A significant shift like a merger in business or economic meltdown leaves employees wondering about their safety, what the future holds for them, how their roles will change, and how they should carry out their duties. How should a leader keep employees productive and effective during such transitional times, providing the structure, knowledge, and security, while adapting to the roadblocks and challenges?

Contributor

• • Malcolm Jack, Chief Information Officer, Granite Construction

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Transcript 

Sanjog Aul [00:00:21]:

Hello, and welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. And the topic for today isLeading through Transition  . Well, transitions are not new to us. We have seen many mergers, acquisitions, and other kind of shifts in business. We have also seen a number of economic meltdowns, which in fact leave all of us wondering what’s gonna come next. And talk about in an organizational setting, we have the employees wondering about their safety, how is the future going to unfold for them, what would happen to their roles, how will they carry out their duties today and tomorrow. So all of these questions are unnerving in many cases, and the leaders are expected to handle the situation, keep getting the business to move forward, get people to work, and stay productive and effective. To give them structure, the knowledge and the security is a big challenge and that’s why I believe leaders are what leaders do. So to that end we have our guest Malcolm Jack who is the Chief Information Officer with Granite Construction. He’s joined us to share his experience and wisdom on how leaders can lead through transitions. So hey Malcolm, how are you?

Malcolm Jack [00:01:49]:

I’m good, Sanjog Aul. How are you?

Sanjog Aul [00:01:51]:

Very good, sir. Very good. Cannot be better. I hope we are not gonna have these kind of transitions that we have to deal with. But, well, that’s perhaps that’s what life is. So let’s talk about how we can do the best we can here. Talking about the issues when people end up having such transitions, could you list in your view which are the top ones that we face when we have a merger in business or economic meltdown? What all do we face in terms of the issues?

Malcolm Jack [00:02:21]:

From my perspective, the 2 biggest issues that you’re gonna grapple with are fear and uncertainty in the staff. When we think about things like mergers and acquisitions or even downturns in the market, tactical and technical problems can typically be solved easily enough. But the hardest part is that you need the people on your teams to get it done. And if they’re grappling with fear, doubt or uncertainty, it’s gonna be very hard for them to focus on those tactical issues. And the irony is, of course, the sooner and more efficiently you can get them done, the better off you’ll be. So it’s the people side of the equation that really makes these transitions very, very difficult. We don’t want to see people oftentimes fear the changes that are coming, but as we know that fear is the only constant or I’m sorry. Change is the only constant. So we have to be prepared for change. We like the good changes, but the difficult ones can be a little scary. I found that the best thing to do to address these things is to make sure that you’re getting ahead of the people problem. You’re dealing with your team. You’re making sure that you get in front of that fear and doubt and uncertainty with the team so that they can then go and focus on really getting the job done.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:50]:

So compare this to a family, with some children, the spouse, and the head of the household driving through a terrain or, you know, some good deep woods, if you will. Don’t know where you are, you feel lost or you feel that there is an avalanche in front of you so that everyone senses danger. So as the head of the household, head of the family, a leader has to do what that head of the family would do even though they don’t sometimes know what’s gonna come next. How would you do it? So how would you do it without coming across inauthentic that I can tackle anything? At the same time, not instill fear and uncertainty or at least reduce the fear and uncertainty in the riders who are going along with you.

Malcolm Jack [00:04:47]:

Right. So the job of the leader is to inspire that confidence that when you’re driving through that dark scary forest, that there is something on the other side and that the path in front of you is not gonna be the end of you. To communicate that there is a plan and everything’s gonna be okay. If the leader of the team panics, then the team will panic. As leaders, we sit in a fishbowl, and it’s important for us to instill confidence that there is a greater plan and vision in place to provide that direction when it seems like direction is maybe lost. There are times when I think communication is really what comes into play here. Oftentimes, leaders have a little bit more information or sometimes there is no more information, but it’s expected that they do. So really sitting down and having a conversation with your teams to tell them what you know and to provide some direction even if it’s temporary direction. For example, there was a time that I was leading a transition where a lot of people were scared because there was a downturn in the market, and we knew that the company had to retract. What that retraction looked like wasn’t really known, and my team was looking to me to give them some guidance to help them dispel some of that fear and uncertainty. I found it was rather than just saying, I don’t know either, sitting down with them and saying, look, here’s the situation that we’re in. We don’t have all the answers yet, but we’ll probably have them in the next 30 to 60 days, and I promise to tell you everything I know when it comes. At least calm that down so that people were able to get back to doing the work that they needed to do. So to use that analogy you’re using of driving through the dark and scary forest, if you’re at the head of the car, make sure that you say, well, I know where we’re headed. I know that there’ll be light there and maybe there’ll be food on the table. We just have to get through this right now even if it’s scary and check that level of stability that they need to follow.

