Introduction
During our busy days filled with all different sorts of meetings, problem solving opportunities, project management work, and various appointments with key people, I think leaders routinely forget something quite important, namely that over time every thing changes. Some years this is planned, and other years, it just happens whether we like it or not. But in the end, every thing changes.
Most leaders struggle with this idea. They do not want to accept the basic truth that change happened in the past, it is happening in the present, and it will happen in the future. I believe we struggle and resist change, because if everything changes over time, then there will always be a constant level of uncertainty and unpredictability to the work that we do each day.
Furthermore, most leaders just want some degree of order, control and predictability in their lives at work, and even at home. If every thing changes over time, then on a regular basis, everything is called into question. Even our own identity and self-definition of what it means to be a leader may be challenged if we accept that everything changes over time. Nevertheless, the truth of the matter is that everything does change over time, including ourselves.
William Taylor in his book, Practically Radical: Not-so-crazy ways to transform your company, shake up your industry, and challenge yourself (William Morrow, 2011), writes about the “Five Truths of Corporate Transformation.” First, “Most organizations in most fields suffer from a kind of tunnel vision, which makes it hard to envision a more positive future.” Second, “Most leaders see things the same way everyone else sees them because they look for ideas in the same places everyone else looks for them.” Third, “In troubled organizations rich with tradition and success, history can be a curse - and a blessing…. The challenge is to break from the past without disavowing it.” Fourth, “The job of the change agent is not just to surface high-minded ideas…. It is to summon a sense of urgency inside and outside the organization, and to turn that urgency into action.” Fifth, “In a business environment that never stops changing, change agents can never stop learning.” Each of Taylor’s “Five Truths” is built on the understanding that change has moved from being an event to an ongoing process, i.e. it is constant, dynamic, and continual.
Over the course of my 36+ year career, I have witnessed these five truths, and I have witnessed the rise of many trends within the world of organizational change. I was there when Total Quality Management (TQM) became a big thing. This was a management system for a customer-focused organization that involved all employees in a continual process of detecting, reducing, or eliminating errors in manufacturing, and then in all other types of organizations. Healthcare adopted TQM and then called it Continual Quality Improvement (CQI). This was a strategic and then operational choice to implement a defined process which was focused on activities that are responsive to community needs and improving population health. The next big thing after various forms of continual improvement was a focus on organizational efficiency, i.e. the ability to achieve an end goal with little to no waste of effort or energy. Here, participants focused on how effectively a company generated products and services related to the amount of time and money needed to produce them. In particular, leaders focused on how to help employees complete the right tasks correctly without wasting time and effort. Each of these trends had a major impact on how people worked and how companies operated. Now, as we emerge from three years of living and working within a global pandemic, the new trend is a focus on resiliency.
Resiliency Is The New Efficiency
In its most simplest form, resilience is the process and the outcome of successful adaptation to difficult or challenging experiences. Resilience reduces the impact of a crises by helping companies to prepare for, and cushion against shocks related to a crisis. This work is accomplished successfully by creating a more flexible workforce, succession planning, and disaster recovery efforts. Furthermore, when leaders trust and empower people to do their jobs, communicate clearly, and give employees the tools they need to do their job well, then people and the company as a whole is more resilient. In short, the goal is to build resilience and adaptability into the very fabric and culture of the company.
The choice to focus on resilience at this time period is based on two important points. First, there is an understanding that unpredictability and complexity is not going away. Second, there is an understanding that efficiency focuses on systems, and systems make everyone do things the same way each time. “The problem with systems is that they depersonalize and standardize everything,” write Karl Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe in their book, Managing The Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty (John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2007). “And people do not, on one level, like to be standardized.” As the authors note “each person is unique” and “no system is perfect.” Thus, they explain that “The essence of resilience is therefore the intrinsic ability of an organization (or system) to maintain or regain a dynamically stable state, which allows it to continue operations after a major mishap and/or in the presence of a continuous stress [think the global pandemic]…. The hallmark of a resilient organization is not that it is error-free but that errors don’t disable it…. Resilience is a combination of keeping errors small and of improving workarounds that allow the system to keep functioning.”
This strategic choice to focus on resilience more than efficiency reflects a high degree of clarity and understanding about how unprepared we were for what happened in March of 2021 when the world shut down due to the rise of COVID-19. Not a single leader I know wants to go through that experience one more time. Thus, they are now laser focused on being resilient given the constantly changing world we live in at this time period.
The Evolution of Psychological Safety
When understanding this need for operational resilience, many leaders must also come to understand the importance of psychological safety. This term became more widely used after the publication of an article called “The Competitive Imperative of Learning” by Amy C. Edmondson in the July-August 2008 of the Harvard Business Review. Here, the author explored two different paradigms of working, namely “execution-as-efficiency” vs “execution-as-learning.” As she explained “ ... flawless execution cannot guarantee enduring success in a knowledge economy….A focus on getting things done, and done right, crowds out the experimentation and reflection vital to success.” Furthermore, she notes that “the managerial mind-set that enables efficient execution inhibits employee’s ability to learn and innovate.”
One element of the execution-as-learning paradigm is the realization that “fear cripples the learning process… it inhibits experimentation, lowers awareness of options, and discourage people from sharing and analyzing insights, questions and problems.” Thus, Edmondson notes the importance of creating psychological safety in order to increase “collaboration and learning in the service of high-performance outcomes.”
Psychological safety, in basic terms, is defined as an environment that encourages, recognizes and rewards individuals for their contributions and ideas and for making other people feel safe when taking interpersonal risks. In this kind of environment, employees feel safe to be included, safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge status quo. In essence, there is the absence of interpersonal fear.
During the initial emergency response phase to the global pandemic and then the resulting adaptive phase, people in leadership positions needed to meet the pressing day to day challenges of keeping the business up and running during the lockdown. At the same time, they began the long term work of adapting what and how things were to get done in order to thrive in the coming years. Therefore, they needed to confront legacy practices and eliminate the ones that were getting in the way of operating under extremely stressful times while also maintaining what was central to the organization’s identity and capacity to move forward strategically.
From my vantage point as an executive coach and consultant during these very difficult times, these dual goals of adaptive leadership, namely tackling immediate operational challenges and building strategic adaptability, required leaders to evolve from focusing solely on psychological safety to embracing psychological resilience, i.e. the ability to mentally cope with and/or adapt to continual uncertainty, challenges, and adversity. In particular, those leaders, whom I witnessed, who were most successful during the global pandemic, learned how to accept and even anticipate change. This unique capacity was interconnected with their physical, mental, emotional, and social resilience, too.
With this evolution from a focus on psychological safety to a focus on psychological resilience, built on a foundation of a psychological safe work environment, I am reminded of two quotes by Jim Collin and Morten T. Hansen in their book, Great By Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck - Why Some Thrive Despite Them All (HarperCollins, 2011). First, as they wrote, “The ability to deal with a crisis situation is largely dependent on the structures that have been developed before chaos arrives.” Building on this notion, they continued, “... it’s what you do before the storm comes that most determines how well you’ll do when the storm comes. Those who fail to plan and prepare for instability, disruption, and chaos in advance tend to suffer more when their environments shift from stability to turbulence.” For me as an executive coach, the critical point in both of these quotes is that leaders need to build the mindset and skill set of being psychologically resilient before uncertainty happens rather than trying to do it during uncertain times.
FYI: To be continued on Monday, October 2.
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