I have been having conversations with dozens of business leaders of larger, more complex organizations recently to help them gain perspective, find traction, and form fresh insights. When we open these conversations, we always check in on how they and their firm is adapting – and at what stage they are in the adaptation process. (for more on the model, see link here).
These leaders got to where they are because they are decisive, insightful, and action-oriented. They hate dithering and know instinctively that if the firm is treading water, they are moving backward.
Their collective insights show that we’re entering a new stage – the muddled middle. We are still close enough to the origin of the COVID crisis to be feeling the echo wave of the existing shock, yet far enough into it that in some ways these leaders feel stuck. Old patterns are asserting themselves, and they can’t help feeling that somehow they would find a new and fresher path forward.
The “Secret” to Regaining Vibrancy
I was pushed the other day in a chalk talk session to offer a senior executive a road map to navigate through this crisis, and as we talked about it, it became clear that I needed to share it with you as well.
When we are hit with something of this magnitude, it puts us all into “duck and cover” mode – we are temporarily a passenger on our plane and not the pilot. What the executive was asking for was a path to get back into the pilot’s seat. Once we are back on our game, vibrancy can return.
If you follow this path, not only will you find a way back to the pilot’s seat, but you will be taking advantage of the best thinking of your team, as well.
Here is the summary outline, and we’ll unpack it a bit more below.
- Regain Perspective: Clarity leads to confident action by your best team members
- Partition Your Thinking: Breaking it down makes having quality discussions much more manageable
- Draw Wisdom from History: People are pattern-making machines
- Look at Adjacent Lanes for Fresh Insight: Great discoveries are largely repurposed insights
- Take on a New Vector: Well established, cross-functional teams will build just the right thing for your firm
#1: Regain Perspective
There is a fundamentally flawed assumption that the work of a leader is to “get everyone on the same page” to make internal tensions vanish. Many leadership training pieces have been created around how to get the team aligned, where aligned is defined as everyone performing their work in the same way – to make friction disappear.
A more useful model is that great leaders manage the team’s skills, passion, and tension toward an outcome. This view recognizes that human insight, motivation, and diversity is the engine that creates outstanding performance and that what we need to bring is the collective best – and that the clarity of the target is the key.
To this end, the work of senior leadership right now is to get very clear on two points: where we are (current reality) and where we are heading (vision). The more clear leadership is on these two points, the more associates in the firm can regain a sense of accountability and shared responsibility – and bring their best to the game.
How to get started:
- Start immediately: Once you’ve gotten all your associates out of harm’s way, the very next thing is to begin assembling a list of what assets you have and the needs of your clients. You need to keep refreshing these to remove all the estimates and get the “fiction” out of both the have and the need
- You need to have high expectations: Great results come from strong expectations by the leader and the leadership team. Setting the bar high for caring for your team members and clients will ripple through the firm and very quickly your clients and partners will feel the difference.
- You need to provide all the support you can: This is a time to reward initiative and effort on behalf of the clients and customers. Find stories of leaders doing the right thing and repeat them. If you need to reign in enthusiasm, do it quietly and privately.
- Move the target forward as soon as you can: Once you have this week in hand, move to this month, then to this quarter, then to this half and so forth. As you do, you will regain leadership altitude – and your team will gain momentum, as well.
#2: Partition Your Thinking
In many spheres of life, unstructured conversation is powerful and energy giving. In the context of leadership, however, it’s much more beneficial to “chunk it down” and set some constraints to allow more specific, focused and powerful insights to develop.
Establishing intense conversations in specific spheres will help your team explore and build on each other’s insights. When we are first knocked off our game by a crisis, it’s unclear what previous assumptions still hold. It’s very important to have spirited discussions where the currently known facts are examined using sound critical thinking.
A useful taxonomy for many leaders is the environment, market, and enterprise. In my discussions with leaders, I see an over-indexing to “news” and an underinvestment in developing insights. A rule of thumb: if you hear a piece of insight from one client or customer, take note. If you test it and find it to be true for half a dozen customers, add it to your list.
How to get started:
- Set yourself up for receiving environmental scans from at least three sources – preferring editors that cull insights and not simply news snippets
- Pay close attention not just to sales trends, but market mechanics. Are distributors shifting their behaviors? Are clients seeking a substitute?
- How is your enterprise resisting a fresh client demand? (I guarantee you are…)
#3: Draw Wisdom From History
Many of my clients are visionary leaders with voracious appetites for new information. My counterintuitive coaching is that reading new books that were written by authors during the great expansion cycle of the pre-COVID era will not be very helpful.
There are two places to invest your reading time that will set you way ahead of the pack. The first is well-researched biographies from leaders who have led through a crisis before, and second, business literature from eras where they met the kind of challenges we’re seeing now.
How to get started:
- Read anything by Walter Isaacson (Jobs, DaVinci, Kissinger, Einstein)
- Step back by looking at Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of Civilizations
- Look back to literature on past recessions (perhaps this HBR article or this comparative piece from McKinsey)
#4: Look at Adjacent Lanes for Insight
We know from history that working through this pandemic is going to be both painful and a time of massive creation and innovation. In other cycles, some of the best moves have been formed by idea transplantation and perspective-shifting. The classic example is using the PARC tech for the Macintosh and the reframe to the human-machine interface. Others cited in this Wharton paper include using IV fluid bags as a starting point for high-tech shoe cushioning or color rendering by using insight from the morpho butterfly.
How to get started:
- Keep the lines of communication open with your best partners
- When it feels right, set up upstream and downstream small team discussions. Artfully choose a combination of creative and integrative leaders to attend
- Participate in a structured advanced inventing session – then go and make it real
#5: Take on a New Vector
This is where you get value from all the above activities. It will be really tempting to just forward this insight onto the plate of your middle management team and ask them to “report back.” At times like this, organic change is very hard in complex firms.
In my work in helping firms adapt to changing market conditions across 20 countries and dozens of business models, I’ve developed a framework that builds a powerful cross-functional engine in your firm, carefully establishing the precise project, team, and work plan for you to see results that move the needle (for more, see posts, here, here and here).
How to get started:
- Start small: Find one thing to stop and one thing to start
- Powerful questions get powerful insights: Ask them if we are expecting enough of each other. Ask why either team has not solved this on their own
- Seek the “why” (it matters): Listen very carefully to your client stakeholders, and begin to map out and reflect back on the impact a project could have on the value you deliver to them.
- Be transparent: Share your internal capabilities that might address this high-value problem
- Be quick to provide resources for contained experiments: Many firms have found that by setting aside relatively small resources, for specific times, targeted at specific results, they make big progress (See structured tools post here).
Working with Me
This may look pretty simple and black and white, but it’s not easy.
I take on a limited number of advisory and project clients, using facilitation tools, checklists, and processes honed through dozens of assignments. If you’d like to talk about how an advisory or consultative approach could help you through the muddled middle, please reach out to scott@scottpropp.com or put a 20-minute appointment on the books using this link.
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