EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP SERIES BLOG #2: COPING WITH CHANGE OR WHO ATE MY LUNCH

We live in a complex world.  Things change quickly.  We’re hungry, yet somebody’s always trying to eat our lunch.

Circumstances require us to adapt and Effective Leaders spend a lot of their day coping with Change and adjusting the direction of their team’s travel accordingly.

They understand the evolving market and the changing needs of customers and stakeholders, all of whom are busy protecting their own lunches.

But often, we spend time on the wrong thing: we’re internally focused, blissfully unaware of the changing world around us.

John Kotter, in  “What Leaders Really Do”, Harvard Business Review, December 2001, tells us Management is coping with Complexity.  Often that Complexity is internal and self imposed by an organization. Some complexity is unavoidable: organized activities require structures and rules.

But teams and organizations create their own miseries of complexity, producing a phenomenon often called “navel gazing”, which is an over-indexing of time spent looking in the mirror.

Effective Leadership by contrast, he writes, is focused on the external world and is about coping with Change, working out what to do about how our clients, competitors and markets are changing..

Some Complexity is necessary. Good governance, effective operations and avoiding reputational risk require a certain amount of enforced procedure.  

But if our leadership eyes are too focused on the internal, we risk missing critical changes in the external environment which can lead to irrelevance and spell our doom.  

Leadership Nugget:  doom and irrelevance are bad outcomes for you and your team.

The disease is obvious but what is the remedy?

Leader, heal thyself.  

Start with understanding how you are allocating your time.  Are you running dawn to dusk, consumed by internal meetings and commitments, unable to spend time focused on would be stealers of lunches?  

Effective Leaders aren’t afraid to challenge assaults on their time:  e.g. does this meeting even need to take place?  If so, do I need to be in it?  If we stopped a particular activity, would anybody notice?

They engage the minimum level of “internal complexity” and devote as much time as possible to understanding and adapting to the changes they see in the external world.

Tactical solutions I often speak of with Clients:

• Calendar Management: block thinking time and keep it sacred: creativity and understanding the external world requires time to think.

• Don’t confuse “busy” with “effective”: consciously minimize time spent on internal complexity and maximize time spent Coping with Change in the external world. Develop the good sense to know when to flex from one to the other.

• Understand where client and shareholder value is created. HINT: it is usually in the external world.

• Complexity is the enemy of innovation and inspiration:  actively work to simplify your team’s operating environment and expect your team to do likewise.

I’d welcome the opportunity to share with you how I can help you and your team reach your next summit on this or any other topic through creation of bespoke training, consulting or individual/team leadership coaching. 

To book a complimentary and no-obligation Exploration Session to discuss your challenges, please click on the link at the top.  I look forward to speaking with you.

Be well,

Brian