly buoyed the management
who were abuzz with a new confidence as they left the
event.
Please give us
a call if you’d like to talk these ideas through
or if you’d like us to be your guides through
transition.
Inter-agency
working
We read with sadness about the
death of ‘baby P’ killed by his mother,
her boyfriend and a male lodger. The media has had
a field day casting around for someone to blame and
Lord Laming will be writing yet another report. It
reminded me of child killings going back over 30
years and the same things coming up again and again
and in particular the need for the various agencies
to work in partnership to avoid cases like this falling
to be picked up appropriately.
Why is it so hard for agencies to work
together? We wonder if a very real “fear of feeling” is
dehumanising the child protection system and inhibiting
the important work it does. Perhaps the context of
child protection affects individual and collective
emotional responses; and perhaps the systems and processes
that are in place to ensure protection are actually
leading to professionals hitting the targets but missing
the point.
We don’t think practitioners need
another voice telling them what to do. Rather, what
is needed is a safe space in which agencies can think
together and acknowledge and experience the complexity
of the challenges they all face in a way that helps
them find appropriate solutions together.
At Consultancy
Works a number of us have a background in clinical
work with children and families. We draw on family
therapy models in our organisational consulting to
help contain anxiety within individuals and teams.
We are developing a process that aims to transform
interagency working by taking a whole systems perspective.
To our knowledge this has not been tried before. This
is ambitious. But we need to keep it in perspective:
the previous report by Lord Laming cost £3.8
million and a conservative estimate of costs at a local
level on a high profile case is around £10 thousand
pounds. Putting resources in for prevention seems sensible.
We are very excited about the possibilities to make
a difference and wanted to share our ideas with you.
We
are at the start of our thinking and testing it out
with key people across the agencies and Government
Departments: please let us know what your thoughts
are. |
