Observation
We may be in the same storm,
but we are not all in the same boat!
My friend Kate has spent the last 9 months living in a dingy little flat while her 30 year marriage disintegrates just as her professional career flourishes. She is a researcher, speaker and author. Last month, courtesy of Zoom, she presented to her largest ever global conference but it took two hours rather than the three days it would have previously involved.
During the first lockdown, John helped his employer develop online orders and deliver them to local customers. Hardly Amazon, but it worked. This lockdown, he is on furlough and has been spending time sound proofing his garden shed so that he could happily strum away on his electric guitars. He is anticipating a long and enjoyable retirement (3 years, 122 days away!).
James is working two twelve hour night shifts in a council run nursing home. Two colleagues and nearly a third of the residents have died due to Covid. He works there so that the rest of the week he can follow his passion, which is writing.
Paul’s brother died 7 weeks ago, he was very close to his brother. Since then, due to Covid he has not been able to see his mother or sister and they are still waiting for the funeral. It makes it very hard to grieve.
I have changed the names and jumbled up the experiences but these are all real people. In fact they are some of my closest friends. I have known them for well over 30 years. Our Covid experiences have been very different. As we transition back to a non Covid-dominated world, I suspect leaders will very easily make the mistake of assuming they share a similar experience to their colleagues.
How will you tune in to your direct reports, wider teams and customers? Without some sense of their experience and current mindset it will be very difficult to begin to develop strategies which will engage them.
Current Leadership Challenge
Forget Remote Working, That Is The Least Of Your Challenges!
‘Courage, do not fall back’
Joan of Arc
This week I asked one of my smartest and most proactive contacts how she and her business were preparing for transition to a post Covid-dominated world. She thought for a moment, then shrugged her shoulders and said ‘other than thinking about remote working, we’re not really - we are just surviving this third lockdown.’
While I have great admiration for her capability and empathy for what she, and many other leaders, have been through in the past 12 months, I think she is at risk of sleepwalking into a tsunami of change for which she is ill prepared. In my view we kid ourselves if we think that Covid driven change is just about Zoom calls and remote working. As a business accelerant pouring petrol on already smouldering seismic changes, this pandemic is possibly without parallel in history and as a result we will see unprecedented disruption, creating opportunities and threats which will impact on us all. As a leader you are about to earn your money (or not!).
Here are the areas which I believe will most require exceptional leadership in the months and years ahead:
Business Strategy
I find it hard to envisage there is any business which will not be significantly impacted by the radical acceleration in: changing customer behaviour, the adoption of ecommerce and the new employee ecosystem and that’s before the impact of: a global recession, investor/capital markets and the aggressive behaviour of competitors who have thrived during the pandemic (or are thrashing about in their last doomed attempts at survival).
How will you better understand your competitive environment and the opportunities & threats it provides so that you can develop and act on a winning business strategy?
Business Model
Access to global talent, new distribution possibilities and an increasing reliance on global technology solutions plus the need for to survive increasingly regular shocks to the system must mean that many business models are up for grabs. New models will need to become more robust and at the same time drive down costs or offer previously unimagined levels of service. In fact I suspect all of this will have to happen for many companies to survive.
How future proof is your business model?
Culture
I am surprised how many senior leaders (and others) have been recruited during the past 12 months. In many ways that is a really good thing, but it’s hard to be inducted remotely and in particular to pick up on the cultural norms of an organisation. If you add to that the emotional stresses and strains that everybody has experienced in the last 12 months, then the culture of many organisations in 2021 will at best need a refresh and I suspect for many, a serious reboot.
Do you understand how your culture has been impacted by the past 12 months, how it needs to develop in the future and how any response you are making post-Covid either enhances or detracts from that vision?
Signature Processes
Your future business strategy, business model and culture will all be heavily influenced by the efficacy of your signature processes (NPD, okr’s, planning, succession planning, budgeting, change, risk & compliance etc). Inevitably these will have been impacted by the last 12 months.
What have you learnt about your signature processes, are they fit for future purpose and what do you need to do to ensure they remain as core of drivers of business performance?
