Can Corporate Leaders Learn something from the Queen?

Anybody who watched the Netflix series based on life of Queen Elizabeth II will surely remember the iconic dialogue which apparently the Queen believed in throughout her life "Sometimes the best thing to do is - doing Nothing!" It is one of the most difficult thing for any human being to do - more so for leaders. "Doing" something comes instinctively to all Human beings as the most natural reaction. That is how our brains are wired and our central nervous system is tuned. But the Queen proved that it is possible to carry out that most difficult task gracefully with eventual success and ensuring stability for her people.

In corporate world, the leaders get constantly tormented by multiple external and internal factors - it could be how the market is reacting, how Regulators are responding, how customers are evolving, how competitors are gearing up and more often than not, by how much budget has been sanctioned by the Board for running the business! In this situation the leaders are often forced to take short term decisions, just to keep one's foot secured today without necessarily keeping in focus the long terms strategies. One of course might argue there is nothing wrong with that approach - if the house is on fire it is but normal for people to only run for their lives without really bothering about anything else! But the question is do we always correctly judge if there is fire at all in every such situations? It is not uncommon to see knee jerk reactions in response to customer complaints, high attrition, budgetary restrictions and so on. Leaders get agitated, frustrated and end up taking quick and myopic measures without fully realizing the long term impact on business or on morale of people on ground. In many such cases, probably the problem is really not that big and does not require very elaborate measures to combat. The magnanimity of the solution surpasses the problem and actually begets more problem in long run.

There actually could be a different reason as well. The innate anxiety of leaders, often triggered by the FOMO mentality, tends to corelate the problems on ground to a reflection of their personal inability and they jump on to action plans to solve the so called crisis. In most cases they grab on some temporary fire fighting measures, that can at least keep the problem camouflaged for the time being. This is where leaders need to be cautious and restrained - every single problem does not necessarily need an action and a little patience and far sight is all that is required to deal with them. Temporary problems die out on their own if ignored, but the moment you start feeding them with unnecessary attention, they snowball into bigger dimensions. A fly on the wall, if looked through a magnifying glass, tends to appear like a monster! But in all reality, it is just a fly on the wall! Creating solutions to kill that monster simply create unnecessary burn outs.

It is essential for leaders to look at any problem in perspective and then judging its importance to decide on appropriate action. Getting into solution model invariably creates disruption in normal operation of business as all such arrangements calls for additional course of action and data management which is over and above the regular operational capacity - not to mention the additional governance and stress created for Managers. Unless absolutely essential, the focus should be on having minimum action plans or not having them at all until really necessary. A stable working atmosphere and confidence that leaders are capable to handle situation, are all that people on ground require. Elaborate reactions and tendency to act on every single issue, creates distraction and nervousness within everyone, which best be avoided, unless really essential.

Is this easy and natural for Leaders? Absolutely not! The Queen in the Web Series and Oscar Wilde in real life already told "To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world!" But this a restraint which all of us in Corporate Leadership need to practice if we want to provide confidence and stability to the people and to the organization.