The secret of painless downsizing

The secret of painless downsizing is that it is impossible. Even if done well, it is a negative, distracting, unsettling, upsetting and stressful experience, not just for those directly affected but for the whole organisation. Any downsizing will absorb enoroums amounts of unproductive time in meetings, paperwork, and gossip. If done badly, it will be all of this, and more, and still fail to solve the problems of the business. So what are they keys to doing it right?

Be open

Everybody involved will feel like shit. Those who suffer will blame you, the organisation, the profession, the economy, themselves. This is not the time to forget politeness, or play favourites. Information should be clear and shared transparently. How you behave can have a determining effect on how those who are made redundant feel about your organisation, and in general.

Planning ahead

Being bounced by a sudden crisis into taking snap decisions about staff is hardly the right approach. Well before things reach that stage, you should be looking at your core business area, at trends in the marketplace, and at your staff's skills. The temptation to keep going and hope for the best should be resisted.

Take the right action

Be as drastic as you need to be. Wishful thinking isn't a business strategy, so you may have to close down entire teams or operations. What you don't want to do is have successive rounds of cuts because you couldn't face them at first.

Keep the right people

Ideally, you should have a forward plan, of how your core business will survive and in due course grow again. This should define what people you need to keep: their value to you now, and in the future, rather than in the past.

Be fair

Last in first out is a clear system: at least people know who is at risk. But it isn't likely to be the best way of deciding who best fits your business needs. Any alternative needs to be fair and transparent: this is not a chance to get rid of the people who have annoyed you at some point in the past. This is hard work, but essential. If moral arguments aren't enough, maybe the prospect of an employment tribunal would help.

Look after your leavers

It's not their fault. You should do everything you can to smooth their transition, to find new jobs, providing references. They will be talking about your organisation wherever they go: what will they be saying?

Should project managers be optimists?

[This question arose from an office discussion about targets and programming]

The short answer: probably.

The longer answer: maybe not, not completely. But a project manager needs to be optimistic about the project, and to believe that it is worth doing and is achievable. If they don't believe that, they will be unable to convince anyone else; and they will find it hard to come up with the tenacity, flexibility and single-minded purpose that is needed to drag a reluctant project to a successful conclusion.

And they need to have faith in the ability of their team to learn and grow. There's no point planning a project team by assigning the roles to experienced specialists, only to discover that when it's time to start none are available. What can you do? Give up, or gather the best team you can and fill the gaps by improvisation.

They also need to be risk-takers. All worthwhile projects involve substantial risk, vene if it's just the risk to reputation that would follow from failure and the opportunity cost of other things that could have been done instead. The exclusion of all risk would make projects impossible to start. Good risk-takers are hard to find, of course; you don't want to mistake blind insensibility to danger for courage.

At a practical level, pessimism can be useful too: if there are important deadlines, best to look at progress with a negative attitude. But pessimism is often accompanied by despair: project managers have to believe that their actions can make a difference, that the world is perfectable, that salvation can be grasped.

Failing projects 3: saving your own project

The previous section dealt with saving a project from outside. But what if it's your project, and you're beginning to recognise the warning signs?

Don't panic, act

or rather

Don't act, think

Have you really got a problem? It is notoriously difficult to predict how much longer an excavation will take. The best way to visualise the timescale is to think that if you stopped digging now, and all you did was record, sample, and close down the site, how many weeks would it take? If your project is in any sort of trouble and nearly halfway through, the answer is likely to be "most of the remaining time". Which means that, unless something dramatic changes, you have very limited scope for further excavation if it is to be dealt with properly. And so the answer is "Yes- you have really got a problem".

This may be a deeply troubling revelation; on the other hand, you should take some comfort in the fact that maybe you can do something about it.


Am I to blame?

The honest answer is "perhaps", but that's not important right now. It may be that the tasking and resources were so mismatched that equating the two was completely impossible. That's not your fault (unless you did the estimating). Or it may be that you were treating the stratigraphy carefully hoping that there would be time to deal with the whole sequence that way. It may be you were unlucky with the weather. But whatever it was, just leave it. The important thing is how you react now; delivering projects when it's easy is easy; it's the hard stuff that's hard to do.


If at first you don't succeed, review your success criteria

Re-read the spec and brief to remind yourself what the key interests are and what you are committed to delivering. You may find that a problematic recent feature can be ignored, or left in situ. Or that full excavation is not expected. There are a lot of clauses about variations and unexpected discoveries which may provide a way out.