Sanjog Aul [00:07:13]:

If someone has a survival instinct that has kicked in, see, unlike when you have a tough project, you give them the motivation that things will be okay. Just stick through it, and we will be winners. But other times is when they say, yes. Whatever this leader is saying, yes. This person has the best interest in mind for me. But frankly, this person is not in control based on what I see in front of me. Economic meltdown. However high you are in an organization, but if the marketplace itself, the whole industry itself is going down the tubes, what is this leader going to do? It’s not that they don’t respect you, but they don’t believe that you can save them. What’s to be said to them at that time? That I care, but will that work? Will that work to the degree you want it to work?

Malcolm Jack [00:08:10]:

Yeah. And hopefully you do care. If you’re building a team with good psychological safety and an understanding, hopefully those team members that are afraid are coming to you to have those conversations. You’re absolutely right. There are times when the situation that you’re facing is completely outside of your control. The economic meltdown is a perfect example of that. We’ve been through it a number of times certainly in the years that I’ve been working. In those times I’ve found that you can’t give direction on which way the market is going to go. And when you see that there’s downturn is impacting your business and tough decisions that have to be made and people are losing their jobs, that’s when people really get scared. And as you indicate, people will tap into survival mode. That’s when you, I think, have to make it more personal, and let them know, to the best you can, what really is going to happen. Give them an idea of how it’s gonna impact them even if it’s not what they wanna hear. If there’s gonna be a 10% pare back in staff, then talk to them about that and why that is so they can prepare for it. Also let them know what that means. If there’s gonna be some kind of relief or if there’s a structure to it. It’s the uncertainty there that really gets to them. It gives them at least a little bit of time to think about it, get their arms around it, and cope with the change that’s ahead of them. The irony is I’ve been through a number of these in different positions that I’ve been in. Oftentimes, people who have been separated from the companies that I’ve worked for, they’ll come back and say, you know, it turned out to be actually a positive thing. I moved on to something that was a little bit better for me. Once I got through the fear, I was able to actually improve where I was headed in my career. So those stories can help people get out of their kind of singular vision of just exactly what’s happening to me, and I think that’s helpful as well.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:29]:

So when we go through this journey, yes, Sanjog Aul, there is a downturn. And, yes, there could be things which are outside forces in a way are impacting how we will survive and thrive through the business. But should we just resort or rather demote ourselves into a survival mode when the outside things get worse for us, or should we maintain that positivity and say we want to be having a growth mindset? Because if we were all about, okay, let’s change the world and suddenly something happens while, yes, it has happened and you cannot do much about it right now. If you say, you know what, all that growth mindset goes out of the window, let’s just keep the lights on. That itself sends a wrong message that this person doesn’t feel this is gonna turn around soon enough, and people will likely be more demotivated than otherwise. So what would be your recommendation? Would you stay on the path of growing the company within the means that you have, or you’ll say, you know what? Let’s stop all projects which made us all excited to come to work every day?

Malcolm Jack [00:11:39]:

