What to do when a project or business does not go your way?

Last week I talked about it how to deal with the lack of time . It is one of the biggest problems of decision-makers, enterprising people , ambitious, whom I identify in my consulting work. The second problem is the uncertainty, the lack of clarity about the decision, when the reality surprises negatively.

We don’t know what to do when we suddenly come across resistance – as if there is a wall in front of us, from which we bounce painfully. When I work with people or companies, the model of 3 areas of change is always checked according to Change Value Process , which says that in order to make a change we need to work at:

1. Mentences
2. Communication
3. Strategy

Here are 3 stories from my clients. Each of them approached the subject differently.

One of them had to come up with a new strategic plan and come up with a solution, which was not easy for him.

The latter came up with a solution fairly quickly, but had trouble communicating it to the company.

The third blocked internally, he wasn’t ready for a sudden change so much that only working on his beliefs and his emotions allowed him to move on.

What to do when an idea, vision and strategy are missing, i.e. strategic questions from Google

I met Katarzyna 4 years ago when I ran a workshop on change management in a team and effectiveness for a company where she had worked for 10 years. Two years after that meeting, she left the corporation and founded a company in the cosmetics industry with her partner.

In the beginning, they imported high-quality cosmetics and sold them on the Internet and to VIP customers through a boutique. The girls were super ambitious, smart and sensible. They entered the market well and quickly gained customers. However, a year ago, reality surprised them a lot. It is not fully known why sales began to decline, despite the fact that everything has so far increased. They were supposed to invest in new advertisements, brands, and develop an online store.

And then suddenly in January 2018 as if someone cut off the sales oxygen. They waited a moment, thinking it was a post-holiday hesitation. However, February, March – the same. Even though they had their capital set aside and they always planned everything wisely, it knocked them out. It even paralyzed a little. For the first time they felt fear. The machine of a few employees, advertising costs, logistics, orders was accelerated, and here was such a strange time. And that’s not known why.

Waited two months. Kasia decided to write to me. There was no time for training or a motivational lecture for the team. There was one task: Save us, because we are afraid that each new month will drown us.

At first I thought I would mostly have to work on their emotions, their attitude so they wouldn’t panic, but when I sent them a list of strategic questions made by Google (which you can find below), they wrote back: We don’t know many answers, but after reading the questions, we felt calm and confident that we would find a solution. We don’t know why, but we feel we can do it. However, we need your help to make him grind us with these questions, because there are a lot of them. We want you to put them to the point and drill down so that we can find a solution as soon as possible.

After 2 weeks of meetings, the key conclusions were drawn:

• we did not notice that two new companies entered the market of women 20-25 very aggressively and through social media they won an important group of clients, which, as it turned out, accounted for 40% of our revenues
• we did not build the loyalty of our clients. We were based on the purchasing cycle on the principle: when the cosmetic ends, it will order from us, but it worked in the first years. Now we need to bring customers together differently, smarter, better.

These were two extremely important strategic conclusions. We are only able to notice them if:

1. We have all active strategic thinking in our head, which looks broadly, analyzes various aspects of the company, team, industry.
2. We draw essential strategic conclusions every 1-3 months
3. We look at different elements of our business (or areas of team activity if you work in a corporation).
4. We are constantly testing new solutions.

Below you will find a list of the 5 most helpful questions for girls. If you want to see the list of 28 strategic questions, download the PDF with additional material (box below).

1. Which parts of your world, company, team have the potential to change as soon as possible, and what is likely to remain the same?
   
2. What could a competitor with high capital, acting very intelligently, do to disrupt the core business of your company, team?
3. Could a competitor exploit your weaknesses or capture the most profitable customers with an ingenious digital platform?
4. Are there situations in your company where you disrupt your own business?
5. Is the anticipated cannibalization or loss of revenue not a reason for closing potentially innovative projects?

Problem with communicating with the team and preparing them for change

The second story of the client is based on the communication difficulties that occurred, although there was an idea, there was a strategy, there was no fear.

Bogdan came to me when, over a year ago, while working in a corporation in the pharmaceutical industry, he was given a task to create an international team and recruit 5 new people to be involved in marketing new products. It was not easy, as the budget for recruiting and salaries was not insanely large, but Bogdan quickly developed a concrete plan and began to implement it.

When the first people showed up for recruiting, Bogdan asked his team to help him with the selection. In this way, he wanted to involve his people, so that they would get to know the candidates and thus cooperate better with them in the future, especially that he gave them some decision-making power.

And there was a mutiny on board. Firstly, only 3 out of 8 knew the team was about to expand. Of the two, only one was positive. The other two looked at each candidate negatively. The remaining 5 people, when they found out, felt that something was being done behind their backs.

Overnight, Bogdan experienced strong resistance, and to put it bluntly: he pissed off his employees. I remember him telling me about it: Adam, ku # @ $, how is it possible that after 5 years of working together, suddenly they react like this. If they do, just tell me how to throw them out wisely because they have upset me so much that I will either kick them out or strangle them. What a disrespect!

