In every company I’ve worked for, there’s seasonality to the business. Everything in life has its ebbs and flows. For one company in particular, the seasonality was SO obvious: from mid-November to the end of December, we’d have a six-week lull. Orders were low, things were slow, and the habitual hustle of the day-to-day was calmer than at any other time of the year. It was a downright boring place to work for those six weeks. Nothing was going on.
You’d think that this would be a great opportunity to step back and assess things. See what could be improved. Run some experiments in a low-pressure environment. I agree with you! That would have been so logical. What actually happened was that in this six-week period, we got sloppy. I mean, everyone got sloppy. It was like all the improvements we’d made during the busy time completely fell by the wayside! We started seeing all kinds of very stupid, very avoidable mistakes. Things that, upon discovery, left everyone shaking their heads because there was no real reason for the mistake to have occurred other than just not following established processes. It was so depressing.
The quiet times can be a great boon to an organization, but only if we know what they are, what they mean for us, and how to recognize them. The trick of the quiet times is that because the pressure seems to be off, we feel like we can relax a little, and not in the good way. Sometimes the quiet times, when not dealt with appropriately, can birth a lot of fires just because we stop taking things seriously the way we did when the pressure was on.
I actually think quiet times are what tell you your real mettle. Can you stay strong when the pressure is off? Can you stay focused, keep improving, and execute cleanly when things seem “easy?” That’s the real challenge. Anyone can survive in chaos. The real question is, are you set up to thrive in quiet times?
If you are not, you will continue to cycle through fire-fighting sequences. Here’s why: You may be strong and clean in the busy season, but the second the quiet time starts, your focus will drift. You’ll find out quickly if the culture shift you thought you had actually took place in the quiet times.
The biggest problem with this cycle is that when things get busy again, it takes a couple days or weeks or months to get back to where you were before the lull set in. In that time, it’s disheartening for everyone to feel like nothing is ever getting any better. Are you prepared for the quiet times? Do you get sloppy? How can you prepare so you can avoid the slop?
How can you identify quiet times in your business? Start with these three questions:
- How do you know when your business is in a lull?
- How often does a lull last? (This can be a couple of days, a week, several weeks….)
- When you come upon a lull, how do you respond?
Next time you come upon a quiet time, how might you be proactive in it so as to maintain and increase the gains you made rather than losing traction?
Activity: Identify a quiet time in your life, professional or personal, over the last year. Did you notice yourself being more efficient? Making more mistakes? Did you thrive in that quiet time, or did you come back into the busy season feeling exhausted and like you’d lost ground you’d previously gained?