Renegotiate

If you can't deliver the narrowly-defined success criteria, you'll need to negotiate with your client and curator. Complete honesty is vital to this process: in most circumstances an extension can be agreed, but if the site still ins't finished then you will be stuck.


Pass the buck

Your managers are paid more than you, because they are responsible for your projects among others. Most of the time this is a hands-off role that involves them in little more than tracking and the occasional flying visit. But their most important role is when things go wrong: they are the cavalry. Call them. Tell them you're stuck and need help. If they understand their job, you will find that it ceases to be your problem and has become a company problem.


Tell your team

Keep your staff informed as the strategy changes, explaining the thinking behind it. Do NOT blame it all on head office or the developer or the curator. You should present it as your plan. If you can't do this then you shouldn't be on site any longer: go on holiday. There will inevitably be objections about whether it is proper to depart from conventional archaeological practice. Face them head on.


Don't spread despair

One definition of leadership is "transference of emotion".* What emotion will you be transferring to your team? If you spend your time bemoaning the past, criticising your bosses, and doubting whether the work can be finished, they will end up too depressed to work effectively. The role of the field officer always involves the difficult balancing act of representing the office to the site team and the site to the office staff. This becomes even harder when projects start to go wrong. But don't give in and stay positive.


My indecision is final**

Even the best people need to be told what to do. The worst, even more so. You should expect to be asked at regular intervals all through the day, every day, what needs doing next, how, who by. If you're not being asked that doesn't mean that you're safe. It probably means people are choosing themselves, and they are probably unaware of the wider picture. Nothing destroys a team's morale quicker than uncertainty at the centre (even making wrong decisions is better). If you find yourself saying "I'll have to think about it" more than twice in a day, you need to do some planning. The best solution in the short term is to spend half an hour in the evening, at home in peace and quiet, making a list of the next tasks to follow completion of the current ones. Then if inspiration fails, use the list. All of a sudden it will look like you know what you're doing.



*

"The fundamental task of leaders... is to prime good feeling in those they lead. That occurs when a leader creates resonance a reservoir of positivity that unleashes the best in people." Publisher's Weekly review of Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Richard E. Boyatzis and Annie McKee.

**

My Indecision is Final by Jake Eberts is an account of the death of the British film industry.

Failing projects 2: How to save a failing project

This section is written under the assumption that you are the office-based manager of a project team led by a field officer and the project appears to be failing. If you are the field officer, see part 3.

Houston, we've got a problem

The first step you need to take it to recognise that there is a serious problem. Accept it. If you spend all your time complaining that it isn't going as planned, you will not be in a positive enough state to drive through any improvement.


We are where we are

If saving projects was easy, none would fail. There are losses; some will be irrecoverable; not all outcomes will be achieved. You should be thinking about damage limitation: what are the key outcomes? How could we get there from here? It is important to remember that whatever you plan, it will probably have to be delivered by the existing team, the team which is already performing poorly. If they have taken 50% of the time and resources to do only 40% of the work, you have two problems: there's 60% of the work still to do, and at the current rate that will take 75% of the available time.


Do something now

Every week of underperforming creates a bigger problem to be addressed. Minor changes early on may do as much as drastic actions later.


"Do" and "Don't"

Don't tell them it's easy

There is no point saying that you could do it quicker or better, or somebody else could. They are finding it hard; unless you are intending to actually do the work yourself, the fact that you could do it standing on your head is irrelevant.

Don't apportion blame: leave the autopsy until the patient is dead

There is a time and place to work out what went wrong. Surrounded by frazzled staff who have been quietly panicking about how it is going isn't one of them. Save it for the post-project review, which will usually conclude that decisions were made with the best intentions in the circumstances as they appeared at the time.

The review may well show that the problems were caused by a combination of bad research, bad planning, overoptimistic costing, remote management, bad luck and bad weather, as well as project implementation. Often such problems only become obvious at the fieldwork stage, but that doesn't mean that's what caused them.

But even if it is true that the fault lies with the field team, who are no doubt demoralised and unmotivated, telling them this is hardly likely to inspire them.


Don't tidy up

You could clean up the cabins and tool stores and make the site look a bit smarter. But it won't help: although a dirty site is a symptom of a failing team, the obverse isn't true. The problems with the team need to be addressed if anything is going to change.


