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Don’t panic, its time to be calm and reflect

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It appears to be a very challenging time for the world right now, especially considering the coronavirus and the uncertainty ahead.  It has become clear that the coronavirus is worse than seasonal flu. Seasonal flu has a mortality rate of 0.1% and coronavirus mortality is varied depending on age, location and density of infected people.   So far, the mortality rate is anywhere between 1% to 2%.  The big difference is that seasonal flu is well researched and understood. 

 

Coronavirus is not yet understood and appears to act differently in different situations.   This uncertainty is a real challenge for our human brains and could perhaps account for the “frenzy” of varied news and views floating around.  The current preparation that we hear about through the media, appears to be aimed at a virus with a much greater impact than what the statistics suggest.

I have been through several crisis events is my lifetime, ranging from various stock market crashes, virus threats and violent uprisings. On reflection, I can see that none of these events were as bad as what we thought they would be.  So, what are the lessons here for us as individuals and as leaders of business?

 

  1. Our emotional system housed in our primitive brain are hard wired for us to experience negative events stronger than positive events. When we become emotional our almost rational brains further shut down and make flawed assumptions.    This process can send us on a downward out of control spiral.   This is a good time to stop, breath, reflect and examine the facts.   Organisational leaders have a key role to keep everyone aligned around a common purpose, communicating clearly to help clarify assumptions.   Tough times dealt with correctly can lead to new opportunities and growth, see them as such.
  2. Understand that the messages given to us, aren’t necessarily how we should hear them. Every one of our stakeholders packages the message differently.  As an example, anxiety sells news, so expect to hear the worst views in the news.   Political leaders need to show they have every base covered, because if they miss one situation, this mistake could easily lead to their exit.
  3. Organisations should not freeze or stop their future planning in tough times but rather see the opportunities and take time to prepare for the upswing. Many great paradigm shifts and new innovations have happened in tough times.   In the current situation, many conferences have been cancelled and many supply lines have been paused.   Experiment with new options, such as online conferencing/ webinars or look for equivalent or local supplies.   It’s a good time to discover new ways of doing things.

Use uncertain times such as these to learn resilience skills, exercise, reflect and inspire your teams with hope.  Stay calm and keep going back to the truth, the facts and numbers.   Remember, this too shall pass.

 

 

Read more about managing through anxiety: https://evolveconsult.uk/leadership-development/better-leadership-through-anxiety-management/

 

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Enable Organisations with Hope and Optimism

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It’s very important for all of us to step into every day with a note of optimism and hope.  When we are filled with positive energy, we better engage and bring our full selves into all that we do.   Successful organisations are made up of highly engaged staff, hence there is clearly a role for organisational leaders to invigorate people with hope.

So how can you step into the future and help your organisation to “light up” and be better equipped to create its own successful future? It is important to consider that according to the Gallup Consortium’s 2017 workplace report, only 8% of all staff in the UK are fully engaged.  These numbers are far worse than the world average, but also show that we have a huge opportunity to create workplaces that get more people onboard and perform much better.

According to Gallup’s statistics, three things enable engaged people: feeling respected, a sense of personal development and positive relationships.  These three areas have everything to do with the organisations culture, the style of leadership used, the way strategy is created and executed, performance management and people development to name a few.

 

1.       Strategy

Consider that strategy consists of long-term positioning and short-term actions, and that the right execution is core to any successful strategy.  Generally, higher-level managers of organisations should be responsible for the longer-term goals and these should cascade down to every level and staff member and to each action taken day to day.   The general rule is that if you want someone to own their work and fully engage, then include them in some way in the determination of the strategy that they must execute.  Methods that can greatly assist, is to create an organisational purpose, along with a vision and values.   A purpose is of a higher order than a vision and should clearly and emotively spell out why the business exists.  This purpose should then be cascaded down to every division, department and function. Look at the following article and videos for further details:

a) Building an Organization that is Fit to Execute Strategy: https://evolveconsult.uk/strategy/building-an-organisation-that-is-fit-to-execution/

 

b) Start with Why, Simon Sinek: https://youtu.be/IPYeCltXpxw

c) Southwest Airlines, Our Purpose and Vision: https://youtu.be/eGxMf88I5g4

 

2.       Style of Leadership and Culture

I like to think of culture as the road to success.   Without a road, you cannot drive anywhere.    Organisational culture simply put is “the way we do things around here”.  Many things influence the culture:  present and past leadership, the places staff come from, positive and negative organisational events, process and practices, the competitive landscape and many more.  Think about the positive and negative ways people behave within your organisation.   Do you experience the same behaviours regularly, write them down?  This is your culture, and one must ask if this culture will help your organisation to thrive in the long-term or not?  One of the roles of senior leadership is to help define, set and ensure that the organisation has the desired culture.

