SalesForceXP: January/February 2009 Coverstory: No Time To Play It Safe

COVERSTORY

SalesForceXP January/February 2009 Cover No Time To Play It Safe

by Paul Nolan

Conventional wisdom advises caution and control in this sort of economic climate - review your costs, tighten your approval criteria, narrow the business scope, and make sure everyone in the organization is as fully busy as possible.

"That approach might work, if the nature of the recessionary environment were known or easy to predict. But it's not," says author and Harvard Business Review blogger Tamara Erickson (www.discussionleader.hbsp.com/hbreditors). "Rather than trying to tighten control and hunker down, I'd suggest that you think about ways to make your team better able to improvise given whatever comes along."

Erickson offers these four steps to help your sales team become more spontaneous, innovative and reflexive:

Increase your firm's "collaborative capacity" through relationships, trust, and knowledge exchange. Don't cut out meetings, intensify the competition among internal teams, or reduce investments in learning.
Articulate a compelling "innovation intent" - something that, in the language of complexity theory, will serve as a "strange attractor" to rally your team around goals that are intriguing, complex and important. Don't narrow the focus to the mundane or over-specify the way teams should approach their challenges. Keep them engaged.
Ensure that your team has regular ongoing exposure to disruptive insights through diversity and external forays. Don't cut travel or fall back on the old "tried and true" team. Bring in new people and new ideas and take them seriously. Get outside your business sphere.
Provide everyone on your team with specific tools to help with innovative thought processes. Don't cut training. Invest in your people. Teach your employees how to be business innovators so they can improvise in motion.