Читать книгу The Hidden Edge - Jodie Rogers - Страница 10

Companies of all shapes and sizes have comprehensive and varied strategic plans, a multitude of business objectives across markets and sometimes industries – enough to keep the most efficient and driven executives continuously busy.

But if you were to distil the objectives of most global companies (decent companies with ethics, anyway) into just two areas, they would simply be:

 To drive revenue, profit, and growth

 To look after their people

In times of crises or uncertainty, these goals become even sharper. In times of stability and calm, they are in cohesion with each other. Unfortunately, in times of challenge, they are often in tension, if not in direct conflict, with each other. They become a paradox that leaders need to navigate, a polarity to be managed.

During the years that followed the economic crisis of 2008, when many companies were facing business challenges, and of course during the global pandemic of 2020, leaders expressed deep concern for their teams and guilt about the things they were being asked to deal with.

The pressure to recover revenue or ‘recession-proof’ a business inevitably has a personal impact on the workforce. No matter which way we cut it, we often unconsciously forgo our well-being in the pursuit of revenue. In times of challenge, an urgency and intensity builds up around scenario planning, rewriting strategy, data crunching, and forecasting endlessly in an attempt to predict an unpredictable future.

During the lockdown of 2020, one corporate leader told me, ‘I can't wait to go back to the office so I can work less.’ It was said in jest, but, like all good jokes, relies on some truth to be funny. This didn't come from a lazy person or a procrastinator. In fact, it came from a senior leader who was working around the clock and close to burnout.

I understand it. When Europe started locking down due to COVID-19, I had several conversations with leaders on what they were about to face. Looking after their people while mitigating revenue loss had become the paradoxical challenge at the forefront of their minds. As we continue to face into and plan for an uncertain world, this challenge needs to be managed skilfully and thoughtfully.

In an article by Sheryl Sandberg (COO, Facebook) and Rachel Thomas (Co-Founder, Lean In), published during the height of the first COVID-19 lockdown in May 2020, they said:

Only 40% of employees say their companies have taken steps to increase flexibility since the pandemic began, and fewer than 20% say their employer has rejiggered priorities or narrowed the scope of their work. That's not enough. Leaders and managers should move any deadline that can be moved, take a second look at targets set before the pandemic, rethink the timing of performance reviews, and remove low-priority items from the to-do list. ¹

But the truth is, the deadlines that can't be moved, the targets that can't be adjusted, and the ever-growing to-do lists are part of the stark reality that teams and business will be dealing with for the foreseeable future as we move into a faster-moving future and an increasingly unpredictable world.

So, while as leaders we may not have much control over deadlines and targets, what we DO have control over is how we can help our teams respond to and take on such gargantuan challenges.

And it's not just for times of heightened uncertainty like an economic crisis or a pandemic. The reality is that adaptability is one of the most important skills of the future. Actually, it always has been. As Charles Darwin pointed out, it's not the strongest species that survive but those most adaptable and responsive to change. That includes us humans, too.

Change used to take a long time to fully occur, certainly regarding how humans have lived on Earth. We were hunter-gatherers for several million years. We then moved to an agricultural way of life which lasted 12 000 years. The Industrial Age lasted only 100 years, and now we find ourselves in the Information Age, which has only been underway for a few decades, and several consultancies (including Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group) are already predicting the ‘future of work’, also known as the ‘Augmented Age’, could be upon us in less than 10 years.

The world and its workforce are changing at the fastest rate in history and will continue to do so. We therefore need to prepare our people to be agile in the face of that change. That requires mental flexibility, emotional regulation, self-awareness, and stress management, among a number of other competencies, which just aren't being prioritised enough.

In an increasingly complex and uncertain world, we all need tools to understand and manage our most important asset – our own minds – because it's our minds that act as our brakes and our accelerators. As we face into the new world, we need to consider how we respond to change. Rarely is change actually a problem; the problem is our natural human resistance to it.

We resist it because change breeds uncertainty, uncertainty brings doubt, which leads to hesitation and increases the risk of death – change and uncertainty generally have not been good for survival. Therefore, humans have been programmed to avoid them. But the world is different; we don't have the predators we used to, we can also navigate uncertainty and change more skilfully if we know how to acknowledge and live beside the anxiety and fear they often bring (knowing they most likely won't lead to death).

We need to be fine-tuning our minds to be more mentally agile and prepared for the long game. We need to be strengthening our neural pathways like we train our muscles at the gym. We need to be flexing our resiliency and preparing for the road ahead. We need to be getting our people mentally fit and empowering them to create their futures and that of the businesses and brands they represent. That's what this book sets out to support: empowering you and your people to enhance their own inner capabilities to navigate and flourish within a world of change. Because this is where true competitive advantage lives.