The Plan - Lead - Excel Letter

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PLANNING TO EXCEL:
STRATEGIC PLANNING THAT WORKS

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Plan for success
train your leaders to lead
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With all the despair
about the economic situation,
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to plan and train
for a positive future.

Plan for success
and train your managers to lead!

Circadian rhythm. No it isn't a band. It's an approximately 24 hour cycle of activities your body accomplishes governed by what's often called your body's clock. For most people, their circadian rhythm is fairly constant; they usually eat and sleep at the same time, often in concert with the light and dark cycles of their environment.

But there's a group that's an exception: shift workers who regularly, or rather irregularly, change from one shift to another. For those people, there is no regular rhythm to their day. A study by Dr. Gloria J. Kuhn, published in the January, 2001 edition of Annals of Emergency Medicine, details problems experienced by emergency doctors who were on rotating shifts. She found that when workers did not receive sufficient sleep, they were more likely to have health issues, experience cognitive problems, and make mistakes. Her results indicated that night shift workers were more likely to experience circadian rhythm issues.

What does that have to do with me? Every leader who runs more than one shift needs to consider the effects of disruption to a worker's circadian rhythm. There's even a name for this: Shift Worker Disorder. Many companies have shift workers, but the biggest problem I've seen is in retail. That's because every retail store I've seen has convoluted and ever changing scheduling that can put workers through three different shifts in a single week.

But Dr. Kuhn's study was talking about doctors, right? True and we certainly want our doctors alert all the time, or at least when they're treating us. But think about what this can mean for your workers. Do they operate machinery such as forklifts and pallet trucks? Wouldn't you like to have them alert when they are operating equipment? Do they interact with customers? People who are chronically tired won't present as good an attitude.

Of course, if you have more than one shift, you must have workers to operate those shifts. What's a leader to do? Consider this. People are really adaptable creatures. If you assign someone to a midnight shift, they will adapt to those hours. It will take time, but adapt they will. It's the time required that is of interest to leaders. That adaption time can be several days. So, if you move a worker from one shift to another, they never get the time to adapt.

That's when problems will appear. As workers never get the opportunity to reset their own internal clock, they become less alert, more likely to have accidents, and more susceptible to health problems.

What's that costing you? Probably a lot more than smoothing out your shift scheduling.

We've talked about basic leadership training and training for mid-level leaders. The third part of a good leadership development program is development of senior and executive level leaders. These people operate at a different level than other leaders. They see a much bigger picture and have a much broader scope of responsiblity than leaders at any other level. Interestingly, even though they're the ones who set the leadership pace, they often don't have much face-to-face supervision responsiblity. These leaders combine high-level management with high-level leadership and their development program needs to address that.

The program at this level has a two-part approach. First, as leaders move to the senior and executive level, they need a much broader view of the company and the industry than was necessary before. Therefore, they need to be educated on all those aspects. If they have concentrated on sales, they need to learn about manufacturing, finance, legal issues, etc. The second part is sometimes difficult for leaders at this level to accept. It's simply that, if they haven't received the basic and mid-level leadership training, they need to start there. I've found that many senior leaders rose through the ranks without any formal leadership development. When their subordinate leaders start to learn the great techniques that will really transform the company, the senior leaders sometimes balk because they don't have that experience. They are more receptive if they've seen the training for themselves.