Leadership in Tough Times

I was asked this past week to write about Leadership during hard times, and then this week's events in Florida and Pennsylvania changed what I was going to say.

Leadership is service. It's usually less about professing your vision than helping those around you find the right vision, the right road forward. That's the skew most of the time.

But there are times when leaders need to put themselves out there. In business, this is hard because social and political factors can be polarizing and disruptive to the fine machinery of the enterprise. But the tragic reality is that there’s a lot of Fear and Hate in the modern company for the simple reason that companies exist in the same world that is riven with these emotions. What can you do as a leader? What should you do?

As a leader, I believe you cannot ignore it. The people in your company or your team are in your care. Many leaders try to ignore this stuff, hoping that it will resolve itself without too much pain. They may be afraid of seeming to be politically partisan or exhibiting bias – but that’s not what this is about at all. When you leave your teams to work out roiling emotions around the Fear and Hate in society, you are not serving anyone well – not your teams, not your customers, not your shareholders, not yourself, not anyone.

In these circumstances, the point of leadership is not positional but principled. It’s up to the leader to be a lighthouse of what is right and what is not, and to help mobilize other lighthouses across his or her company. Don’t engage in specific areas of political or social disagreement – engage instead at the points of pervasive moral truth that undergird our relationships with each other.

Right now, there’s a lot of Fear and Hate in society. Each time I click those keys, it’s shocking to see them appear on the screen in black and white. The problem for you as a leader is that when people are consumed with Fear or Hate, they put themselves first. They don’t put other people first. Yet as Warren Buffett has said many times, putting others first is the cornerstone of every successful, sustainable business.

Let’s make this super practical.

Your business needs people who will design and deliver great #CX, including great products that your customers want to buy. That takes love and empathy, not just technical knowledge. Should you doubt this, the software world continues to astonish with examples of this lesson, learned and unlearned.

Your business needs people who will sell great products that your customers really need. That means sales people who realize that closing a deal that’s bad for the customer is bad for you and them too. The enterprise SaaS world desperately needs to learn this lesson.

Your business needs managers who will prioritize the well-being of everyone in their teams. My experience taught me that many things are important, but none are so determinant as having this single factor. The talent churn, political infighting, and resulting loss of efficacy and efficiency in your company are well known to you.

Your business needs employees who embrace what it means to be part of a team. Hiring the right people – not just the right experiences and capabilities – happens because you have clearly prioritized it. If you don’t, it won’t.

The people who make up your business – employees, contractors, investors, customers, partners – need you to speak up in times like these. This is not about having all the answers. It's about pointing people to the right questions. That’s leadership in tough times.

Mark Stouse is CEO of Proof Analytics, a powerful new ROI analytics bridge that bridges the gap that between business leaders and their marketing and communications teams. Championed by finance teams as well as progressive CMOs and agencies, Proof calculates the performance of marketing and communications investments, including audience impact, business value creation, time to value, materiality and risk, ROI and opportunity cost. www.proofanalytics.ai