Use your longer term employees to fuel and drive strategy success

With low confidence in the economic recovery, a lot of companies are filling their work needs using project based employment and short term hires. For your short term operational needs, these are great sources of relatively cheap labor (I will discuss this in another post). But for strategic initiatives, you need people thinking about the long term success, not just next quarter or the end of the project. The incentives for short term work by their definition are not aligned with long term objectives. Why would temporary employees care about the welfare of the company three years down the road if their involvement ends in one month?

For strategic initiatives you need longer term employees - people who will face the consequences of their actions and decisions. They also provide cohesiveness from one project to the next, and make decisions based on the long range business goals and not only on the short term project objectives. They represent and transmit the culture of your company. They provide the history and traditions that have made you a success in the past.

Thinking traps

I was reading an interesting blog post by Litemind about thinking traps. A lot of them have to do with our natural bias:

• Thinking we are better than we are (overconfidence in our abilities, memory, intuition or gut)
  
• Trying to confirm decisions we already made (shopping for confirmation, protecting our status quo or sunk costs)
  
• Unquestioning our thoughts and assumptions

We can avoid some of the traps by talking to people who hold different points of view. This article reminded me why it is important to have diversity in our teams. Our teams can protect us from some of the traps. There is one trap that is not in the article and that is intrinsic to groups: the "group think" trap. This trap makes the team assume one position or opinion and none others are considered (from wikipedia: groupthink).

To avoid falling into "group think" we have to make sure that dissenting opinions are heard, that timid or softspoken team members get a change to talk, and that critical thinking is always on the table. As a team lead or member, we all share that responsibility. Remember that this trap can make a team behave like lemmings and jump off the cliff.

Too many priorities

When setting priorities people are usually overoptimistic about what they can realistically accomplish. We see individuals trying to do everything at once: lose weight, exercise, eat healthier, be a better spouse, dedicate more time to the children, fix the house, reinvigorate their careers, build a better network. The reality is that you can’t do everything at once. If everything is a priority; then, nothing is a priority.

Companies don’t fare better than individuals. The illusion is that 100 employees should be able to handle 100 priorities. But companies have to understand that the average employee probably can’t handle more than 3 priorities at a time.

The impact on a business is that employees can’t find optimal solutions to problems that satisfy all priorities: should they be focusing on client experience or on cost management? Product innovation or bug eradication? This in turn can create paralysis in an organization while the decisions makers figure out which one is the most important priority.

Another side effect is that the company makes it impossible to do something that would please everybody. If they execute something thinking of customer experience, then somebody complains about cost management. Thus the actions of employees are based not on the priority but on who they do not want to anger.

The way around this problem is simple: first figure out what the top priorities are, then execute on them. Everything else doesn’t get a pass.