Time’s pressured, headcount’s down and your resources have been stripped back. Whatever your job, a natural response would be to keep your head down, avoid time-consuming meetings and defend your own business unit.
But now’s the time to dust off that old adage about two heads being better than one.
People who take a defensive position may make matters more difficult, as Adrian Moorhouse argues here. Moorhouse, a former Olympic gold-medallist and now the managing director a Lane4 consultancy, counsels against cutting divisional meetings and training budgets, which allow people to interact and network with people outside of their own team.
Why is this useful? Informal gatherings strengthen the company’s collective resilience, he says, because people understand each other at a human level and will find it easier to work together to make changes quickly.
Perhaps more surprisingly, he’s noticing an increased demand for formalised communications.
Sure, use the grapevine, but ensure you’re also sending out regular, formal messages about how the company’s doing. Use email and newsletters as well as ‘town meetings’ and other gatherings — and err on the side of too many, rather than too few messages. A medium-sized business boss himself, he says, “I cannot communicate too much at the moment.”