Don't work overtime and weekends

The extra work done won't compensate for the administrative and logistical problems caused, and productively in core hours will suffer.


Maybe send people on holiday

This will be good for them, and good for the site, since it provides a break which will alter the team dynamics. It's actually a good plan to include a break in projects on purpose: the need to hand over to someone else is a very good discipline.


Maybe replace the field officer

This might seem the obvious solution, but it is fraught with difficulties. For a start, it seems to personalise the issue into a matter of their competence. It will probably irreversibly damage their working relationships in the future. And it will be resented by the staff (paradoxically, this is true even if they have spent the last month complaining about how useless they are), the staff you are hoping to lead forward to success.


Maybe provide more staff or more time

Again this may seem an obvious solution. But throwing more resources into the mix will have little effect unless the fundamental problems are addressed; in no time any new staff will have gone native and be just as unproductive as the rest. And adding a few weeks to the project may be felt to be extending the prison sentence.

Even if this doesn't happen, there's likely to be friction between old and new staff, especially if the new members have been labelled as 'the ones who are coming to sort it out'.


Do make hard decisions

In general, problems arise because people defer hard decisions, rather than because they choose wrong. But archaeologists will be understandably reluctant to depart from accepted methodology. If you are going to abandon stone-by-stone planning, the decision should be made by the senior archaeologist involved, after careful thought. The team may well be reluctant: it is important to explain to them the rationale, not just the outcome.


Do support your field officer

Help them by smoothing any practical issues, listening to their views, respecting their opinions. And make sure you are available and visit site often: long distance management only works when projects are running well.


Do talk to the team

Give them information about the background to the project, what your priorities are, and how they fit in. They should be made to feel part of the company, even if they are only there for a single site.


Do listen to the team

You never know, you might learn something.

Failing projects: 1 - identification

So how do you spot a failing project?

Although this question is framed as if it were about the project, it is really about the project team. Some projects will fail because they are too big, too complex, or too under-resourced to achieve their aims despite the best efforts of a fully functioning team. Here the issue is rather: how do you spot when a project threatens to fail even though it should succeed?

Teams are astonishing flexible and powerful. Humans are by nature social animals; if you put people in a room and give them a task they will become a team. As Big Brother has shown, this may not be a pleasant or wholly positive process: the missing element in the House is leadership. Most failing teams reflect a failure of leadership. There are a lot of warning signs indicating that such failure is imminent.

Site visit to a failing project

• Workers will be focused on specific tasks or areas, reluctant to share equipment or lend staff

What this reflects is a lack of belief in the project as a whole. It isn't necessarily a conscious effort to avoid blame.

• Untidy tool store, site and cabins

People feel too busy or too tired to do anything that isn't their direct responsibility: it's easier just to leave the rubbish on the chair or put the tools away dirty.

• Minor accidents, incorrect or incomplete records

People who feel under pressure won't have their usual air of calm competence.

• Minor sickness, lateness and slowness

One of the prime motivators is feeling that you can't let your team down by not playing your part: so these symptoms reflect that the central identity of the team is weak.

• Poor morale and working relationships

Arguments are to be expected when people work together, but in normal circumstances they would be brief and soon forgotten. One common phenomenon is the developemnt of a strong site v office antipathy where senior managers are seen as the enemy.

It will be apparent that 10 minutes of wandering around the site and talking to a couple of the team will probably be enough to assess these warning signs. It should perhaps be emphasised that although it is often said that conditions like the weather or the nature of the work are responsible for poor morale, this isn't true: an enthused team will cope with an adverse situation positively.

Talking to the team leader (Project Officer/ Project Manager)

The team leader will be aiming to deliver a successful project completed on time. They will normally do their best to avoid admitting to uncertainty. Phrases such as "I'm not sure ...", "I don't know ... "and "I can't decide ... " should be taken as red flags that they have reached the point where they are no longer able to take effective decisions. This is usually because they feel swamped by the work to be done and therefore cannot plan ahead. Another warning phrase is the reponse, when asked for the likely completion date for a task, is "As long as it takes"or "I can't tell". This is not because people should be able to predict the future accurately, but rather because it's telling you they haven't even got a plan for how it might work out.

When people get to this state they cannot prioritise effectively, but more importantly they cannot direct the team, who will sense whether their leader has a grasp on the project.

Action is needed ... but what? See part 2.