SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 170,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each Tuesday in our e-newsletter.
Last week, we asked: What’s your current view of the economic and business environment?
- It’s great and doing well: 0.84%
- It’s solid and improving: 29.83%
- It’s solid but getting worse: 5.16%
- It’s weak and faces challenges: 57.69%
- It’s horrible: 6.47%
More rough times ahead. Clearly, the economy continues to present challenges to the majority of your organizations. The question you need to answer as leaders is how are you going to prepare your business and your people to weather the journey. You need to have a clear sense of priorities (e.g., what gets cut if we don’t make our numbers, what investments will we make or defer, etc.) as well as communicate to your employees about their financial prospects going forward (bonuses, etc.). The more uncertainty you can remove from their minds, the more they’ll be able to focus on their work and hopefully help your organization navigate the troubled path ahead.
Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS and author of “One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership.”