Fasten Your Seatbelts
In the 1950s classic film All About Eve, Bette Davis speaks one of the great movie lines of all time: “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
There is quite a bit of bumpiness in the world right now. As Korn Ferry’s Gary Burnison shared in his recent newsletter, “90 percent of leadership is ambiguous. Everywhere we look, there’s ambiguity and all its synonyms: uncertainty, obscurity, vagueness, doubt, puzzle, and enigma.” Bumpiness, indeed.
The unease from that bumpiness is showing up across the board in jam sessions with the leaders I work with, including how to address the bumpiness with their teams. I recently helped a leader structure an all hands meeting for her team to address the uncertainty. Here are the four key elements I suggested she include in the agenda. I hope they’re helpful for you, too:
1. Acknowledge the reality
We're in the middle, between what was and a future state that no one — and I mean no one — knows. We search for certainty in the middle, but middles are always messy, and certainty is difficult to find. Accepting this will make it easier for you and your team to adopt a go-forward attitude and focus on the right actions to take now.
2. Commit to communicate
It’s easy to get distracted by the bumpiness and forget a basic tenant of leadership: taking people on the journey with you. In the absence of information people create stories – and they are never helpful stories. Commit to your team that you will keep them informed as best as you can, and create your plan to make that a reality.
3. Stay close to customers
Be ruthless where you focus your time, and focus it on what matters: customers. Earlier in my career I joined a company that shortly before my first day on the job reported a big revenue and earnings miss. The stock tanked. Leaders departed. A strategic review was launched, and anxiety increased. My response? I did everything I could to help our sales teams work with customers to close deals. Revenue, it turns out, solves a lot of problems. Plus, I loved learning about the problems our customers were trying to solve. There's nothing more valuable.
4. Let’s learn and grow together
"How can I learn and grow?" is my go-to attitude for tough situations. If I can learn and grow from a challenge or setback I can help others learn and grow, too. I suggested my client tell her team, "Watch me and the rest of the leadership team. We're going to do some things wrong, but I hope we do a lot of things right. Use all of it as a reference point for when you're leading a team one day."
One More Thing
Remember to practice pausing and pulling up to create space, because in that space comes much needed perspective. Turns out Gary Burnison is also a big fan of hitting the pause button:
“Pausing does not mean stopping. Rather, it’s like shifting into neutral, just for a moment. It’s all about creating a space for ourselves—physically, mentally, emotionally—in which to remember and respect, reframe and refresh.”
PS: Last week my colleague Ron Garfield and I introduced “Shake S**t Up on LinkedIn. We put together a short (but mighty) series designed to stir your internal pot, challenge your status quote, and Shake S**t Up with bite-sized, digestible tips, a little humor, and our signature coaching flair.
Here are three ways to watch the first three episodes: