Voices » BV Krishnamurthy » Enhance Your Managers' Skills During a Downturn
BV Krishnamurthy Bangalore Calling RSS Feed
Enhance Your Managers' Skills During a Downturn
8:11 AM Thursday August 21, 2008
Even in the best of times, organizations pay only lip service to skills enhancement. Instead, replicating a task repeatedly is perceived as the way to increase productivity and efficiency. Since growth is treated as a given based on the number of years one has been in a job, employees are given new and sometimes fanciful designations in the hope that such palliatives will indeed motivate them. Inevitably then, people tend to rise to their level of incompetence.
Thus, it should not come as a surprise to find brilliant programmers becoming team leaders or project managers who cannot deliver on time, cannot assure quality and invariably overrun budgets. The scenario is no different in other sectors. Managers today are so hard pressed for quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, and in some cases, hourly progress reports that they do not have the time to learn anything new. Where then is the time to unlearn that which is obsolete?
A downturn represents a fantastic opportunity to correct this anomaly. Since the pressure for meeting deadlines or achieving targets is not very high, at least in a relative sense, organizations would do well to invest in people and enhance what Nobel Laureate Mohammed Yunus calls "Social Capital." Employees at all levels can be sent for outbound training activities that would improve their team building and team working skills, and bring in a sense of process ownership that can do wonders to the organization when normalcy returns to the industry and the economy.
In firm after firm, we see individuals who are great when it comes to their performance but fail to build teams or to be a part of a team. The organization finds it difficult to do away with them since they do contribute significantly, particularly in the short term. In the long term, however, such individuals are value dissipaters. Investing in training such managers in particular to develop the ability to look at the big picture and to act in ways that strengthen the organization is probably the best investment that a firm can make in a downturn.
It is not easy; it requires visionary leadership, a courageous attitude to look at a downturn as an opportunity to fine-tune the organization to realize its avowed vision. Equally, it requires an organizational culture that is tolerant of honest mistakes and that fosters a nurturing environment where employees are passionate about their work and hence can deliver whatever the organization wants. Sadly, this is easier said than done given the preoccupation with share price movements and the need to provide favorable projections to all stakeholders.
For more, see the Complete Downturn Survival Guide 
People who read this also read:
Sign up for the Weekly Hotlist, a weekly email roundup featuring the top posts from HarvardBusiness.org and HBR.org.
Never miss a new post from your favorite blogger again with the HarvardBusiness.org Daily Alert email. The Alert delivers the latest blog posts from HarvardBusiness.org and HBR.org directly to your inbox every morning at 8:00 AM ET.
Trackbacks
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2675
No trackbacks have been made to this entry.
Posting Guidelines
We hope the conversations that take place on HarvardBusiness.org will be energetic, constructive, free-wheeling, and provocative. To make sure we all stay on-topic, all posts will be reviewed by our editors and may be edited for clarity, length, and relevance.
We ask that you adhere to the following guidelines.
- No selling of products or services. Let's keep this an ad-free zone.
- No ad hominem attacks. These are conversations in which we debate ideas. Criticize ideas, not the people behind them.
- No multimedia. If you want us to know about outside sources, please point to them, Don't paste them in.
The editors
BV Krishnamurthy
B V Krishnamurthy is the Director and Executive Vice-President of Alliance Business Academy in Bangalore, India, where he is also the ASI Distinguished Professor of Strategy and International Business. An engineer with post-graduate degrees in industrial management, systems engineering and business administration, and a doctoral degree in strategy, he has worked in corporations in Europe and Asia for 23 years (his last stint as CEO of a consortium) before entering academia in 1998. BVK also teaches in business schools in the USA, France, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Russia.
ADVERTISEMENT
-
1
Michael Jackson and the Zombieconomy Umair Haque
-
2
How Michael Jackson Became a Brand Icon John Quelch
-
3
Debunking Social Media Myths David Armano
-
4
A Good Way to Change a Corporate Culture Peter Bregman
-
5
Great Communicators Are Great Explainers John Baldoni
-
1
Debunking Social Media Myths David Armano
-
2
Michael Jackson and the Zombieconomy Umair Haque
-
3
How Michael Jackson Became a Brand Icon John Quelch
-
4
How to Identify Your Employees' Hidden Talents Steven DeMaio
-
5
Why Microsoft Had to Destroy Word Peter Merholz
-
1
-
2
-
3
-
4
-
5
Stay Connected
Browse Our Store
Productive Business Dialogue (Simulation)
This simulation will help you learn how to craft conversations that are fact based, minimize defensiveness, and draw out the best thinking from everyone involved.
Measuring Marketing Performance
In many organizations, marketing exists far from the executive suite and the boardroom. Learn how to improve the link between high level corporate strategy and the marketing function.
Voices Topics
- Advertising
- Apple
- Branding
- Career planning
- Change management
- China
- Coaching
- Communication
- Competition
- Conflict
- Corporate social responsibility
- Crisis management
- Current Interactive Case Study
- Customers
- Decision making
- Delegation
- Design
- Disruptive innovation
- Economy
- Election 2008
- Employee retention
- Entrepreneurship
- Ethics
- Execution
- Finance
- Financial crisis
- Gender
- General Electric
- Generational issues
- Getting buy-in
- Giving feedback
- Global business
- Green business
- Hiring
- Human resources
- India
- Information & technology
- Innovation
- Internet
- IT management
- Knowledge management
- Leadership
- Leadership development
- Leadership transitions
- Management 2.0
- Management Innovation in Action
- Managing people
- Managing teams
- Managing uncertainty
- Managing up
- Managing yourself
- Marketing
- Microsoft
- Motivation
- Negotiating
- Networking
- Operations
- Organizational culture
- Personal effectiveness
- Politics
- Presentations
- Procter & Gamble
- Product development
- Productivity
- Project management
- Public relations
- Recession
- Risk management
- Sales
- Social enterprise
- Social media
- Starbucks
- Strategic planning
- Strategy
- Succession planning
- Talent management
- Technology
- The Future of Management
- The Future of Management Podcast
- The Leading Edge podcast
- Time management
- Toolkit
- Tools
- Video blog
- Wal-mart
ADVERTISEMENT
Comments
This is an optimistic opinion expressed by the author to face downturn as yet another opportunity to correct the maladies of firms.
Social capital is a gaining concept which may even replace the financial capital, physical apital an human capital. The promotion of social capital can enhance the
CSR image.
I also feel that downurn is not the end of the world,
but an opportunity to introspect,inter act and evolve new strategies.
As our ancient wisdom says,life personal or corporate cannot be linear and we are bound to face difficulties
and downturns in a sportive way.We shoul belive that THIS
TOO SHALL PASS.
S.Prabkaran
- Posted by S.Prabakaran
August 23, 2008 12:43 AM
In good times, companies enjoy good profits and thus they are pressing forward to find new opportunities, thereby making every worker ant work twice as hard. However, during the slow down period they tend to tighten their buckles so much sometime they cannont even breathe. More often than not they cut more muscle instead of cutting fat to stay lean and mean.
The author's strategy is at best a good read but hard to implement by any company. Companies do not look after their employees during downturn. That is time the CEO spends time to weave himself a golden parachute and board members eye on their big bonuses. If anyone finds a company that truly does what the author says, please let me know.
- Posted by Ash
August 27, 2008 1:07 PM
In addition to the problem of an organizations unable to detatch themselves from individual contributors, they sometimes fall prey to the opposite end of the spectrum - trying to build teams that consists of superstars. This is not the way to build teams. In fact, this could lead to the very problem illustrated by the author of this posting. It is more important to build teams that consists of members with complimentary skill sets and that have the ability to take advice and counsel from other team members who have skill sets that differ from the ones that they possess.
- Posted by Umesh Ramakrishnan
September 3, 2008 10:24 AM
I agree with your article.
Few years ago, I met few business schools in India and asked whether their students can write a business plan, marketing plan, advertising plan or a cash plan? The answer was No.
We prepare curriculums and course material with present in mind. We do not indeed give much value to the needs of the future. Many a times, benchmarking and adapting best practices becomes difficult and therefore the ' Next Practice ' becomes even difficult. This is one of the reasons why the managements face downturn situations.
The greater ill is unwillingness to look into future but keep reflecting on the past and the baggage. This leads to an inertia generating complacent attitude and overconfidence.
- Posted by Jay Parkhe
September 11, 2008 7:51 PM