Barefoot in the Boardroom

Every Leader's Guide to Navigating Change

Shara Hutchinson

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781789664706
• eBook ISBN: 9781631958137
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Barefoot in the Boardroom is a practical change management manual for executives looking for a provenmethodology that can break down a huge vision into manageable chunks.

Certified as a Change Management Practitioner and Talent Optimization Consultant, Shara Hutchinson demonstrates how to assess one's leadership capacity, change impact, and organizational health and reveals the strategies and tactics necessary to achievea leader's most audacious goals. By following Shara's proactive measures and techniques outlined in this book, business professionals will expand their leadership skills while simultaneously encouraging the growth of others. Barefoot in the Boardroom will scale an organization, team, or department to not only identify the right strategic initiatives but to execute those initiatives and sustain success.

Within Barefoot in the Boardroom, business leaders will find a vast array of proven techniques and strategies to apply. Shara Hutchinson's "Exposeyour™" Leadership Capacity approach includes the nine leadership competencies needed to develop a high-performing team, while her encouragement of vision teaches leaders how to align their business strategy with their team, ensuring that they have the right people in the right seats to get the right results. Shara also introduces the "Barefoot Method™"—which is her signature change management strategy that can be applied to any organization, team, or department to ensure it is future-proofed. Barefoot in the Boardroom will challenge business professionals to break out of the box and innovate with the times. Each chapter offers clarity for strategic initiatives, key objectives, operational tactics, and measurable outcomes that encourages leaders to implement change and innovation in order to sustain professional longevity.

Phase 1

You’re Already in the Boardroom

Chapter 1

Time for a Change

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”

Andy Warhol

Imagine this. You’re standing on top of a ten-thousand-foot building. You look down and realize you’re able to zoom audibly and visually into the second-floor boardroom—meaning you can hear and see everything going on. In this boardroom, you and your entire leadership team are having a strategic planning session about the organization’s future. More specifically, your twenty-five-year plan. What are you talking about? How is the conversation going? Who from the team is offering out-ofthe-box ideas? Has anyone brought up how things may change in your industry and with technology over the next five years, ten years, or twenty-five years? Have you determined how you will adjust to these changes? Based on your conversation, will your organization still be around twenty-five years from now? Is your plan future-proof?

You’re reading this book because you’ve already reached a certain degree of success, and now you’re aiming for the next level. However, the next level comes with next-level challenges, and you recognize that what you have done to get here won’t get you there. The question you are facing is, how can you level up your leadership to ensure the longevity of the business? The answer is simple, but not easy: change.

All organizations experience change. Some people are more threatened by the pace of change than the actual change itself, and others oppose change because they feel insecure during the awkward phase of confusion between the old normal and the new normal. This analogy or example to go barefoot in the boardroom explains the importance of adopting changes as you grow. It permits you to do something out of the ordinary to achieve extraordinary results.

Anything around us can change, move, and need creativity over time. Suppose you refuse to anticipate and forecast the future because you are trapped in the old ways. In that case, you will miss opportunities and experience the same pain my feet and back felt before I took my shoes off in that board meeting—only you’ll feel it in your key performance indicators (KPIs).

“Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.”

—Walt Disney

No leader with an audacious vision builds a company with the intent of only surviving for a few years. The objective is to keep growing and reach the heights of success over time and have a future. For that, a plan and having the right leaders in the right positions is necessary.

For a business to grow in an ever-changing environment, a leader must consider all the factors that impact business performance and develop strategies accordingly to make the business plan future-proof.

Change is the leading force in the corporate world that decides the decline or rise of a company, so get comfortable with it and get ready to take your shoes off!

What is Future-Proofing?

Future-proofing is the process of forecasting the effects and shocks of potential disasters that might cause a company to go out of business or suffer financially. Based on these expectations, leaders develop methods to minimize the repercussions for the business. There are four basic principles for reducing the impact of future shocks:¹

1. Create a well-structured framework.
2. Establish a solid financial foundation for your company.
3. Do not overlook the importance of putting your plans into action.
4. Formulate a strategy.

Why Is It Important to Future-Proof?

In the business world, there is a lot of competition. Furthermore, globalization has resulted in incredible technological and economic developments, making the playing field unpredictable and unequal. Whether it’s a new technology, technique, or product, something new enters the market that poses a danger to your company every day.

Organizational success and survival are highly reliant on the capacity to manage and adapt to change. As a result, businesses must establish a long-term strategy beyond prior techniques, approaches, and quick fixes. This entails planning for the future, looking beyond the confines of the internal business environment, and considering the entire industrial ecosystem in which the company operates.

All You Need Is a Hedgehog

Typically, a long-lasting business is not an overnight success. Instead, its executives spend time planning to reinforce the business foundations to ensure its long-term success. To do this, they work to understand their “Hedgehog concept,” or “secret sauce” as I call it, which makes their business unique. I read an article that explained this concept well as it relates to leadership and business.³ Here is an excerpt:

“The term ‘Hedgehog’ comes from the famous essay by Isaiah Berlin titled ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox.’ The story contrasts the fox as a cunning animal who knows many things, always seeing the world in all of its complexity, with the hedgehog who knows one big thing really well and simplifies a complex world through a single organizing idea.

“As it relates to business, fox companies recognize and pursue every opportunity, seeing the world in all its complexity. They work to be good at many different things so that they can take advantage of opportunities as they are presented. They become scattered and diffused, never really becoming great at any one thing. Hedgehog companies, on the other hand, are laser-focused, understanding and concentrating on what they are best at. They are able to simplify a complex world into a single organizing idea, always considering first whether or not an opportunity fits into their pattern of success.”²

Considering the above, what is your Hedgehog concept? What does your organization need to focus on to be futureproof? The article went on to outline three questions you must be able to answer to understand your Hedgehog concept:

1. What can you be the best in the world at?
   Consider what would happen if you concentrated all of your energy and effort on a single goal. What might you become the most extraordinary in the world at? It’s not that you’re establishing a goal to become the greatest at anything; it’s that you know what you’re capable of being the best at. It’s also critical to recognize what you won’t be able to improve at.
2. What drives your economic engine?
   The answer demands a comprehensive grasp of the one element that causes you to make more money than any other ratio or denominator in your company. Thinking outside the box of your industry’s obvious KPIs may lead to significant creative breakthroughs, separating you from the competition and potentially upsetting the status quo.
3. What are you deeply passionate about?
   A company’s employees must be dedicated to and interested in their job for it to be successful. This necessitates both their emotions and their brains being engaged. Understanding the goal of your company and your employees’ interests and being persistent in pursuing opportunities that align with those purposes and passions is a crucial element of comprehending your Hedgehog concept. The idea is to make a conscious decision to do the job that naturally inspires enthusiasm in your workers rather than striving to get them enthused about their work.

Answering these three questions will set you on the path to creating a ten- to twenty-five-year vision that will propel you to the next level to be an innovative leader. In later chapters, we will discuss this in more detail.

Innovative Leadership Matters

If you do a little research, you’ll discover several examples of organizations that collapsed because they failed to see the necessity of future-proofing their operations. The majority of these companies were highly successful and dominated their respective industries. Despite being at the top, they were unable to sustain their market positions. The reason? Failure to innovate. Why did they fail to innovate? Leadership.

“The task of the leader is to get their people from where they are to where they have not been.”

—Henry Kissinger

Blockbuster, one of the largest DVD rental companies, is an excellent illustration of the inability to innovate.

“Innovation is the unrelenting drive to break the status quo and develop anew where few have dared to go.”

—Steven Jeffes

Blockbuster vs. Netflix

One of the most well-known DVD rental companies was Blockbuster. However, because of its inability to adapt to change, it is frequently presented as an example of a company left behind by disruptive innovation. With hundreds of locations throughout the world, it was a market leader in the video rental industry. Until video streaming came along, it was at the top of the business. One article aptly explains Blockbuster’s fatal mistake.³ The gist of the article is as follows:

Because they failed to innovate with their digital offerings, the company, with its costly rents and overhead, began to lose ground to DVD postal services and early-stage streaming services such as Love Film.

To make matters worse, because of their market position, Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix—a young firm that offered postal video services. Netflix would sell 49 percent of the company and adopt the Blockbuster branding. However, the leader decided not to. They never saw a future of streaming, so despite having the opportunity to purchase Netflix on several occasions, Blockbuster decided to continue doing what they had always done. Now Netflix dominates the sector and Blockbuster is left behind.

This example explains why it is vital for companies, small or big, to build a system that can help them anticipate the future. Rather than focusing on short-term solutions, companies need to calculate future risks and prepare to tackle them in advance. If Blockbuster had considered this fact, Netflix would not have introduced streaming services in the market. The changes could have been an opportunity for the company to grow. Instead, their lack of change led to their failure.

The CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, said: “If Blockbuster had launched their streaming service two years earlier, Netflix may never have happened.”

Blockbuster was only one of many examples. Aside from competitors, executives are occasionally caught off guard by events that drastically disrupt their business and the whole economy. The COVID-19 pandemic proves this. Many companies were seriously affected, with some industries suffering more than others. While there were essential businesses that remained open based on the necessity of their products or services, many companies did not fit into that category. Some could not have done much to minimize the impacts. However, others could have mobilized their staff, continued operations faster, and increased sales had they noticed the trend of mobile services, remote-work technology, and digital innovation two years earlier.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

—Peter Drucker

COVID-19 Has Taught Us to Innovate Digitally

Businesses may learn a lot from the year 2020. Many companies had to discover new methods to adapt and stay relevant due to the coronavirus pandemic. Companies in the manufacturing, entertainment, and food industries, as well as schools and churches, all had to socially distance their members and employees. The economy felt the effects. People couldn’t interact in the same way anymore. Therefore, everyone had to discover new methods to connect for business and social activities. With so many standards, dealing with lockdowns and implementing standard opening procedures (SOPs) for safety with a small team was tough. This pandemic served as a reminder of how unpredictable the future is and how organizations must be proactive to survive unexpected events. The world ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Phase 1 - You’re Already in the Boardroom
• Phase 2 - Take Your Shoes Off
• Phase 3 - Stand on the Table
• About the Author
• References