Keep using Rockefeller Habits in the COVID-19 virus crisis

Summary

When your company is using Rockefeller Habits (aka Scaling up), keep using it as your life-line but make some changes to navigate successfully through today’s challenging times. This post contains some practical tips for scaleups between 10 and 250 employees to navigate through the current crisis.

Please contribute in the comments to make the content better.

* We use Rockefeller Habits in this document, that is the same as Scaling up.

Rockefeller Habits and your business principles

Companies that have implemented Rockefeller Habits in the past will benefit tremendously now. Focus on these points:

• Live the purpose. The core purpose includes culture (core values) and core purpose (‘why are we in business’). Tell stories, celebrate events manifesting the purpose and make decisions within the context of the purpose.
• See the crisis as the ultimate test for your systems, core values and core ideology. Are we staying together or are we starting to judge, blame and criticize? Are we falling apart now times get tense?
• Discuss and define business principles. It is business as unusual and certain principles may not apply now. What if a customer badly needs your product or service and is unable to pay now? Normally you would walk away, but this time… discover and discuss dilemmas and use the purpose as your compass.
• Readjust and focus on short-term priorities. This particularly applies to quarterly priorities. Drop what you have formulated earlier and define new priorities. Focus on quarterly priorities instead of annual priorities as long as the near future is unclear. Consider a sprint of a month instead of a quarter.
• Redefine KPIs. Find and use meaningful “leading indicators” that businesses can work on. Choose fast changing KPIs to obtain as much information. Suggested KPIs: contacts with customers, employee confidence, cash flow, confidence of leadership team.
• Focus on cash flow. Discuss current cash flow position and cash flow principles. In many businesses revenue has dropped significantly overnight imposing cash flow constraints. Make it a daily or weekly KPI. If you experience a negative cash flow, you may consider using the date that your company runs out of cash as a key indicator. Like “July 22nd”. Every action may impact that date, make it earlier or later. It creates clarity that drives a sense of urgency.
• Focus on “core customers”. This is always best practise, but now ask them where the need help and use them as a source of market intelligence. Call them every week.
• Importance of meeting and planning sessions. The rhythm will be as important as always or maybe even more important. Consider virtual meetings (more on that later). Don’t skip meetings.

We found this document by McKinsey & Company helpful: COVID-19: Implications for business with more information and updates. See below in the resources.

Develop scenarios to drive clarity

Develop a vision with your team on what the likely scenarios are for your company. Possible scenarios could be:

• quick recovery. The virus will be under control soon and business consequences are limited to Q1 and Q2 of 2020.
• global slowdown. It takes more time to contain the virus and globally businesses will have a hard hit in 2020 (but with a more positive outlook for 2021).
• global recession. The impact for businesses is far broader and will have a longer time span.

Of course, scenarios are specific to industries. What scenario is most likely for your business and how can you use it while planning?

Rockefeller Habits is a great asset now, not a liability

Companies using Rockefeller Habits are better equipped facing current challenges in business. For two reasons:

• the core of the business is in better shape: a core strategy which is clear, unique and committed to by the company will help you tremendously creating clarity and increasing engagement.
• your team / company is already disciplined in having discussions and meetings, setting the right priorities (with a meaningful definition of done defined) and measuring what matters.

Cherish this capability and don’t drop this ball. Don’t break the routine. Don’t break these valuable habits.

Keep your quarterly meeting

In current times, the quarterly meeting may be more important than ever. Consider the following suggestions:

• keep it short (3–4 hours or less) and focused.
• prepare like life depends on it. Thorough preparations are required. Remove participants that violate this. Consider making a template for preparations and share that with all participants. Ask the authors for an example if you need (details at the end of this post).
• discuss and define scenarios. Choose the one that you feel is most likely for your business and use that scenario as context for business planning. See earlier in this post.

A suggested agenda for a 2.5 hour quarterly meeting could look like this:

(*) Making preparations with powerpoint slides has two advantages:

1. members need to really prepare well and consider what to share. It makes reporting more consistent, less ad-hoc and easier to take in.
2. powerpoints can be shared 24 hours before the quarterly meeting begins for reading and better understanding.

Consider using a powerpoint template to create consistency in preparation and presenting.

You may adjust timing to your needs, e.g. when having a bigger team (like 5 or more).

You may consider this quarterly meeting in a monthly rhythm to make your company even more agile. For reporting on progress, discuss and amend quarterly priorities every week

Keep the meeting rhythm while being distributed

You may not get the team physically together anyway, but you can stay effective even working from home or in another distributed way. Amend the meeting rhythm to a virtual one, but don’t break the rhythm.

We have particularly good experiences in team meetings with Google Hangouts and Zoom and less so with -for example- Skype. The reason is simple: you need capabilities to engage participants and capture their contributions.

Some practical tips when you meet while being distributed:

• agree that people do not do other things while being on the virtual quarterly meeting.
• use the comment function (or waving hands) when someone needs to bring something into the discussion. Agree on what the protocol is, don’t shout out what you think at the very moment that it pops into your mind.
• keep the meeting focused. Agree what the objective of the meeting and interrupt when topics are brought up that are outside of the context of the meeting.
• keep a parking lot for all those topics that come up and cannot be dealt within the objective of the meeting. Consider to schedule it in another meeting (weekly?) or plan a separate meeting when it is an important topic.
• appoint a strong moderator for keeping the structure. The structure enables focus on the discussion. Discipline sets you free.
• do rounds when asking for input or when getting buy-in for decisions. It is important that everyone voices his or hers buy-in with ‘Yes’ or voices their opinion. In physical meetings you can watch people’s behaviour better, in online meetings it is more difficult. When a team arrives at a decision, ask everyone to chime in. Engagement is key.
• have regular breaks (every 45 minutes) to recharge and get some coffee.

A second daily huddle

Consider an additional daily huddle at the end of the day (say 6.03pm). The format is different though as there is the following three questions:
1. what went well today?
2. what did we learn?
3. what do we need to improve tomorrow?

Make a backlog of opportunities

Your company will need to react to whatever it is thrown at at the moment. Focus on the short term. But also prepare for the future at the same time. Consider this: what if this crisis is so disruptive that it will change your way of doing business forever? We see one opportunity for any business: a rapid digitalization of doing business. But there must be more. Put all ideas and opportunities in a Spark File (what that is you will read here). Don’t discuss it further (because of cous) and certainly don’t allow persons to focus on why this and that would not work anyway, just jot it down and continue. You may find your Spark File handy when your business is in calmer weather.

Please help to make this post better

Please share your findings when implementing this or any tips, tricks and tools with us so that we can make this document better.

Resources we use now

• COVID-19: Implications for business by McKinsey & Company
• Business implications of COVID-19 by KPMG

For further assistance

Do not hesitate to contact us for assistance if you are using Scaling up / Rockefeller Habits:

• Anna Chojnacka, anna@scaleupimpact.com, m +31 617 844 060
• Pieter van Osch, pieter@scaleupimpact.com, m +31 655 394 395

Don’t worry if you are not a client. Just call us. We are in this together and we will share everything we have. This is not a sales pitch or clever social media funnel.