As I speak to executives, there are two stories I’m hearing over and over:
The demand for my products and services is soaring and I can’t keep up OR demand has shifted and I can’t reset my portfolio fast enough.
These two create intense pressure and disrupt us as we are reaching to get back to normal. Getting pushed out of paradigms unwillingly is not pleasant, but it does provide a gift and opportunity.
Think Catalyst Not Hero
Actually, there are several gifts that come in the face of disruption, the biggest being the need for change is evident and intense. This focus, and the intensity of the stakes involved, creates a powerful environment for progress. As a team leader, you will have a small number of these moments in your career. It is essential that you harness this angst for good and use it to help the team recover.
The biggest sand trap for the first-time expedition leader is to over index on personal responsibility – it is so tempting to take on not only the leadership role, but to add in the subject matter expert role, as well.
The shift I coach leaders to make is to become the catalyst for the needed product or service change. When you make this shift, you go from reacting to the pressure to instead focusing it to move you and your firm into alignment with the future that is desperately trying to emerge.
By being the person that clarifies the challenge, drives quality decision making and activates the full team to solve it, you remove the thousand pound rock that you form in your mind, and activate the best resources available – internally and externally. It’s then that then that new opportunities show up and real fresh business begins.
Moving from hero to catalyst opens the door for much better results. Let’s ground this in three key takeaways:
- Reframe – Do the work to see the disruption in a “now forward” framework. When big change comes at you, it feels like chaos. This chaos disorients you and makes you feel helpless. The anecdote for this is to move from using your current framework, which is rearward anchored, to a brutally truthful forward-looking framework. This is hard work and needs to be Job One. Until this is done, firms will continue to over invest in the past.
- Intentional Team – Build a team that can move fluidly to build the new value. Since you need fresh thinking, you must assemble the resources in a fresh and efficient way. This involves creating a fresh team, with carefully curated members and equipping them to be much more than collocates individuals.
- Partner, Partner, Partner – The days of white-coated technologists running back to the lab, inventing in isolation, are long gone. Your firm exists in an ecosystem of talent, insight and resources. Modern value development is predicated on forming the best minds from the full value chain into a focused effort. By designing the questions, background and leadership style of the participants and the agenda, we can activate new viewpoints and capture value.
The Biggest Trap: Avoiding the Inward Turn
The scarcest resource during these shifts is objective and specific insight – nearly everyone around the team leader will be seeking to frame the future using the vocabulary and system that worked in the past.
This is a high-leverage time to invest in skillful facilitation and outside viewpoint. Making the mindset shift requires you to look straight into the inertia of your firm and make some clear-eyed framing choices that will open the opportunity for progress.
Through my work, I’ve developed a comprehensive co-development path to support leaders and team members working through these challenges.
If you’d like to talk through in a more detailed way what this looks like, please reach out to me at scott@scottpropp.com, or use this link to put an appointment on my calendar.
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