I replied to him: Bogdan, humanly, I understand you. But if they react like this after 5 years of good cooperation, then something must have happened or rather: something did not happen and you have the effect. People react this way because either (between us) there are debi @ # $ that is nothing to talk to, or they are smart people but felt disrespected and threatened. So I asked the following questions:

1. Did you take care of communicating with them and said: What is planned? Why will there be recruitment? How will it affect them? How will this help them? What do you need their support for?
2. Did you listen to their opinions, concerns, ideas?
3. Did you answer them?

You didn’t, so you just invited 3 people overnight to accompany you in your recruitment meetings. You have planned everything but did not consider communicating changes to your team .

So we had to do a little anti-crisis action with Bogdan, which was based on:

1. Apologizing to the team for these mistakes.
2. To implement the above plan.
3. Declaration that Bogdan will care about greater respect for them, always informing them in advance about changes.
4. Setting rules that even if he makes such a mistake, it is important that they do not attack him with rebellion, but ask openly and respectfully what is going on.
   
   At the same time, I recommended Bogdan to develop further in thinking about business and people by working with me on CVP Elite Management Program and to read the following books, which I consider to be some of the most important in such a work:
   
   
5. Jim Collins Book Pack: Visionary Organizations, From Good to Great, How Giants Fall, Great by Choice
6. My package: Simple but important to manage, 60 seconds a day to manage better, Wall – how to overcome resistance and make changes
7. Blue Ocean and Blue Ocean Transformation – Renee Mauborgne , Chan W. Kim
8. Working differently – Frédéric Laloux
9. Quality Doctrine – Andrzej Blikle
10. How Google Works – Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg

Do success and efficiency depend on psychology? Sometimes our own emotions are the problem.

For many years, business psychology and the coaching world have studied the factors of success. What really influences the success of a person and a company? There is no one answer. In terms of personal effectiveness, I have so far identified 48 factors which are personal strategic factors.

This is related to the third story of my client, who for the last 3 years has been working simultaneously in a corporation and developing his IT company. It is not easy, especially in terms of time. However, Janek came to me not with the problem of organizing time, but with the need to think about whether he should close his company.

He didn’t start a family, so sitting in the evenings at night and having meetings with a team of 4 on the weekend was not a problem for him. But for some reason he began to feel that it didn’t make sense after all.

As he put it: I kind of feel burned out, no. I seem to feel a lack of energy, supposedly not. I don’t know why I’m writing to you and what I mean. But I feel suspended. As you wrote in any of your articles about the suspension and no-decision trap, that’s what I have. The company is moving forward, but my energy is not what it should be. Even when I took a week off from work in the company or 2 weeks of vacation from the corporation, it still did nothing.

I asked him to fill out two online questionnaires I created.

1. Burnout Questionnaire
2. Success Metrics Questionnaire

On this basis, we started analyzing what it was about. The problem here was not strategy, it was not communication. The challenge was his own head, the emotions that broke him internally.

Just answering the questions from both questionnaires helped so much that he knew what to look for. In the case of burnout, there are 40 factors. For what I call personal strategic factors, we have a list of 48 items. It seems like a lot at first. But thanks to 4 meetings 1v1 we quickly found 3 that turned out to be crucial.

My last client lost SENS creating a company and working for a corporation. Why? His own company gave him an additional PLN 10,000 per month, he did not develop new skills in the corporation.

His company entered the stage where it began to face demanding customers, which they began to evaluate, give feedback, and sometimes CRITICAL cooperation, quality of service . It started to hurt him a lot. He was not mentally ready for this. He himself did not realize that it was taking so much energy from him.

These were normal comments every client is entitled to have, but my client took every remark to himself very much. Partly because he is a perfectionist, partly because he was never immune to confrontation. Until now, there was little of it, now it has become much more.

My head became confused as a result of the need to grow the company. Until now, the company has been coding quite simple solutions. Time consuming but simple. Now the market has started to change. My client has always thought of himself as a business owner coding IT solutions and serving clients.

The current situation has begun to require him to become a leader who plans, sets direction and creates additional services. In this he had a blockage. He has never seen himself as a leader who CREATES A BUSINESS, PLANS A STRATEGY.

That’s it these are just some of the Personal Strategic Factors that are essential to a leader’s mentality. Many of them are not obvious. You need to be aware of them and develop them. Otherwise, a wall will grow up in front of us!

Therefore fill in: Success metrics questionnaire
And subjectively assess the level at which these factors are active in you. Thus, you can test the success probability of what you do.

How to deal with lack of results and unexpected situations?

Develop strategic thinking – that is, look more at more areas and draw conclusions.

How to do it?

1. Practice strategic thinking in everyday life and analyze areas
   1. Mentality – what you need to work on
   2. Communication – how to better talk to people
   3. Strategy – how to better look at business, analyze and plan
      
2. Read wise books that develop strategic management and change management as well as strategic psychology thinking
3. Ask yourself Google’s strategic questions
4. Ask yourself questions based on strategic factors according to CVP
5. Perform strategic analysis every 1-3 months – alone or with an external consultant, to make sure you do it and that you do not miss anything

If you are wondering what exactly this analysis looks like and you feel that it may be something for you – contact us by writing to [email protected] or by calling 505 129 061.