PEr Chronicles: Culture IS strategy

100% fake. The snow that athletes at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics are competing on is completely artificial. Every Olympics present their own set of unique challenges from accelerating climate change affecting competitions condition to security from potential terrorist attacks and cost overruns. These Beijing Games present several additional serious issues in particular, diplomatic boycott over human rights abuses and the formidable COVID-19 challenge.

As the US Navy Seals puts it, “The only easy day was yesterday.”

Sometimes things need to be harder in the short term for them to be easier in the long term. You’ve got to put in the time and embrace the struggle on the path to mastery.

I know it’s common in books for “experts” to give you “steps”, Five easy steps! Top Secret Steps!

Seriously?

You can’t buy a map to the top. If you could, everyone would be up there.

They’re not.

Bottom line, there is a difference between knowing how to think, and being told what to think. That whole BS about thinking outside the box is just that: BS.

Groundbreakers in business, science, medicine, parenting, technology don’t see the box. They see possibilities. Every great creation and invention started with people who knew how to think and didn’t allow themselves to be told what to think. If you want to get to the elite level, this is what sets you apart. If you follow the textbook exactly, if you always do it the “normal” way, you can be very good at what you do. But what happens when there’s a glitch or an unforeseeable issue that the textbook didn’t cover? How do you manage when nothing is “normal”?

People love to talk about “pivoting” in hard times – making a fast shift in a different direction – but you have to pivot and move toward something, you can’t keep changing direction just to change direction. And unless you know how to think for yourself, you’re just going to keep pivoting back and forth, this way and that way. Waiting to be told what to think.

In my life, I’ve failed much more often than I’ve succeeded. The only reason I’ve accomplished anything is because I learned early how to bounce back with unrelenting energy and passion and come up with a new dream every time I stumbled. It’s because I’ve kept going – because I’ve been eager to learn from every challenge and keep trying - that I’m here today. And because, from a very young age, I’ve never believed that the answers were inside me. I’ve always looked for answers in the work of others trying to do similar things, in the wisdom of my mentors, and in the energy of my collaborators.

Too often, we just default to external factors being prioritized in business, budget, business plans, investments, market dynamics and so on. These matter – of course they do – but they are not as important as the people who sit behind them. If we want business to be agile and adaptable to change, we first need people who are.?Flexible business models are meaningless if we don’t also have agile mindsets and behaviours.?Your people are our business’ most important asset.

A word of caution: the temptation is to think “I know this.” But here’s the thing: are you applying it to get the best out of your teams? Are you actively using your values to make decisions that are both right for you and for your business? Knowing is not enough. Changing your behaviour because of what you know, is.

Most senior leadership consider any topics relate to our inner world – emotional, social, mental – are distracting from what really matters – business metrics and results. But it is the wise and empathetic leaders who know that there are the real skills that matter. Empowering your people to leverage their most important asset, their own minds, is fundamentally the best investment any company can make.

If you told me you’d read 500 books about how to fly a plane, I still wouldn’t get in a plane with you in the cockpit. The mistake many of us make is that we think we know or stop at knowing.

The pressure to recover revenue inevitably has a personal impact on the workforce. No matter which way we cut it, we often unconsciously forgo our well-being in the pursuit of revenue. In times of challenge, an urgency and intensity builds up around scenario planning, rewriting strategy, data crunching and forecasting endlessly in an attempt to predict and unpredictable future.

After two years of COVID restrictions, one corporate leader told me, “I can’t wait to go back to the office so I can work less.” It was said in jest, but like all good jokes, relies on some truth to be funny.

This didn’t come from a lazy person. In fact it came from a senior leader who was working around the clock and close to burnout.

I understand it. I had several conversations with leaders on what they were facing. Looking after their people while mitigating revenue loss has become the paradoxical challenge at the forefront of their minds. The truth is deadlines that can’t be moved, targets that can’t be adjusted and the ever-growing to-do lists are part of the stark reality that teams and business will be dealing with for the foreseeable future as we move into an increasingly unpredictable world.

So while as leaders we may not have much control over deadlines and targets, what we DO have control over is how we can help our teams respond to and take on such gargantuan challenges.