Yeah. That is a tricky balance, isn’t it? My take on it is always to keep a positive outlook on things. We live in a world of economic cycles and that they can be macroeconomic cycles or they can be economic cycles even within your own company. While I appreciate the survival mentality of let’s just shut everything damn down and keep the lights on, a good survivalist is always thinking for the future as well. So I think you have to keep the positive attitude that things will turn around because history has shown that in most cases they will. The market will respond and recover. Most companies that have been around for a while figure out how to get through the tough times. Granite Construction is almost a 100-year-old company. It’s been through many economic cycles. For example, when things turn down, there are certainly steps that you take in order to preserve things and maybe shut down some of the more forward thinking programs that are taking capital just to make sure that you can kind of keep the primary business running. But you always have to be thinking of what’s in front of us. What is the next step? How are we gonna grow from here? These cycles are temporary. They always seem to be temporary. So you can’t let yourself get caught in the all I’m trying to do is survive and it becomes this war of attrition. Always be thinking forward. So, yes, you may have to shut some projects down, but maybe it’s just about the scale of them. Sometimes what it is, is shutting down the big ones, but then taking the opportunity to say, okay, how do we improve what we can do? Maybe those projects are more internal. Maybe you’ve got fewer people or you’ve got fewer systems in place. How do you become more efficient? So when you get back into growth mode, you can do more with not only the resources you have, but you get to a point where you’re more efficient as a team and as an organization and growth mode is going to be a little easier, it’s going to cost a little less, it’s going to give you a little bit more capacity to actually grow that business or grow your capacity as a team. I’ve seen this many times. I’ve been in a company where we hit an economic cycle. We had to scale down, scale down, scale down the team. But after that cycle ended, that team was so efficient. That skeleton crew ended up being so efficient that when it was time to start growing again, growth could be faster. The team had come together more. The silos had been broken down during the lean times because they had to. And when the growth started happening, they were able to move faster and quicker and really, they started to reap the rewards of the lean times they had been through.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:34]:

Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back. And let’s dig a little deeper on the approach that we take when these downturns happen. So, Malcolm, you mentioned that we would take a project and or we’ll keep a growth mindset, keep moving it forward, and we will do a b c. Traditional wisdom says, you always want to be inclusive. And that means you will also get ideas from your people to say, what should we do in this regard? But when you know that the rest of the team is almost demoted themselves into a survival mode and they’re looking for you to pull them through this downturn or these tough times, then would it be a good idea to be inclusive? And if you are not inclusive, then would you be seen as someone who is trying to unanimously take a decision when we do not know and even they feel you don’t know where we are all headed? So how do we eat the cake and have it too? Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back and explore.

Sanjog Aul [00:16:39]:

Welcome back. So the dilemma is to be inclusive or not be inclusive when you are trying to put together a strategy to handle these tough decisions or dilemmas that you have because of the downturn. If you are inclusive, there may be people who are far more negative thinking at that point, and that might also influence your decision making, and it will make you do less than what you could have done. And you would be less of a growth mindset than you could have been because you allowed that inclusiveness. But if you’re not inclusive, the people who are following you may anyway not 100% trust you because they also know some of those things are beyond you. And if you’re not inclusive, they might be less inclined to follow you because you never asked them what they think. So what would be that delicate balance here that you would have picked? So let’s not talk generic. So Malcolm was stuck in this situation, what would be that balance you would have tried to strike? 

Malcolm Jack [00:17:43]:

This is a great dilemma to be in certainly to talk about because I think I’ve been caught on both sides of this dilemma looking at a scenario and trying to decide, do I bring people in with that inclusive mindset to solve it, or am I just going to try to do it with either myself or a scaled down team? You mentioned the concept of survival scenario and oftentimes when people are in these areas of fear and uncertainty, they drop into that survival mode. If you break down what survival mode looks like, it really is building a silo of one. It’s building a silo around themselves. And the more you keep people like that at arm’s distance and do not include them, the higher those walls go up. So my tendency is to be more inclusive, to bring people in to be part of solving the problem, whatever that problem is. And if they can’t help solve the problem, at least be transparent so they understand what that problem is so they can wrap their head around it. Oftentimes, what happens is it becomes the universe of uncertainty. Through talking to your teams and bringing them in even just from a conversational level, letting them understand the problem, the scope of the problem. If you can scope something down from the sky is falling to, no, the sky isn’t falling. Maybe we just lost 10% of our customer base. That’s a much different problem. But if you’re not talking to them being specific around the scopes, or if you’re siloing yourself off to make the decisions, then you’re not gonna be able to grow. It’s gonna be much, much harder. I would also offer that, hopefully, as a leader, you’ve done some of the work upfront and that you have built an environment of psychological safety within your team so that you can have an inclusive conversation. You talked about having your cake and eating it too whereas, sure, someone in survival mode and that negative opinion is gonna impact some of the decisions you make. But if you built an environment of psychological safety where people feel safe to express fear, they feel trust and safe to express not only fear but uncertainty and to ask hard questions so you can have that conversation. Oftentimes, that opposing point of view is exactly what you need to come up with the best path forward. So bringing that more negative viewpoint in, if you can do it in a way that is actually collaborative and constructive, can help you figure out the best path forward, whether that’s a growth path forward or whether it’s making the hard decisions that you need to make.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:36]:

So if you were to go specifically into an environment like where the downturn is happening or a meltdown has happened, to what degree would you like to tweak the organizational structure, the reporting, the dynamics, the communication. We already spoke about the handling of the people and the project portfolio to the degree it is not going to come and haunt you after we got over that big hump, whether it’s, like in case of a merger. How you were doing earlier, once the merger-related integration is done, life has to come back to usual, but you don’t want to change your structure, your way of thinking, the dynamics so much so that it has a permanent impact and it is difficult to recover from. So how temporary do you go? And what would be that idea about going temporarily into that mindset and that organizational structure and with an expectation set for all parties above and below and your peers that we will bounce back to our original structure which was for a stable environment. How do you go about doing something like that? What would it be, and how would you go about it?

Malcolm Jack [00:21:56]:

It’s like the impossible scenario here. But I think that you can get a lot of that accomplished. The first thing you need to do is make sure that you’re grounded in a set of core values or principles. For example, at Granite, we have a set of core values that really drive a lot of the decision making of the things that we do. On top of that, I as a leader have my own set of core principles on how I make these very hard and difficult decisions. Those types of things help me push through understanding so that at the end of the road when you look back and you say, well, why did we make that decision? What drove us to go there? Hopefully, if anything, you can point to your principles and your core values to say, because that’s how we make these — these are the guideposts by which we make difficult decisions all the time because this is what we believe and how we operate. But to get to the more tactical part of your question, how do you look at the staff, how do you look at the project portfolio, how do you organize yourself in a way that you can go through a difficult transition whether it’s a downturn in the market or a merger and acquisition and come out the other side in some sort of whole or now slightly modified state that you can get back to business as usual, that’s where strategic planning comes into play. That’s where having things like a staffing model is inherently very important when you say, okay, here is the staffing model, not the org chart, not the plan, not the names and boxes, but the model in which we’re gonna do the business of say information technology or of any other functional group. This is the model we use and this model can expand and contract based on the needs of the business, but this model is the model that we’re going to use. So as your business contracts or it needs to, you stick to your model, but maybe some of the job duties move around or the people move around, but the model stands. As you grow, it’s very easy to grow that model out. So from a staffing perspective, you look at it from what’s the staffing model, what’s the division of duties along an organizational model that makes the most sense for your business. When I look at the projects, you use the same type of methodology. You say what is the method in which we’re going to decide which products are really, really critical to the success of the business, which ones are not, how do we rank those, how do we communicate on those, how do we understand them. If you do these things, then what you set yourself up is you’re in a position to say, no matter what hits you, no matter what these downturns or changes are, you’re able to point to the model and the methodologies on how you get it done. And that model and methodology, if it’s built right, will expand and contract based on the needs of the business or the environment or what have you. It makes it very easy to just, if you educate on the model, not each individual decision, but just this is the decision making process in which we’re gonna evaluate these things. That’s what makes it easy because then you can have conversations to say, hey, here’s how we’re gonna change staff based on this model. Easy conversation if you understand it rather than diving into the individual decisions that need to be made around projects. So to sum it all up, I would say, start with your core values and your principles. On top of that, lay in your strategic plan and your model, and then the decisions are much easier.

Sanjog Aul [00:25:40]:

Let’s go back to that same family metaphor for a second. So if I were to help build the character of my children, I would not always cradle them. I will let them tough it out because that would help them grow and learn that there would be unique situations they would deal in their lives, and this is a ground to practice or maybe a reality that they should learn how to deal with. That said, should we really, as leaders, who also have a role not to just get the projects done, not to just run the department, but also to develop people, should we just cradle them, or should we allow, in a controlled way, some rattling using this as a training ground?

