We’ve never had a time quite like this – explosive demands for goods and services, really mobile talent and the wholesale reorganization of work itself.
At the same time, many leaders are feeling like they are on a treadmill – through no fault of their own – and noticing that the harder they run, the less real progress they gain for themselves and their teams. It seems that in the pandemic we all needed to manage some degree of initial contraction. Now that we’re faced with sudden and rapid expansion, we find ourselves “behind the curve.”
What’s really going on here?
What you are experiencing is the zone of diminishing results.
Like many other talented leaders I know, your first instinct may be to lean in. After all, we’ve all been told that “if we push hard and get back to the basics, all will be well.”
The challenging news is that getting back on track is a mirage. We are early into recovery and our mindsets are anchored in the pre-pandemic performance of our teams. While it may seem this has come out of the blue, the pandemic has actually amplified a universal, yet hidden pattern that’s been operating under the surface all along.
The pandemic has changed things. Your workforce has a new mindset. Your clients have fresh expectations. Your upstream partners are struggling to deliver. Everyone wants a better user experience and expects seamless digital integration. These crisscrossing expectations place your firm at a more complex starting point than when it grew to scale.
In other words, you and your firm may be caught in the tension that exists between the once valuable internal mindsets, processes and technologies and the new thinking, skills and systems that are required for a much higher level of contribution.
What’s Really Going On
Above, you’ll see the familiar curve of the hero’s journey. The first “mountain,” or climb, of the hero’s journey is a seemingly tangible, predictable and routine journey. At the top of that first climb, there’s an opportunity for celebration and “coasting” which is then followed by inevitable additions that weigh on the results, followed by unanticipated life-changing challenges that lead to real backsliding and regression.
This inflection point is where the real work of leadership is hammered into shape. In the midst of this experience, our hero finds his mentor that helps him gain clarity and equips him for the road to come.
For the successful hero, this is followed by a second journey where our now forever-changed heroine more than meets the challenge and reaches unimagined new heights (for more on this, see the post here).
For the context of business and larger firms, the first journey (in green) is one of scale. This might be when a firm selects a large scale new tool or process like ERP, agile or customer journey mapping, and it provides an overwhelming boost to the firm. It unlocks fresh value and accelerates the business growth to the green plateau.
At first, all seems well. The success of the first climb leads to everything from celebratory lunches to awards to performance bonuses. Then quietly – and often before even the most talented leaders can detect it – the curve starts to bend. People, process and technology subtly begin to assert themselves locally. New requirements are placed on processes. Performance results start to decline, and inertia pulls the group forward into an unfamiliar section of the curve. It’s here that the more effort you put in, the less output you get.
Eager to regain their success, many organizations try to reprise the first journey. Perhaps they add a new tool, technique or hire some new, specialized process resource. This leads to one of three outcomes:
- The first is a circular path back to the first journey, with the discovery that the first climb has released most of the hidden performance and very little change in the results is noticed.
- The second potential path is that these experiments take the group even deeper into the rut, and the harder they try, the deeper they get. Much like an ATV stuck in the mud, more power only takes you deeper.
The third path is to get the slide arrested and move on toward the higher plateau available to those who are willing to do the diagnostic work to make differential investments to integrate the group (more to come on that below).
The First Journey and Second Journey Require Different Approaches
The second journey requires a different approach – one that examines the system.
The first journey lives in operations, optimization and management. The second journey lives in customer focus, service and market, then proceeds to lead us to the needed internal work.
The second journey is one that creates outstanding customer results that drive careers, net promoter scores and stakeholder value.
The first journey required you to bend your team and processes into compliance with a new tool or off-the-shelf solution that released pent up value that your legacy tools had not accessed. When you used the new tool, these value pockets released and you had wind in the sails.
The second journey approach starts with anchoring externally – with the client – and creating insight and alignment that allows a fresh agenda to be established. This fresh view is developed by being ruthlessly constructive in looking at your client base and its needs. This clarity is then applied diagnostically to your firm and its teams to allow precise differential investment to integrate the previous investments.
The good news is that rather than requiring a wholesale transplant of what was completed on the first journey, in this case, a more nuanced approach of strengthening the positive and removing the friction leads to a very strong move forward.
Why This is Important
If you find yourself on the performance plateau, time is not your friend. In this “getting back to normal” part of the pandemic, the water levels are rising quickly, making it harder and harder to stay afloat.
I’ve seen firms consume valuable (and in this environment very scarce) time, talent and resources on journey one “back on track” programs that have not moved the needle, and in fact accelerated the move into the zone of diminishing returns (and in some cases business failure). When something as simple as adding a fresh element to an existing process might have been done, I’ve seen firms trade out a fresh tool or system that was installed with great fanfare only a few months earlier.
The deeper the zone of diminishing returns, the more investment is required to make the necessary changes to get on the orange curve. The best possible point to take action is now.
By deciding to start on the second journey sooner than later, you build a bridge over those worst moments and get you productively on that second climb.
The second journey begins with a diagnostic and systems view of the group or firm that leads to laser sharp work to find, form and execute actions that accelerate the journey to the second peak. A great way to get started is to ask yourself questions like what historical successes have gotten you to this current moment? What are non customers buying that threatens your core?
If you are on the first journey, Godspeed…I wish you fair winds and following seas. But, if you feel like the harder you pull, the deeper you get, you may be on that purple journey of the stuck ATV.
If you’d like to talk further about what it could look like to get your team on the second track, please reach out to me via email or put an appointment on the books with this link.
