How Jeffrey S. Davis navigated Perficient through the recession

Help people grow
Unfortunately for Davis, he did have instances where people came back to him and hadn’t come up with enough to cut out of their part of the budget. The claim was that there were too many things they couldn’t afford to live without.
“It’s a process of education and less of a negotiation,” Davis says. “It’s not really a negotiation when we know who the winner is going to be and that’s me.”
If your people have a hard time even drawing up a list of possible cuts, try being a mentor to them rather than a tyrant.
“With those people, it’s more of a process of, ‘Let me walk through it with you.’ Make it more of a mentoring exercise. ‘Let’s go through it together. Here’s why this function is no longer going to be necessary or here’s why you’re not going to need this many of that particular title or function in the scenario we’re talking about.’”
You can also encourage people to look beyond just getting rid of employees to reduce costs.
“Those are some of the things that don’t immediately strike the person serving in the trenches wrestling with this,” Davis says. “To your point, maybe they are hung up on the people side of it. And they aren’t even thinking about the fact that, ‘Hey, we’ve got that extra conference area over here that some other tenant has been wanting for two years. Let’s get rid of it.’”
Whether it’s offering alternatives or just encouragement, you need to remove the fear your leaders may have about making important decisions. Show that you trust them to make big decisions in the best interest of the business.
“You’ve chosen this person for this job,” Davis says. “They are either your person or they are not. If they’re not, you should do them a favor and get rid of them. If they are, you should support them. People are motivated knowing they have a boss who believes in them. I can’t think of a better way to be motivated myself than knowing my board has confidence and believes in me and believes in where I’m taking the company.”
If people do make mistakes in the cutback process, try to remember that you’ve made plenty of mistakes yourself.
“At this level, if you’re still trying to manage people, there’s something wrong,” Davis says. “You’re not doing your job correctly or you’ve got the wrong people. But your business is not going to grow. You’re not going to reach your potential either if you’re still trying to do everybody else’s job for them.”
You’re not going to have a team of leaders that feels like it’s marching forward together if you become a micromanager. You need to buy in to them and they need to buy in to you and you need to trust each other.
“If you’ve got that buy-in, they’re going to work really hard,” Davis says. “They really believe in their heart of hearts this is what needs to happen not just because you told them so, but because they understand that it really does need to happen. They’re going to work very hard to make it happen.”