In the hierarchical and authority centric world, that almost lies behind us, management would mostly use a parent-child style of leadership. They would then wonder why staff are disengaged and do not take accountability (acting like children).   This world demands an adult-adult style of leadership, which means interacting with all staff equally as adults irrespective of their level. As per Gallup’s survey quoted above, people must be treated in a way that makes them feel respected, this is as adults, not children.

 

3.       Cascaded Goals

Once a business has decided on its critical success factors through its strategic process, it ideally then defines its strategic objectives.   The objectives are worded as an end state such as “grow revenue by 10% in market 1 and 2” or “reduce operational costs by 10% in real terms”.   Both these strategic objectives will require a plan of actions (a strategy) to achieve these end states.   In both cases, these plans would cascade to every department and every person in some way.   This link is key. Motivation levels will be high, if each person has bought into the Purpose, Vision and Strategy and has a clear view of how their work relates to the bigger picture.  People are motivated by meaning, achievement and purpose. See the following article for more strategy insights:

Building an Organisation that is Fit to Execute Strategy, Paul de Beer:

https://evolveconsult.uk/strategy/building-an-organisation-that-is-fit-to-execution/

 

4.       Performance Management

The entire field of performance management is still disputed in many areas.   What is understood is that people work for meaning and want fairness and transparency.   One of the key failures of performance management in many organisations is that it is not consistent and fair. Ratings are often biased to ensure most people fall into the centre of the bell curve, and therefore achieve an average performance rating. (to ensure average increases and bonuses where linked to performance)

The ideal performance management system should be linked to the individual and team cascaded goals as described above, as well as link to the desired cultural behavioural drivers. There should be clear differentiation between good and poor performance.   If the person is a people manager, then it is key to performance manage their role as a manager.   Make sure to develop all your managers on how to conduct meaningful performance conversations.

 

5.       Customer Centricity

Customer centricity as the name implies, means putting the customers’ needs in the centre of all you do.  This requires an organisation to be good at the transactional drivers (technology, processes, product, quality, efficiency etc.) as well as the transformational drivers (long-term thinking, EQ, engagement, listening, staff development etc.).  The prerequisite for your staff to powerfully engage with your customers is for them to be fully engaged within your organisation.  Ideally in the long run, all organisations should develop their cultures to fully support customer centricity.

 

Here is a short article with a few additional perspectives: LEADERSHIP WISDOMS FROM EXPERIENCED CEO’S: https://evolveconsult.uk/leadership/leadership-wisdoms-from-experienced-ceos/

 

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Do you really believe in collaboration?

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Collaboration is about coming together with others and creating an output much bigger than the sum of the parts, typically a 1 + 1 = 3 scenario.  True collaboration therefore requires an abundance mindset, a view that there are enough resources and successes to share with others. The alternative is a scarcity mindset, which is founded on the idea that, if someone else wins or is successful in a situation, that means you lose. This does not consider the possibility of all parties winning (in some way or another) in a given situation.


Abundance is synonymous with the field of positive psychology, initially founded by Martin Seligman. Seligman and many subsequent researchers have empirically shown how marriages, teams and organisations flourish when an abundant and positive deviant mindset is present. Each of us can develop an abundant mindset, but this requires self-awareness, self-reflection and self-inquiry . Once the mindset is present, it can lead to feelings of empowerment, well-being, energy and appreciation for the good things that surround us.


Many of the modern businesses that are flourishing today, have achieved success through an abundance attitude. Think of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, would they have achieved the successes they did, with a scarcity approach?

Now think about your mindset and that of your organisation?  Are these mindsets enabling the success of self and others?  What must change if not the case?


