Not too long ago, before COVID-19 took off, we met for lunch. When he sat down, he just looked exhausted. He was a good and experienced leader, but he was way past his edges.
He started our visit by saying, “I don’t even know where to begin. I can barely keep up with the pace and all the messiness around this change we are going through.”
The company was going through a major restructuring to meet new market expectations. This included many old and new people moving into new jobs plus lots of systems being changed. Along with all of the positional changes, this particular leader was working with new teams and new expectations, more complicated metrics, more diverse primary and secondary customers, plus more unknowns than knowns overall.
As we visited, he realized that he and his teams were going to have to expect more “surprises” and uncertainty. They were at the beginning of the change cycle rather than at the end.
After listening and getting a sense of the big picture, my two initial thoughts were the following. First, as the Irish poet David White has pointed out, “Our language is not large enough for the territory in we have entered.” We are struggling to find the words to describe what is happening within and outside ourselves, our organizations and our teams. Some of the old words just don’t capture what is happening without significant “unpacking” or sharing.
Second, John Paul Lederach wrote in his book, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005): “Centuries ago the apostle Paul described our world as a community wracked with unrelenting pain. “The whole creation grows,” he wrote, “with labor pains until now.” (Romans 8:22) The metaphor suggests that humanity lives in a time of great pain and great potential. Birth is simultaneously pain and potential, the arriving of that which could be but is not yet. I believe the human community still groans with pain today. We seek a birth of something new, a creation that can break us out of the expected. We seek the creative act of the unexpected.” The challenge of this “creative act of the unexpected” is that it can be overwhelming, draining and lonely when one is the leader.
When I step back and look at the big picture across multiple companies and multiple industries, I notice the rise of some interesting trends. First, a lot of re-planning is happening right now. Many leaders feel that their organizations are in a period of crisis and they desperately do not want this to damage them permanently.
Furthermore, many leaders are struggling with disjointed incrementalism, i.e. they know where they want to go, but are not sure exactly how to get there. The result is that they are perplexed but not confused. They worry about the uncertainties and difficulties of this time period, but they are not confused about what is most important.
Next, many leaders are worried about a long term growth stall-out, i.e. a continued drop in revenue, growth or both that could happen over an extended period of time. They understand that the growth engine that powered the company to success has stopped working right now, but are unsure if it is no longer viable in the long term. They are also recognize that the real problem could be that the business environment is too complex and that bureaucracy is slowing everything down.
The outcome of the above is that many leaders are guiding their companies through a planning and action process which results in preventing problems before they become bigger problems, especially the problems that could define the future in a permanent manner. To a degree, everyone and everything feels like we are in state of permanent crisis.
With this in mind, we need to remember that leaders working through a crisis understand that a crisis has two distinct phases. The first is that emergency phase, where your task as a leader is to stabilize the situation and buy time for the team and the company. The second phase is the adaptive phase. Here, you tackle the underlying causes of the crisis and build capacity to thrive in a new reality. The adaptive phases is especially tricky, notes Ron Heifetz, Alexander Glasgow, and Marty Linsky in their article called “Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis” (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2009), because “people put enormous pressure on you as the leader to respond to their anxieties with authoritative certainty, even if doing so means overselling what you know and discounting what you don’t.”
The above authors remind us that leaders “face two competing demands. They must execute in order to meet today’s challenges. And they must adapt what and how things get done in order to thrive in tomorrow’s world.” As they continue, “You need to confront loyalty to legacy practices and understand that your desire to change them makes you a target of attack…. As you consider eliminating practices that seem ill suited to a changing environment, you must distinguish the essential from the expendable…. What is so precious and central to an organization’s identity and capacity that it must be preserved?” In short, the authors explain that “… the dual goal of adaptive leadership: tackling the current challenge and building adaptability.”
Our challenge as leaders is that when we grasp this perspective, we have a problem which few talk about but many know. As Jim Mattis and Bing West write in their excellent book, Call Sign Chaos: Learning To Lead (Random House, 2019): “Business management books often stress centralized planning and decentralized execution. That is too top-down for my taste. I believe in a centralized vision, coupled with decentralized planning and execution.” To have the capacity to create a centralized vision and then live with decentralized planning and execution is not easy for most leaders. It goes against so much of what they have learned and experienced.
So, given all of the above, I have a question for all of you this week: Where do you get your good and/or new ideas from as you plan for the future? From my experience, I see the best leaders generate them after visiting with a wide network of diverse people and diverse resources. This week I encourage you to seek out a broader network of people and to engage in good in-depth exploration and sharing. It will help you see the bigger picture, generate a centralized vision and over time give you the capacity to work with decentralized planning and execution.
P.S. If you are hungry for some fresh perspective and interesting new ways of thinking, I encourage you to consider reading the following short, but good book: Kleon, Austin. Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative, Workman Publishing, 2012. It will get you thinking.
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