I expect that a fair few of you have had to make redundancies as the economy takes a dive - I hope for your sakes you don't work with leaders who dress it up with rubbish names like ‘right sizing’. We recently decided to reduce our support teams and to remove our entry level roles, which meant that we’d have to make redundancies for the first time in 16 years of business. This was a very big deal indeed.

The first question that I asked the team was: "If Carlsberg did redundancies, what would they do"?

It really got us thinking. It would be like their adverts - somehow it would all be okay, people would get new jobs (probably better ones), they’d get the best looking references in the world, they’d be introduced to their next employer, we'd all manage to stay friends and people would feel happy and confident when they left. Oh yes, and everyone left behind would be fine about the changes. And we’d all have a leaving do together with speeches and music – a real celebration of our time together.

We got to the end of the consultation and, though it was not like a Carlsberg ad, we did manage to get pretty close. That question forced us to think through the problem from a different perspective and to go the extra mile just to see what the possibilities really were in this difficult process.

I’ll be trying this question for my next major challenge as well!