By Eric Beaudan
As leaders, our ability to deal with global disruption — whether it impacts our organization’s supply chain, sales and distribution capability or cash flow — is regularly being tested. Whether we’re talking about disease outbreaks or financial crises, events beyond any individual or organization’s control can force us to sharpen our ability to lead in unpredictable times.
As global disruption ebbs and flows, what role should leaders play, and what strategies can you deploy to get ahead of this unpredictable curve?
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My company, in partnership with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, recently released a study that examined how 1,890 senior executives around the world view their organization’s ability to manage disruption. The results were quite staggering: Only 15% of respondents expressed a reasonably high level of confidence that their leadership team is “fit to lead through future disruption,” while 61% reported being “tentative” and 24% are outright “worried.” The two top reasons given by executives who worry the most were lack of vision/buy-in and resistance to change inside their organizations.
The Conference Board, a global business membership and research association, noted similar findings in its C-Suite Challenge 2020 report: “CEOs’ internal concerns include talent and skills shortages, disruptive technologies, and building an innovative culture.”
As you reflect on your own organization’s degree of vision and resistance to change, here are four strategies you can deploy to maximize your leadership effectiveness:
1. Remain Visible
Disruption calls for what I call “visible leadership”: the ability to connect with all the people in your stakeholder group (employees, suppliers, customers, investors) with energy and purpose. Remember how former President George W. Bush was criticized for being in absentia on 9/11? Due to security concerns, he spent most of the day on Air Force One flying around in secrecy and reappeared in Washington, D.C., in the evening.
Leaders need to be visible, approachable and authentic during times of disruption. In the absence of your calming statements, people will automatically assume the worse and may start posting doom-and-gloom theories on social media.
2. Encourage Candid Dialogue
I borrowed this concept from the late Jack Welch, who wrote that candor is “the biggest dirty little secret in business.” Welch was well-known for his bluntness and his ability to call out the truth, however uncomfortable it made others. I’m not advocating bluntness for its own sake, but the ability to address issues in an open, no-holds-barred manner is critical for leaders facing disruption.
There are three ways you can do this without pretending to be Neutron Jack:
• Instead of speaking from your prepared notes, walk into a room and ask people, “What’s on your mind?” and answer their questions without feeling that you need to stick to your script. I’ve witnessed highly successful leaders pulling this off on numerous occasions.
• Acknowledge — don’t shut down — people with contrary ideas. At Toyota, workers and plant managers are encouraged to speak up and stop the assembly line when they detect a problem. This is a key differentiator for Toyota’s culture and ability to deal with disruption at the operational level.
• Ask for feedback. The ultimate test of your leadership is your ability to listen to feedback, play it back and reflect on what you heard. The CEO of a tech company recently shared with me that he’s learned to eliminate the anxiety of asking for feedback by recognizing that he doesn’t necessarily need to act on every piece of advice he receives, but he makes sure that he’s at least receptive to it.
3. Adopt A Resilient Mindset
Our survey showed that an astounding 88% of confident leaders rated their organization’s ability to display resilience as high. By contrast, only 1% of respondents who are worried about their organization’s ability to manage disruption rated resilience as a strong suit.
Developing a more resilient mindset starts with mindfulness, which is your ability to center your thinking and avoid overreacting to negative events. If you continually blame others, send out inflammatory emails or lose your composure in internal meetings, you’ll likely create a sense of panic and loss of control — exactly what you don’t need in an environment where uncertainty and volatility are already chipping away at your team’s confidence.
Try practicing these three mindfulness techniques:
• Set a regular time in your workday to meditate (observe your breathing without letting external thoughts interrupt you). All you need is three minutes.
• Avoid responding to emails immediately, especially when you feel annoyed. Park your response for 24 hours.
• When working through difficult situations or conversations, ask yourself, “Is my message going to make the other person feel better, not worse?”
4. Maintain Strategic Awareness
Disruption is likely to force everyone to focus on short-term problems and ignore anything that’s not in the here and now. Your job as a leader is to remind people that they need to balance short- and long-term considerations. You can do this by:
• Looking out: Anticipate how disruption will change your organization’s position as a global/local player and how your strategy needs to reflect this.
• Looking across: Observe what other organizations are doing to navigate disruption and how disruption is impacting your broader industry/peers.
• Looking inside: Evaluate the type of talent, leadership capabilities and organizational structure or systems you need to develop to get ahead — and hopefully stay ahead — in the face of global disruption.
There’s no question that disruption will continue to define the course of business and organizations. The challenge for you as a leader is to develop the mindset and organizational culture that will turn the forces of disruption into a catalyst for strategic thinking and creative execution.
*This article first appeared on the Forbes website