Be a Good Manager During a Recession

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Ten Ways to Be a Good Manager During a Recession

Why Managing in a Recession Requires More Creativity and Consistency Consistently being considered an outstanding manager is always a challenge. When a severe down economy or recession strikes, these challenges expand and multiply. Often, outstanding management careers are made or hurt by the way you respond to these obstacles.

Your creativity and outside-the-box thinking can cement your reputation as a successful and rising manager. Yet, not all action plans include revolutionary thoughts and ideas. Often, a heavy dose of common sense, empathy, agreeability, and, most of all, consistency are just as effective. Here are ten suggestions for becoming a better manager during a deep recessionary period. The creativity factor is up to you.

Ten Ways to Be a Better Recession Manager

• Be supportive, objective, fair, and calm. Just as successful athletic coaches and military officers remain focused and calm to avoid increasing stress on the players and troops, good managers display professional calm during these troubled times.
  
  
• Bring all staff into the decision making loop. Always a good idea, bringing your staff into the decision making process is critical during a recession. The specter of an economy out of control is magnified when staff also feels they have no control over their professional future. Allowing them to participate in the ongoing decision-making process restores some self-confidence.
  
  
• Communicate like you never have before. As a manager, you’re no doubt already aware of the importance of good communication. The psychological depression that often accompanies a recession mandates that you step up your communications efforts to new levels. Keeping everyone in the “information loop” diffuses many fears and uncertainties.
  
  
• After you “talk the talk,” always “walk the walk.” Talking to staff about belt tightening, shrunken budgets, wage freezes, benefit reductions, etc., has little value if you jet off to Cabo for five days right after your speech. Your workplace actions should support your words about recession survival.
  
  
• Don’t recommend staff reductions until you’ve exhausted all other avenues to save money. Regardless of your authority level, explore all other methods of reducing expenses and maximizing revenue before you submit to the temptation of making staff reductions to balance a budget in stress. Even if you have only modest control of personnel decisions, developing new useful ideas to cut costs and increase income still might save some jobs. Your superiors will look at you a bit differently, too.
  
  
• Don’t adopt a “stage personality.” Continue to be your honest self. Resist a feeling that you need to adjust your professional personality to face the cruel realities of managing during a recession. Not only unnecessary, this change may be mistaken for a lack of empathy, a lack of caring, and a lack of sincerity by your staff. Avoid being the creator of further damage and uncertainty to your staff. Just be yourself and display your concern and commitment to your staff and company.
  
  
• Be professional and generous if layoffs and downsizing cannot be avoided. If, despite your sincere efforts, senior management succumbs to the layoff or downsizing temptations, maintain superior professionalism and display sincere empathy for your employees. Don’t skimp on severance offers, retraining possibilities, and maintaining benefit coverage for some period if possible. Be aware that this is important, not only for those employees who are being separated, but for those that remain will watch your actions very closely for future reference.
  
  
• Stress educational and professional development to remaining employees. After a layoff or downsizing, remaining staff will be expected to work even harder than before, often doing multiple jobs to get through the recession. Educational and professional development is often pushed to the bottom of the “to do” list because of time and budget constraints. If anything, you should stress the importance of cross-training and new knowledge more than during the growth periods.
  
  
• Work even harder to generate income, profit, and return on investment (ROI). During a recession, there is sometimes the temptation to go into “cruise control” because the economy is so poor. Managers get into pure “survival mode” at the expense of using their creativity and motivation to find new income streams and generate higher performance levels. Once again, your career might receive a huge boost if you are willing to work even harder to generate positive operations results.
  
  
• Concentrate on the “now,” but develop a vision for the future. As a successful manager, you can probably multi-task with the best of your peers. This is a perfect time to take this talent very seriously. Live and manage in the “now” to keep your department afloat, but also work on developing a vision for the future. Recessions don’t last forever (it just seems like they do) and sharing your visions with your staff can be wonderful positive therapy for your entire department.