Malcolm Jack [00:26:29]:

I think you said it perfectly. We should absolutely allow them in a controlled way with some guardrails because you want to set your team up for success. You want to set your leadership team up for success. So, yes, enable them and empower them and then push them out of the mess a little bit to make decisions. I heard recently, and this was an interesting way to think about it. The success of a leader is not necessarily how successful he as an individual is, it’s how many successful leaders he made during his career. It’s an interesting metric if you think about it to look back and say, if at the end of your career, did you just independently lead many teams through all these fantastic things or did you actually spin out other successful leaders who went on to hopefully do greater and better things? I really like that metric. I think that says as a leader, not only are you doing good things for the company that you’re working for, but you’re also doing good things for the people that are on your teams and helping to propel them forward into the next chapter of their lives. 

Sanjog Aul [00:27:46]:

Now if we go and you mentioned the controlled manner, could you perhaps define for the listener at what point you will say, you know what, it’s way too much. Is it by person? Is it by situation? How do you calibrate how much to let the people be rattled? Because if you try to control too much, you are actually trying to prepare the road for the children versus the children for the road.

Malcolm Jack [00:28:11]:

Yes. That it’s hard to give a specific example because each person, each leader is a little different. Maybe they have a different style, different sensibilities, different things that rattle them more. When I look across different people that I’ve had on my teams, I’ve known individuals who were so afraid of failure that anything that looked like they might fail could lock them up. This individual is also one of the most brilliant engineers and leaders I’ve ever seen. So for him, it was about letting him know that failure was okay, that I was sending him out on this mission to get things done. And if he failed, it was completely fine, but I just wanted him to go give it a shot. So giving him permission to fail was what he really needed. I’ve had another leader who failed all the time and loved it because he would learn from it. The direction that he needed was maybe pulling him back a little bit and keeping him focused because he would get the bright shiny object phenomenon where I would send him on a task and he would go too many different ways. I tell these stories just to say that what’s really important is know the individuals that you’re sending out. Give them guardrails that are gonna work for them based on their strengths and weaknesses, and just make sure that they can be successful within those guardrails.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:43]:

So let’s take a quick break

Malcolm Jack [00:29:45]:

It’s also really good

Sanjog Aul [00:29:46]:

Go ahead.

Malcolm Jack [00:29:47]:

Sorry. It’s also really good to make sure that they have some sort of pressure release that you’re aware of. You have to know when you’ve pushed them a little too far or you’re close to having pushed them too far and they’re about to blow off steam so that you can then step in and provide the relief that they need.

Sanjog Aul [00:30:07]:

So let’s take a quick break, listeners. When we come back, let’s build upon what Malcolm just mentioned about what all or to what degree do you cradle or rattle your team so that they can grow. Now like disaster recovery or business continuity related pull the plug tests, and some training and some grooming in advance, can something like that be done? Keeping in mind that transitions are inevitable, and what will we do so that we are not doing all the learning and all the shifting real time when actually the transition times do come up and there are surprises and shocks. To what degree can we prepare for these times of transition realistically? What would be a good way to approach it? And what, if it has been tried, have been the results of that preparation? Was it that our team was better equipped or they did worse? Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back and explore.

Sanjog Aul [00:32:15]:

Welcome back. So, Malcolm, is there a way to prepare your people before such times of transition? We don’t know what flavor of transition will hit us, but can we teach them how to prepare and how to wear safety belts and how to bulk up so that they don’t hit the windshield if there is an accident?

Malcolm Jack [00:32:37]:

Yeah. I believe there is. I’m a big believer in running tabletop exercises where you bring lunch in, put a couple hours aside, do it once a quarter, sit down with your team and talk about what are the different scenarios that could come along. A great way to do this is a disaster recovery tabletop exercise. You can throw so many different disasters at something. You can really start to simulate different types of potential crisis. For example, you can say that there is a quarantine in effect. What’s happening right now with the coronavirus is very scary, and a lot of different companies and different places around the world are putting quarantines in effect. Maybe you can work from home, maybe you can’t. But what if you did a tabletop exercise where you said, look, 10% of our staff is not able to come to work. You randomly pick 10 people and you say, what do we do now? Or you say, let’s say that we have a budget retraction of 10% to 20%. What does that mean for us? So you can do that tabletop exercise as well. When you do it from a hypothetical planning phase just to see how people would respond, see the issues that come up, the different viewpoints, it starts to put people in the mode of, well, this is just a planning exercise. This is just something to think about and to talk about how we would respond. It’s not right in front of you. Because it’s more theoretical, that personal fear and uncertainty hasn’t set in with your employees. We used to do this with disaster recovery as well. We would have all these scenarios from the power is out to I spent much of my career in San Diego, and we would get these wildfires which would evacuate employees from their homes and they would be on the run so they couldn’t work from home and they couldn’t come into the office. So we had to have scenarios where we had to run the office on a skeleton crew and then potentially with skeleton systems because some of the systems may be offline because we weren’t able to maintain the support that we needed. Then there’s great cybersecurity ones where you can talk about systems are completely offline or an entire section of the organization has somehow been corrupted with ransomware. What do we do in these scenarios? How would we respond? It gets people thinking tactically and technically because you remove the fear and uncertainty from that situation. What you then build is a strong playback of strong initial plans on how to respond. And when a scenario similar to that happens, you can point to it and say, just like that tabletop exercise that we ran, let’s use that as a base from which we figure out how to respond.

Sanjog Aul [00:35:46]:

Now whatever may be happening in our industry, there may be a merger whatsoever, then there could be a downturn. But whosoever we are currently serving, we should not stop serving them. And in fact, we should always keep upping the quality and experience that we deliver, right? So you retain the ones that you have. That said, you’ve got to be able to figure out that while you might be cutting to the bones behind the scenes and you got people who are afraid, what would you do besides motivating people on the ground in terms of performance metrics or benchmarks so that the outcome of all of the complexity that may be the shifts that may be happening within the company does not impact the outcome we deliver to the customers. What would be your playbook to that? Because there are going to be inevitable shifts inside the company. So are you going to tell the customer, you know what? For a few months, we might be at a level minus one in our customer service. And that’s okay too if you tell the customer we are going through some rough times. Can you accept a little less of customer service or less of a delivery time? Is that a way to basically reduce the expectation levels of a customer to deal with it, or would you simply like to be a hero and try to deal with the complexity within the company during these times?

Malcolm Jack [00:37:19]:

I think this gets back to a premise that I have about truth, transparency, and trust in difficult times of transition. You talked a little bit about metrics, and my thought on metrics would be, if you’re putting the metrics in when you hit the difficult times in order to ensure quality and ensure that you’re delivering, then at that point, you’re a little too late. Hopefully, you’ve already thought about the metrics that you need to ensure that your organization is delivering the quality product that your customers need, and they’re already in place. If you’ve been thoughtful about creating those metrics, you’ve created them in such a way that you’ll be able to really start to see where the pressure points are. So as you make those changes, as the pressure of the changes start to hit you, you can see where it’s impacting your organization and the quality of services that you’re providing. At that point, you have a choice to make. The choice really comes down to, do you push your team harder and make internal changes to try to make sure that you can still hit certain priority goals or priority metrics? Or is that the time to be very upfront, truthful, and transparent about how these changes are impacting your organization? My guidance would be, if it’s a short-term thing and you see the light at the end of the tunnel, that might be where you put a little bit of pressure on the team to just buckle down and get through it. But if you’re in a cycle where the end is a little ambiguous, it’s not that clear, that’s where you have to be very mindful about not pushing your team too hard into burnout when they’re in a situation of diminishing resources. That might be the time to then go forward and have a conversation with your customers to let them know that here’s how this is impacting us. This is what it means to you. And here’s our strategy and our plan to even though you are going to be impacted, you’re still going to get what you need at the end of the day. 

Sanjog Aul [00:39:31]:

And have you seen any gotchas in the way this is to be done? Because it’s how you carry this communication on both sides. How do you tweak what you’re supposed to tweak? That’s where the devil is in the detail. Any pointers in that regard?

Malcolm Jack [00:39:49]:

Yeah. The devil is in the details in a situation like this as has been my experience. I would recommend, and what I have done in the past is when you’re facing something like that is that’s where you sit down and you write up what I would call a structured transition plan. Whatever it is that you’re transitioning from, we’re transitioning from point A to point B. Our services are gonna go from here to here or we’re going to maintain services at Level 4 for the next 3 months because that’s the foreseeable future with a plan at the end that says if it doesn’t get better, here’s what we need to do or here’s how we need to resource up in order to maintain this. You have to provide some clarity, not only to your customers and the leadership team, but also to your team and your staff. They have to know what the plan is, especially if the plan is to keep your foot on the accelerator and to keep pushing through with diminished resources. Most teams are happy to do it for a little while because they can get behind it, and they understand that there are times in the organization that they need you, and they need you to work more and harder and that’s okay. But it can’t be this unending cycle. They have to understand where the release is and where it’s coming from. So having a plan, communicating that plan, and then promising to follow up at the end. If the plan doesn’t work out, if the resources don’t come, then you have to adjust and know what that adjustment looks like.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:17]:

Now quick question. When you are looking at where you are going to be making changes, which is gonna be primarily in house, you are going to inform the customer that, hey, we might have a temporary dip in our customer service, in our delivery, etc. Would that be okay? A lot of companies and people somehow believe that even though we are transparent, we will lose these folks. But what have you seen on the ground? Do customers typically understand if you have served them well throughout. 

Malcolm Jack [00:41:51]:

I think so. This comes down to the relationship that you have with your customers. If you just show up at their door and the first time that they see you, you show up with bad news saying the service is gonna be disrupted and they don’t necessarily know about the challenges that you faced at all and they don’t necessarily know about the challenge that you’re facing now, there’s no context for them to really absorb that conversation. They just have to accept it rather than be a partner with you on it. But if they understand the good times and the bad, and if you had conversations with them when times are good and they see that things are getting better, and now as you face whatever challenges are in front of you you have that open dialogue with them of this is how this is impacting the team, here is how it’s impacting you, and this is why, that tends to be very positive. Oftentimes, if they’re in the same company in an IT organization, your customers are in the same company that you are in most of the time. They’re facing the same challenges and they understand the challenge that’s ahead of you. Sometimes it can actually be very beneficial to have those conversations because you can collaborate on it. It’s like, well, you know what? I don’t need this from you as much anymore. I really appreciated it when it happened, but this service doesn’t have to happen as fast or you can put it on pause for a while. Maybe you can even have a conversation around what is truly critical to them, keep that going. That dialogue with your customers helps you balance out and make some of the decisions you need to make because maybe you’re making them on false pretenses and simple conversations will help you get a better alignment with what they need so that you can make better decisions on how you tackle that challenge.

Sanjog Aul [00:43:45]:

So you mentioned about IT being an internal function in most companies. It can be. But as you see in today’s world of digital where everything is becoming externally focused, we have partners in our ecosystem. Of course, we have customers, and we have the internal customers. And we in IT are becoming the very DNA of the whole ecosystem, if you will. And we’re not saying only problems will be impacting the IT department. There will be many other departments, but you are no longer to serve that customer solely dependent on only what you do. There is a lot of external dependence now. Would that change your strategy in any way?

Malcolm Jack [00:44:25]:

It wouldn’t change my strategy, but it would definitely change the audience and the people that we would need to partner with and have a conversation with. You’re absolutely right. As we move to more digital, as every company becomes a technology company, it just opens up a wider scope of people that you’re partnering with and quite honestly, a wider scope of people that you may be having an impact on as you go through difficult transition. So you have to manage those relationships as well. You have to reach out to your technical partners. You have to reach out to all the people on the outside. Let them know what’s going on. That message may change a little bit. Certainly, what you would talk about internally would be very different than what you would talk about with external partners. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t say a little bit that there have been some internal changes that are having an impact on what you’re doing. This is what it means. Really, it gets back to making sure that the individuals have context on what the transition means to them or what it means to that business relationship if it’s somebody on the outside. We’re still going to, for example, do business with you. We’re still a partner of yours. We’re just having some internal struggles that we need to deal with, but don’t worry. This relationship is still strong. That simple conversation can really stabilize a situation where fear and uncertainty of, oh, I heard something was happening over there. Is everything okay? Let’s just get on the phone and say, yeah. Everything is fine with this relationship. With what you care about, we’re okay. So it is about managing the relationships and having those conversations.