The mindsets of the top management in an organisation have a way of influencing the tone of the organisational culture, and hence the mindset of the organisation.  When organisations work on their strategies, there are two lenses they can use.  A Red Ocean strategy and a Blue Ocean strategy or possibly both. Many of the new highly successful entrants into the market today, tend to have followed a Blue Ocean strategy. These companies would include Uber, Amazon, South West Airlines to name a few.   In the context of this article, consider which of the two mentalities are needed to develop a Blue Ocean strategy? What does your organisation require?


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Leadership Wisdoms from Experienced CEO’s

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A while back in 2008, I was privileged to facilitate a number of discussions at the annual CEO Summit, a key event hosted and arranged by Dictum Publishing.

 

Each year a number of senior leaders are invited and given various pertinent topics to discuss and reflect on.  One of the topics had leaders reflecting on the barrage of paradoxes and contradictions that they face daily in this ever increasingly complicated world. I will use certain of the discussions to form the basis for this article.

 

The long versus the short

Businesses continually find themselves being pressured for short-term results yet many of the factors that influence these results require a longer term focus. The lower levels of every organisation are closest to the customers and the products and therefore have a key influence on profits. Factors that enable people, often seen as “soft factors” such as the organisational culture, communication, leadership styles, involvement, communication, change management, trust, congruence and vision therefore have a profound impact on profit. Considering the radical changes around us that we need to cope with daily, such as record high inflation rates, increasing world debt, global sustainability, unrest, increasing population rates, increasing poverty, government uncertainty etc, it can be very challenging to keep one’s eye on the long-term game while delivering in the short-term. We need to still minimise risk while encouraging entrepreneurship, deliver to strict timelines while maintaining a work-life balance, and look after and care for people while remaining lean and often right sizing. These are just a few of our challenges.

 

Talent

South Africa is currently experiencing a huge talent shortage, figures published show that the IT sector alone is short some 70 000 individuals at the moment.  Businesses now more than ever, need to look at how they retain, treat and develop talent. On the retention side, it is said that employees leave organisations for bad managers and that the organisational culture reflects the personality of the top leadership. This shows the need for a value system within the organisation that is lived at all levels, a system where people feel they are treated with dignity, respect and transparency. Leadership needs to be unleashed at all levels; people need to feel they are the Managing Directors of their positions. This is easier said than done, as top leadership sets the tone of the business and needs to model the values and behaviours that the business wishes to aspire to.

 

This is not always so easy, considering increasing daily pressures and challenges. South Africa’s talent shortage is related to our rapid growth as well as to many of the practices that suppressed people under the apartheid regime. As businesses we need to think differently to reduce our talent shortages. We cannot abdicate the responsibility to government to solve our talent crisis, the problem is just too large. Businesses need to also take up responsibility and leadership in this area. Businesses need to consider ways to employ people with the right aptitudes and attitudes and then through learnerships and other practices help skill up these people, which is a big commitment from the organisational side. What if these newly skilled people then find a better job? We need to think abundantly, if some of these people do indeed leave, then aren’t you helping the country to solve both skills and employment issues? If every company did this we would have come a long way towards solving many of our unemployment challenges.

 

Broadening scope of senior leadership

The scope of the role facing senior leadership seems to be broadening, organisations are increasingly being affected by national and even global issues such as environmental sustainability, poverty and unemployment, political stability, national talent shortages and energy issues to name a few. Today more than ever, organisational leadership is required to step beyond the traditional limits of their organisations and start dialogue with other organisations, industry bodies and government to help develop solutions to these challenges together.

At the same time, constant crisis and talent shortages pull senior leadership down to doing shorter term technical tasks, compressing the staff at lower levels and often creating vacuums of longer term work that is often being neglected, therefore increasing risk to the organisation.

 

Key skills for leadership today

The team I facilitated at the CEO Summit then came up with a number of skills, behaviours and attributes that they felt were vital to successfully managing an organisation today:

  1. Leaders must be able to master the ability to reflect as well as introspect even in times of crisis.
  2. The ability to tap into the views and perspectives of people that you trust.
  3. You need to always consult and reflect before making decisions, but then you need to make the right call. You need to have the ability to make the right call without being influenced by your personal ego.
  4. You need to find ways that work for you to consistently apply values. You need to think through the big picture on the backdrop of well defined morals and values.
  5. You need to develop a statesperson approach to building networks and creating conversations across industries and sectors, don’t wait for others, you must lead the way.

