It’s a very vulnerable and unique time.
In my discussions with leaders of more than 50 firms, I’ve been hearing over and over again that beyond the near term triage lies a very unsettled time. There is a tenuous drive to get back to “business as usual,” and an unspoken agreement that there is no such thing. The news continues to offer no consensus, and we are being warned daily that we might have to be in this phase of limbo for months to come.
For leaders in larger more complex firms, situational leadership has never been more important. Think of a trampoline with half a dozen children on it, jumping at random times. Some will catch a wave and go high, some will have the energy sucked right out from under them. This is how it feels in a firm that is struggling to regain cadence and alignment.
The “Secret” is to find an organizing rhythm and a way to get your team engaging in a way that synchronizes their thinking, effort, and execution to create momentum.
Leaders are surprised that some of their most conscientious team members are suddenly some of the most unsettled (and sometimes angry) members of their teams. Believe me, if as a leader you are seeing your direct reports unsettled – it only gets more dramatic deeper in your firm. The deep work now is to find those red hot insights and opinions and build on them by listening to what is said and forming a picture of what is unspoken. Much like the tip of the iceberg, what is really going on below the surface? When you can paint a picture of what someone is communicating to you that allows them to take a deep breath and relax, you’ve captured insight that can lead you forward.
Unsettled teams and team members consume time, money, and precious resources in friction, re-debating previously agreed on decisions and doing their own local insight gathering and planning. This adds an unseen cost of doing business to our businesses and limits our ability to bring the clear outcomes that our clients and customers expect of us at this challenging time.
What You Need
There are two key tasks right now:
- The first is to stretch your mind and those of the leadership team. Stretching your senior leadership team’s outlook and thinking can be done most efficiently by developing what I call “75 percent scenarios.” What is the upside and downside scenario that has a 75 percent chance of occurring? For example, setting politics aside for a moment: as of the writing of this post, it appears that the experts are split on either a second wave that will cause us to return to some type of shutdown or have a robust “swoosh” economic acceleration into 2021.
- The second is to take these pictures and develop a clear op’s plan to your mid-level leaders that are built on the best thinking of your senior team, with an openness for disconfirming information. Getting to your “base case” is up to your team – and note that it’s frequently not the average of the high side and low side. This is where a skilled facilitator can help get you beyond discussing superficial opinions and instead unpack the insights and thinking that each team member brings to the table. There are powerful tools that balance those who may have great insight but may not normally bring it forward with those who typically are verbally dominant. It’s important to have a rich insight base and a “spirited” discussion so that the team is 100% committed to the output.
How to Get There
It’s really important to have the scenario discussions with a small group, in a private setting. You want to be able to talk and think, and honestly, some of the discussion will be pretty raw and unsettling. This is the place to get it all on the table, then sort it into the high and low side pictures referenced above. The reason to have this session facilitated is to avoid:
- Having the Most Senior Executive (MSE) get forced into setting the pace and have everyone fall in behind
- Having the most verbal participant monopolize the air time and logjam collaborative discussion
- Risk having the deepest thinkers step back and simply observe and not add to the discussion
- Risk the meeting becoming a “Lowest Common Denominator” session where the outcome is a milquetoast version of what really is needed
- Stay out of the typical groupthink, like the normalcy bias – (for more see this post for more on biases that can lead you off track)
Once you’ve got the base case worked out, it’s time to bring in the rest of the team and work out the actions that put you in the best possible position. Be super clear that this is our best thinking and not our final thinking.
Many groups stop here – and there is some value captured, but the real heavy lifting is to work out exactly what to do to prepare for your scenario.
The Very Real Cost of Inaction
Let’s talk about the real cost of friction in your firm at this time:
- It consumes leaders’ time
- It saps teams of the creative juice needed to overcome the frequent project “gumption killers” like internal resource constraints, key partners’ lack of engagement and getting peers to execute on key needs
- It keeps your go-to-market teams “selling what’s on the truck” and not listening carefully to how needs have shifted
The Upside of Getting the Moose on the Table
I’ve had the privilege of leading senior teams through a number of these scenarios and prioritization efforts, and there are several patterns that show up that makes the investment multiply quickly:
- The scenario is much richer in detail. This richness is due to the fact that those involved in creating it are close to the action. This makes it much more likely that your internal stakeholders, suppliers, and partners will trust you and engage with you – you’ve done the work.
- The team that co-creates the scenario co-creates the solution. This leads to powerful engagement and ownership of the solution path. Contrast this with a “build and sell” approach that is much more common – and has a much lower success rate.
- It does away with those passive-aggressive opinions that go underground during times like this. Unfortunately, there are those who will appear to listen to you in the briefings and then go back and drill holes in the boat when you try to move forward.
Lets Talk
If you have taken the survival actions and now want to build a team solution and would like to move forward significantly, please reach out to me at 847-651-1014 or use this link to put a 20-minute call on the books.
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