With many economic indicators pointing to at least the beginning of the end of one of the greatest recessions since the Great Depression, is it finally time to start examining what life might look like on the other side of the downturn? Is it too early to start injecting hope back into your organization? Does your CEO have a new story to tell about the next chapter in your company’s history? Is there an agreement on a growth strategy? These questions are worth asking now, or soon, even if we believe the economic turnaround is still a couple of quarters away.
Why? Well, you wouldn’t think it would be too difficult to get senior leadership to start projecting a positive future, if indeed things are beginning to look a little brighter. But, the fact is that leadership teams find it far more difficult to get focused early on telling the positive story, than they do when the news is all doom and gloom. There is something about a deep dive in financial performance, severe lay offs and waning sales that focus a leadership team with laser like precision. It’s far more difficult, particularly in the early stages of the rebound. Why? Many don’t want to get ahead of themselves too quickly for fear they will loose the very attention and focus from teams that helped them respond so swiftly to the economic downturn. For some, there could even be a bit of superstition that creeps in and they don’t want to “jinx” what appears to be positive signs of an uptick in performance. Of course, for publicly and privately traded companies, there is always the pressure to appropriately manage expectations. But, by far, the most significant factor that delays positive communications is the lingering pain absorbed by the organization in getting right sized for the current economy and the desire to avoid the excesses that invariably led to the squeeze in the first place.
With all of this in consideration, and certainly depending upon the industry, this just might be the right time to ask senior leadership “are we ready to project and communicate a brighter future?” The power of the self-fulfilling prophecy is often better understood on the way down than it is on the way up. The calculus of hope is often a mystery, but no one would ever argue with power of positive momentum — both real and perceived.
