Collaboration – Communicate the facts to employees and customers, and ask for ideas and help.  Companies reported that employees came up with a number of really useful ideas to reduce costs.  Being able to do this underscores the critical importance of building a high-trust communications environment in your organization – so that people are willing to share their ideas, and care about your success.

Transparency – These successful entrepreneurs identified the key metrics that focused everyone on performance, and began reporting on them even more frequently.  To quote the article:  “One company described the increase in their business as ‘reporting that was done yearly was now monthly, monthly reporting was now weekly, weekly reporting was daily, and daily reporting was many times each day.’”

Creating a system for sharing performance measures may seem counter-intuitive during a recession, but the process has immediate payoffs.  In my experience, the act of getting your team into a room and talking about what the key measures ARE is a high value exercise in itself.  Once you’ve arrived at a set of key performance indicators and created a system for regular reporting (whether with a simple spreadsheet or a specialized performance management software package)  you are able to adapt and act, as a team, in a much more dynamic way.

So what’s the problem, I asked?

Nobody else is buying into it, he said.

Why? To make a long story short, he had gone into his office, shut the door, and laid out his view of how the company would be successful.  Only problem was, he didn’t get anyone else involved in the process.

The best plan in the world will not succeed if the people responsible for implementing it don’t buy in to the program.  “Buy in” requires that all concerned get to say their piece, and believe they’ve been heard, whether their idea is adopted or not.

In most of today’s complex business planning situations, two (or more) heads are better than one. How to bring out the best collective intelligence of a group?

An effective, collaborative planning exercise requires a balance of two kinds of conversations:

Divergent thinking is a process of exploring possibilities, brainstorming, different or emerging perspectives, thinking outside the box. The wise leader encourages these contributions from everyone involved.

And, at the end of the day, there needs to be a focus and a plan.  This is convergent thinking – out of all those possibilities, where will we focus?

I’ve heard a lot of leaders say “We operate by consensus around here”, but I seldom believe it.  Often the appearance of consensus is like one of those elections in a country where, say, 95% of the voters support the incumbent. It’s just that people don’t dare to voice what they really think. Everyone would like to believe that a consensus is desirable – but it’s not always possible. If everyone has had their say, however, and understands the reasons for picking that focus, you’ll have a much happier team.