28 Apr Touching yesterday, embracing tomorrow!
The more we prepare today, the less we’ll have to repair tomorrow. ~ John Maxwell
‘Twas a time less than a decade ago, when the start-up ecosystem was just about starting up. When VCs began putting their money behind innovative ideas and potential entrepreneurs. When the objective was to reap the intended return. The only way this could happen was by ensuring that the ideas see the light of the day as fast as possible, the start-ups acquire customers, meet the business objectives and… light-up their boards with radically opposing personality traits in some areas, and complementing ones in others.
These personalities could broadly be classified using the Deloitte Greenhouse Experience group, built around these four basic types. The purveyors of possibilities, energy, imagination and creativity, a.k.a. the ‘Pioneers.’ The custodians of stability, order and rigor… or ‘Guardians’ of the status quo. The ‘Drivers’ of change and accelerators of momentum. The relational connectors and ‘Integrators’ of teams.
Attendees of these board proceedings were privy to an electrifying, high-voltage atmosphere, equivalent to that of a boxing ring… where verbal punches flew quick and fast, and emotional blood trickled slowly onto the parquet floor. Strangely, discussions that emanated therefrom turned out to be super productive, actionable and outcome-oriented… leaving zero room for politics, delays, process limitations, and things of that ilk.
Finally, the single biggest factor contributing to the success of these companies, was the skill of their leaders, who had successfully managed to integrate diverse and even opposing personalities and harness them towards goal-oriented results.
Fast forward to tomorrow. Beyond managing diverse personalities who sit in board meetings, there is an unseen challenge that business leaders will be called to manage, in the form of employees returning to a post-Covid19 world. Spending more time in lock-down, out of virtually distraction-free office environments, has made people less likely to play by the old rules. The longer the situation continues, behavioral psychology predicts they will find it harder to maintain discipline. As time passes, people’s resolutions have already begun to fray, and in part contributed to the rise of the back-to-workers, especially in urban America.
At a very basic level, human behavior is governed by reward principles… greatly accelerated by the rise of social media. At a deeper level, never before has the planet witnessed such a renaissance of spontaneous personal creativity, in virtually every genre.
From the little television that I’ve watched, I noticed that whenever an expert was interviewed about what they thought should be done to make things better, considering that no leadership playbook exists for a post-Covid19 world, almost to a person the paraphrased answer was… ‘We need to get creative.’
What leadership will look like tomorrow, no one knows as yet. How boards will conduct business is yet to be seen. Cliché’s like ‘out-of-the-box thinking’ are history, because every known box has already been blown away.
But of one thing that’s certain… we are all faced with a series of opportunities, that are brilliantly disguised as impossible situations. And only creative thinking can grapple with these challenges. What we can take comfort in, is that we have the imminent return of our people, with creatively stirred minds. Only the leaders who learn to harness the creativity their people bring in, will stand a better chance to embrace tomorrow and succeed. The question is, how prepared are we? Keen to hear your comments!
No Comments