Being a leader of organisations and people is indeed a complex task, which in itself is a challenge that we face today. We know that leaders are not born but made, yet most of the attributes and skills of a good leader can only be learnt over time through experience and trial and error. Companies today need to pay urgent attention to creating opportunities for people to learn how to lead themselves and others.,

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Leading without blinkers, imagine the power

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Recently I consulted to a particular executive team regarding their company structure. Working with the team early one morning, I started by having them imagine their business in a few years time having achieved a high level of success. They then worked in two groups to draw up what the describing attributes would be in that scenario. Next I had the team draw up the attributes considering the worst case scenario, that of the business having failed. At this point they started looking rather concerned, and commented that many of the negative scenario attributes existed in the present.

These new perspectives appeared somewhat of a surprise to them, yet all I did as their facilitator was enable them to share information they already individually knew. Clearly the team for some reason had not until that moment been able to share their views and perspectives adequately. The ability for a team to share and consider every perspective is paramount to creating high performance teams, a prerequisite to building sustainable high performance organisations.

This type of situation is not uncommon. Considering the fact that the overall tone, culture and direction of the organisation is set and modelled from the top, team performance can make or break organisations. Companies that were average performers managed to flourish in the simpler word that lies behind us. The highly competitive world that faces us today will increasingly only tolerate top performance. Today increasingly higher demands are placed on senior leadership to develop highly performing companies. Our cognitive blinkers In order to understand what leaders can do to better enable companies through their collective leadership, it may be useful to look at some of the potential blind spots we have as individuals, after all a team is simply made up of individuals. Dr Gregory Berns, neuroscientist and author of “Iconoclast”, describes that the human brain is limited by an energy constraint of about 40 watts of power (a light bulb). In order to save energy the brain will use information stored from past experiences rather than figure out new options by re-evaluating all the new information. This small flaw in our system will often result in us feeling that our perceptions are real. The truth however is that our perspectives are just our perceptions. Dr Berns goes on to say that the solution to limit the effects of our past experiences on our perceptions is by regularly bombarding our brains with information it has never encountered before. This information bombarding process will force the brain to think outside of our normal pathways. Inferring from Dr Berns’ findings, one could go on to say that as leaders we need to always be open to hear different views however tough and despite sometimes feeling that we know better.

The field of cognitive science describes a number of cognitive biases that result in humans making judgement deviations from “reality”. These biases may well be related to the brains energy constraints. Below is a list of a few of the most common biases:

  • Bandwagon effect — the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.
  • Choice-supportive bias — the tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
  • Illusion of control — the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly cannot.
  • Confirmation bias — the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
  • Status quo bias — the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.

Full list found at www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

Rank and power blinkers

Another dynamic that can have a severe impact on people, teams and the organisation is the effects of rank and the related use of power. In the world that lies behind us, it was more acceptable for management to lead using their positional power as a motivator for example by saying: “I am the boss now do what I tell you”. Today this old world style would be considered coercive leadership and could result in people becoming fearful and angry and disengaging from the organisation. Organisations where coercive leadership is the norm tend to develop cultures of dependence, where people hold back their personal power and abdicate thinking and leadership to higher levels. These organisations become slow and struggle to reinvent themselves. In such cases, senior leaders are forced to get too involved in operational thinking to the detriment of long term planning and organisational integration.

Today senior leaders need to work very hard to soften the effects of the positional rank they have inherited within their organisations. They have to demonstrate to others that they are open to receive all forms of feedback by not becoming defensive when the feedback arrives.

They need to search out views and perspectives widely, even though they may think they already have all the information.

Flattening the organisation

High performance organisations require leadership to be distributed throughout the organisation. In order to foster a culture of agility and adaption which is key to competitiveness, all the resources need to be engaged resulting in staff feeling as if they own the business. The traditional hierarchy created a vertical flow of power within the organisation, resulting in silos and counterproductive leader-follower dynamics.