Sanjog Aul [00:46:07]:

Let’s take a quick break listeners, and we will be right back and let’s turn the table on ourselves as leaders. We are not fully cooked at all times. We are also developing to deal with situations that come our way. But we gotta build some of those muscles we never had a chance to build. How could we do that proactively? Foresight and the intelligence to be able to lead others in such times? We don’t want to be an apprentice at the time when we have that turbulence. Where we go to the gym to build that muscle proactively, how do we go about it and what are the things we should be keeping in mind as we do that development so that whatever we develop as competencies and confidence is relevant to the kind of transitions that we are likely to face. Please stay tuned listeners, we’ll be right back and explore.

Sanjog Aul [00:48:06]:

Welcome back. So to tackle all these situations that we have in transition, like, we have helped and were talked about developing other people who work with us and or even our business unit leaders or even our management. How should we as leaders develop ourselves the muscle that we need to tackle things like this, which we are not even sure what will hit us?

Malcolm Jack [00:48:27]:

My advice on strengthening the muscle on how to get good at this is to dive in. Don’t shy away from transitions big or small. There’s a saying that I like which is calm seas do not make good sailors, and that’s true in just about any profession. Any kind of work that you can get experiences is really the best educator. So dive in when those opportunities come up. Maybe it’s not with you, maybe it’s not with your organization. If you’ve got a friend that’s going through it, you definitely want to dive into it. I’ve been in situations where disaster recovery we had to enact our disaster recovery 2 times. I think I talked a little bit about the San Diego wildfire season. That really taught me a lot of lessons about transition. Certainly, the market downturn in 2007 and 2008 taught me a lot about financial downturn and what that can mean for business. So life will bring them to your doorstep as well, but you as a leader have to engage in it. You have to dive into the problem. That’s how you can exercise the muscle. In times of growth and prosperity, don’t let that muscle weaken. Do thought experiments. Read about other people who have gone through it. Look at cybersecurity, a transition that people have had to deal with. Make sure that even if you can’t actively engage in something that your mind is engaging in on a regular basis.

Sanjog Aul [00:49:50]:

So let me ask you 1 final question, which is about the specific things. One is that you definitely mentioned that we should jump in. Don’t lose any opportunity to build your muscle. Another is to actually go become a student. But student of what? What competencies? What mindsets? What tools, people process technology tools we should get up to speed with? What kind of leadership training we should go through so that you get outside-in input versus you just learning on the job?

Malcolm Jack [00:50:26]:

So, Sanjog Aul, I’m gonna take a little bit of a diversion for you here because, just a few years ago, I had this same dilemma, and I chose something that was maybe a little off the beaten path. I was looking at going back to school or what sort of educational path I could take to help exercise my leadership muscle and my muscle around crises. Instead, what I decided to do was to go and obtain my pilot’s license, my pilot certificate. This novel approach taught me not only about thinking on the fly, it taught me about emergency situations. Pilots use a variety of checklists and emergency procedures, and they are constantly thinking about what do I do when my engine stops. It was a learning; it was exercising the muscle in a very different way around many of the similar things about how do you manage cockpit dynamics. If you have a copilot in the airplane, how do you divide the duties of an emergency situation to make sure you can get that airplane on the ground? I know it’s a little bit different, but a little bit different was exactly what worked for me. I’ve applied a lot of the lessons and training through flight training and ground school to my everyday life in my job today.

Sanjog Aul [00:51:53]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, thanks so much Malcolm for sharing your insights. These questions were not easy and we don’t want situations like transitions happen to us, but they do and they will. Your responses to my questions were spot on and they were grounded in reality and experience you’ve had. So thanks so much for sharing your insights about how organizations and leaders can lead through transition.

Malcolm Jack [00:52:18]:

It was my pleasure. Thank you very much.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:21]:

Thank you so much again and listeners, hope you enjoyed. I have some nuggets that I got for myself and I’m sure you got for yourself as you listen to the podcast. Please like us on Facebook search for CTN. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn group and please go ahead and subscribe to our podcast on many syndication channels that we are on, iHeart, Spotify, TuneIn, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, you name it. So hope you enjoyed this conversation. Be ready for more. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CIO Talk Network. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week, take care and God bless.