Thought Patrol Podcast

You maybe the smartest person on the room, but you are not always right. You have one perspective, one set of experiences and one world view. Regardless of how smart and experienced you are, if you’re human, you’re often wrong, or as we like to say, “not quite right”. When we are surrounded by a team, why wouldn’t we unlock that potential and leverage the collective experience in the room?

Steve Jobs may have had an enormous ego as the head of Apple, but he understood his place in the information age when he famously quipped, “It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

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Almost all of us have a set of values for our organisations; we all say our people are our most important asset. Which is a terrible saying. We should indeed manage assets, but we lead people. But it is only under pressure our true organisational values are exposed, as are our personal virtues. If they are true values and virtues they do not change due to circumstances. "Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to our eyes. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and at last some crisis shows what we have become" according to renowned scholar Brooke Foss Westcott.So what will we choose? Will we throw out our values because the pressure is on, or will we stay true to what is important to us and those around us? It’s a pivotal question for me because at its core, is a call that will determine the engagement of our stakeholders, and therefore ultimately the organisation’s sustainability. A crisis is a test of our character as well as our company.VIEW MORE HERE

There’s a need to be action oriented in a crisis. We need to get a lot done in a hurry. But, there is danger in haste, if actions are taken at the expense of due consideration. The team and the organisation will loose out. There is a need for fast efficient decision making protocols, which still allow an appropriate level of input and collaboration. I’m sure we’d all agree its not time to be sitting in circles, holding hands, physically or metaphorically. Yet if we do not operate from a perspective of empathy and care, we will make decisions that may well yield short-term gain, but cause medium term damage.

This happens if we don’t consult and collaborate; we don’t leverage the collective intelligence and experience around us. The result is we alienate those who are there to help. When our teams feel trusted and in on the tactics, they own the actions and implement well. Teddy Roosevelt said it best; “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.”

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How and what you communicate in a crisis will very often determine the success or otherwise of your endeavors. It’s that important.

Building trust quickly is essential. You will need people to respond quickly and effectively if you are to move fast enough to react to the crisis unfolding.VIEW MORE HERE

In the midst of a crisis there is overwhelming pressure, both from within the organisation and from external forces, such as stakeholders and environmental factors.

The key is to generate clarity in uncertainty by holding to a set of agreed priorities. The opportunity to be distracted by the urgent rather than the important is heightened in a crisis. Beware the noise that comes from someone else’s agenda. Ensue the organisation is focused on what is truly important, and absolutely foundational, or it will busy itself in the urgent minutia. Whatever you do, if it’s going to be effective it has to be simple, super simple. This is not a time for complexity it’s a time for simplicity. You need a clarion call to galvanize an organisation to change its behaviour based on a simple set of imperatives.VIEW MORE HERE

In a time of crisis we all reach for those words of wisdom and experience that have echoed down through time. My intellectual giant of choice is Mike Tyson who said, somewhat aptly in my view; “everyone has a plan ‘til they get punched in the face.” Crude yes, but that’s what COVID feels like for most of us.

One thing that has become very apparent to us all is that, control is an illusion and our environment a lot less predictable than we like to think. Great leaders help define reality. In this case it’s the impact of COVID, on our individual team members and collective organisation.

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What is it about bad news? It sells well, travels fast and seems to catch our attention. Our 24-hour news cycle is unfortunately built on it. Despite all the views to the contrary there is nothing wrong with communication in most companies. All and every staff survey will put communication at the top of things to improve, and yet bad news will get around a team at the speed of gossip.

Organisations leak news and despite all the efforts to maintain secrecy, people inevitably know something about what is going on. Many leaders endeavor to cloak everything on a ‘need to know’ basis, as if there is a risk of everyone knowing what’s going on. The trouble with this is, people talk and if there is bad news brewing, they will automatically assume the very worst. So even if you have dire news, let people know, be transparent, go broad in your reach for ideas and input, and trust your team to handle it well.VIEW MORE HERE

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize [winner] in economics, once wrote: "Productivity is not everything, but in the long run, it is almost everything."

Are you frustrated by how long it takes to get things done? Why is that? What would it take to get higher productivity? We do have a major problem with productivity levels of below 1%, despite all our technological advances. Something is fundamentally wrong, not at the fringes but at the core of how we do leadership, business and run organisations.

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People are human, would seem to be self evident; yet do we treat our teams that way? Are they just organic machines? Of course not! Sometimes as leaders we become so fixed on our goals and KPIs we forget we are hiring flesh and blood, flawed, inconsistent and subject to outside influences. They are not unlike you and I.

Occasionally I wake up and don’t want to do today, it’s not my usual good morning God, it’s more like good God it’s morning. We all have families and relationships that aren’t always perfect; or is it just me.

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Do you have people in your organisation who don’t or won’t make decisions? Is there a lack of ideas? It’s almost as if they’re afraid. What you may need is more trust. ‘Trust trumps fear’ all day!

A recent YPO Global Pulse Survey of thousands of CEOs showed that, nearly all (96%) of leaders rate building and maintaining trust with stakeholders a high priority, with nearly half (42%) saying the importance they place on building trust with stakeholders has increased in the past five years.

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