The challenge is to create an organisational structure and culture where the power flows horizontally, where staff interacts directly with others outside of their “team” in the business to find solutions, rather they using the vertical hierarchy as a long distance telephone. In order to achieve this requires a departure from certain traditional views. As an example, if we ask members of an executive team who their team is, the CFO, CTO, CMO etc will traditionally answer finance, technology, or marketing respectively. Considering this view, the danger would be that these executives are so focused on their function that they are not spending adequate focus on the objectives of the greater organisation. The chief executive most certainly cannot be the only person with the greater hilltop view. This same paradigm shift should be applied throughout the organisation resulting in everyone broadening their view of the organisation and their function. Heads of marketing should not just understand their individual components of marketing but should also understand and influence all of marketing within the organisation.

Today’s winning leadership toolkit

In order to lead organisations to success in this world requires leaders with a set of skills that often seem absent from our toolkits. Few of the skills required today were used by previous generation’s leaders, nor were these skills taught to us in our homes, schools or universities.

Leaders today need to:

  • Learn to feel comfortable not knowing all the answers.
  • Master the art of having courageous and sometimes tough conversations with others.
  • Invite and receiving feedback without defensiveness.
  • Value opposing, dissenting and unfamiliar views and voices.
  • Suspend personal anxiety and judgement.
  • Learn to be the manager as facilitator and coach.
  • Master listening skills.
  • Create reflective sanctuaries in order to reflect on events and perspectives.
  • Understand and use personal power and rank effectively.

The challenge is that many seasoned leaders may have attained great success withoutmastering these skills in the old world, but success will demand them in the future. These skills are often labelled as soft skills however when a person tries to learn them, you quickly discover just how hard it is to break old habits and master these skills as well as the powerful impact their use has on others.

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Time to talk

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When times become tougher for businesses, either due to economic recession or other industry related challenges, senior leadership often fall into the trap of instituting radical knee jerk remedies but often neglect to create a place and time for others within the organisation to align with the need to change as well as to raise differing perspectives that could hold opportunity.

However frightening the financial results and projections may be, the cold truth is that the very people who know the answers to operating more efficiently, are those that are closer to the customers and products, and are the people lower down in the organisation.

 

This new world of work that we find ourselves in, has lead to a highly competitive landscape where quality, service, innovation and differentiation are key to enter the market, but not always remain there. The complexity of business today means that we need to have all the resources aligned, and leadership leveraged at all levels within the organisation.

In any organisation with numerous employees, there is a natural differentiation of roles and responsibilities. Those individuals at the lowest levels are more narrowly focussed and tend to be closer to the product and/or service offered by the company. As we move towards the top tier of leadership, we move further away from product detail but we have a broader view of the organisation, deal with longer term milestones and more abstract concepts.

 

The higher the level the leadership roles become, the more important the need to work to align key internal and external stakeholders and to constantly understand the changing competitive landscape in the future in order to lead the organisation to make subtle directional changes in the present. In order to become an agile or learning organisation, all the resources in the organisation needs to understand the greater vision and own the components of it that they can contribute towards. All the resources in the organisation need to be aligned with each other and be fully engaged and be able to execute their leadership influences both up and down within the organisation. 

 

Untapped opportunities that lie within organisations can be leveraged by individuals and teams who can learn to enter dialogue to be able to raise dissenting and paradoxical views, the very perspectives that hold the key to innovation and competitive practices. Great disconnects in understanding often exist between levels in the organisation, lower levels may not agree with the level above or know certain information that higher levels may require. Lower levels often deem it unsafe to exercise influence higher up in the organisation and therefore hold back their contributions. From my experience working with numerous senior management teams, I am often surprised to find out just how little conversation is had between team members and differing levels within the organisation. 

 

On numerous occasions I have witnessed highly experienced and highly skilled individuals become almost paralysed and the very thought of having to influence others in more senior roles in their organisations. I am left with the thought that great competitive advantage exists for organisations that can somehow create a place where people can simply talk to each other despite their position, perceived rank or any other reason that may block simple discussion.

 

Leaders often dismiss the skills of listening, dialogue and coaching as simply soft skills without realising the powerful impact they may have on the organisation. One of the reasons for this is that many of these so called soft skills can take a very long time to master and cannot simply be learned cognitively or by reading the text book. They need to be practiced and learned experientially and over a relatively long period with much trial and error. Leaders must be prepared to acknowledge their incompetence in this regard in order to start learning, a startling challenge for some, but confirming that humility is indeed a very powerful leadership trait.

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