Employee Engagement
As I started this note by observing, we have all experienced Covid differently. Many of us have not seen our colleagues in person for months, some have been working from new and distant locations and as we move forward, I suspect that ‘returning to the office’ will generate a great range of responses depending on individual circumstances, experiences and mental health. To assume our engagement levels will automatically return to pre-Covid levels seems rather optimistic to say the least!
How are your colleagues feeling individually and collectively and what will most enable them to positively engage with the business over the next 6-12 months?
Team
If the business changes are as significant as I believe them to be, then it is likely that leadership teams who were fit for purpose in the past may well be not be for the future. In addition every team I know has been under pressure in the last year and I would guess that many relationships have weakened, resulting in many teams needing fresh blood and almost all teams needing reigniting.
What are you doing to ensure you have a high performing leadership team fit for the future?
Own Role
As many of my clients begin to grapple with these issues they are almost all coming to the conclusion that their own role; their purpose, their priorities, their behaviour, their ways of working and their story telling is central to making progress and therefore they need to invest some serious time in reflecting and acting upon their own agenda.
Are you clear how you will add most value in 2021/2?
Narrative
People are tired, they are being bombarded by many different types of message, they are trying to make sense of what is happening around them and many are probably yearning for ‘a return to normality’. There has possibly never been a greater need for the leader to provide a message which: helps people make sense of their context, gives them hope around the future, allows them to engage with something worthwhile, provides them with clarity of direction and points to the actions required.
Is your leadership narrative relevant to your business strategy and compelling to your customers and colleagues?
Practical Action
Don’t Overthink it, Just Start The Conversation!
‘Never tell me the odds!’
Han Solo
The Empire Strikes Back
In response to the above it would be easy to be overwhelmed or to start ‘boiling the ocean’ by setting up workstreams, change programmes and employing vastly expensive consultants. They may all be relevant at some point in the future, but for the moment this is your job, don’t delegate it!
You will have your own style and way of doing it, but for me the key elements are:
Create the time and space to think.
Decide what are the key questions you need to get your head around – the list above might be a good starting point.
Gather around you a few key people who can contribute to the conversation – in my experience the whole Exec is often too difficult to manage, I like input from the owner/shareholder/boss but that will depend a lot on the circumstances, people with a good market perspective are invaluable as long as they are not blinkered and I’d always have a really smart, energetic person who can do some heavy lifting (data gathering, note capturing, challenge and input etc). Watch you don’t just get a bunch of people smoking the same dope!
Find a way of gathering current market perspective and data – but think broadly as you don’t want to be copying an extinct model. Look to the fringes of your market to see what the future could look like.
Create a rhythm and momentum, so that the conversation can maintain its energy, continually producing better insights which are acted on. However avoid getting to action too soon, exploring possibilities is much more important to start with, the days of translating it into stakeholder engagement, programmes, priorities and budgets will come soon enough
Most of all keep it simple and nimble.
Examples that I am seeing working are:
CEO spending time with his Chair to develop a working model before fleshing it out with four members of the Exec – they think they will have a bold new strategy by May.
CEO/CMO/CFO spending regular time together leading to a new investor story and a probable change in ownership (2022/3). In the meantime the rest of the Exec (with input from this group) are very focused on maintaining the change agenda which was already started pre- Covid.
A Regional Head spending time working up his thoughts, using his Global Head (boss) and coach (me!) as sounding boards. He has committed to sharing with his Exec by ‘the summer’ and in the meantime is driving them hard to deliver on their existing business plan.
A Global Chief People Officer, taking part in the wider discussion about the future of the business and then working up her own views about the people implications and testing it with key individuals she trusts, including senior people in her own team. She then drip feeds it back into the wider conversation.
UK GM using the above as an agenda to help develop and bring together an essentially new leadership team.
My experience is that conversations like this are rarely rocket science and that looking back the outputs often look common sense but without the time and focus no such clarity can be achieved. Of course leadership conversations like this should be going on all the time but in the current context never, in my view, have they been more important.
Execution is equally important but without a vision to start with, any future success is purely luck!
I’d written the above and then yesterday I was with a group of CEO’s who run growth businesses backed by Europe’s leading digital venture builder. What was impressive, and scary for other businesses, was that they had already done much of this work in 2020 and were talking about how they execute in 2021. Your competitors, especially the new and successful ones, will be moving at speed!
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