The Leadership in Action Series: On Leading in Times of Change

Rush

• Publisher: Center for Creative Leadership Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781604911206
• eBook ISBN: 9781604917451
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

The ongoing state of many contemporary organizations is one of change. The pace and complexity of change contribute to intense emotions that play out both inside and outside organizations. The leader's challenge in dealing with change is to recognize and understand the patterns of response that people express as they learn their way through transition and to customize intervention strategies that help individuals move forward in the changing environment. This collection of sixteen pieces explores the important topic of leading through transition from a number of angles.

Pressure Cooking: Real Leaders Thrive When the Chips Are Down

Graham Jones

The role of the leader involves several principal tasks: creating a compelling vision, coming up with a strategy to achieve that vision, and communicating the vision and strategy to the organization’s people. All of this puts the leader in a highly visible position, in which expectations can create enormous pressure. In tough economic times such as the world is experiencing now, this pressure is intensified. Leaders’ success in such environments depends largely on the path they choose: to be safe leaders or real leaders.

The fundamental job of a leader is to establish a clear vision for his or her people—they want to know where their leader intends to take them. But the job doesn’t end there. Leaders must then formulate a strategy and plan so that their people know how the vision will be achieved and what is expected of them. Next, the vision and strategy have to be communicated to the people who are being asked to deliver it. This is where leaders must demonstrate a level of logic that is bulletproof if they are to secure their people’s buy-in and engagement. In communicating the vision and strategy, leaders must also show genuine emotion, oozing a passion that will inspire everyone to follow. This whole process means that they will be highly visible, exposed, and vulnerable.

Many senior leaders are so highly visible that they sometimes feel isolated and lonely. Everyone wants to be their friend. In fact, they have so many “friends” that they are sometimes unable to identify who their true friends and allies are.

Such visibility can weigh heavily on the shoulders of leaders. The expectations their people and they themselves have can be enormous, to the extent that leaders may secretly wonder if they are up to the task. In my work with senior executives I have had a number of them tell me, when behind closed doors, “I’m waiting to be found out,” or, “I’m wondering how I got to this position; I don’t feel comfortable in it.”

The responsibilities and accountabilities of leaders do not, of course, cease when they have secured the buy-in of people via a compelling vision delivered with passion. The demands are incessant in the daily grind of operating in an environment where leaders are expected to be decisive, know the answers, be role models, and deliver results. Get it wrong and they can lose many of those newly acquired “friends” and “allies.”

DIFFICULT TIMES

As if this routine situation does not constitute a sufficiently demanding challenge, leaders are doubly or even exponentially tested when times are tough.

Good economic climates can hide many of the flaws in corporations, and poor leadership and inept leaders often go unnoticed in such favorable times. Too often, as long as results are delivered, there are few questions asked about how they are delivered.

Things are very different when times are tough. Leaders have never been more highly visible than during the recent dramatic difficulties facing the business world. This has been a roller-coaster environment that has engulfed large corporations that once seemed untouchable. This is when outstanding leadership is so crucial, but it also happens to be when outstanding leadership is very difficult to deliver.

In difficult times, employees need and want to be able to trust their leaders to be open and to let the employees know how things stand. Leaders also need to recognize that an inevitable part of change and turbulent times is that many of their people will view the situation as a catastrophe and that they will need the leaders’ help to deal with it. Listening to employees’ concerns, showing empathy, and reminding them of successes, however small, always have to be at the forefront of a leader’s mind in these circumstances. But leaders must also continue to focus on a strategy for moving forward and keeping employees focused on delivering quality service and products to customers.

SHOWING RESILIENCE

This is where having a vision for getting through the tough times is so important. Many leaders fail to understand that visions are equally as important, if not more important, during turbulent times as during more normal times. Leaders need a vision of how the organization, business unit, or team will deal with the current difficulties and emerge stronger. This type of vision is about organizational resilience, reminding people about what they are good at and what is required from them, and telling a story of how the challenges will be overcome.

The best example of this in my experience of working with leaders in tough times is Ben, the leader of a building materials company experiencing a serious downturn in a rapidly shrinking economy. In the midst of announcing job losses, Ben also spent time telling the people who remained about his vision of how the organization would emerge from the difficulties stronger than when it entered them. He reminded his people of their skills and abilities and the resilience they had shown in previous downturns. Ben talked about how people would grow and develop during the tough times ahead and how the company would retain its top talent to ensure it maintained its competitive advantage when better times returned. He told them how the company would seek and find opportunities that it would seize on because of the optimism it would carry forward. This was a great example of a vision that reflected the resilience required in tough times.

FACING A CHOICE

Of course, all this fortitude is demanded of leaders when they may be feeling pretty worried and pessimistic themselves. Clients,

employees, shareholders, and the media are but a few of the stakeholders who watch leaders very carefully to see how they cope under such circumstances.

So in turbulent economic markets, even the best leaders are stretched to their limits. What has worked in the past may not work in these current difficult times. This is when the pressure cauldron that leaders find themselves in either makes or breaks them.

At times the pressure on leaders may be so great that they wonder whether it’s all worth it and why they have put themselves in this situation. In fact, have you ever considered why leaders choose to be leaders? Is it about the status, package, power, and authority that come with the role? Is it the required responsibility, accountability, and vision that attract them? Or is it about the opportunity to make a difference and have a real impact?

My experience in coaching numerous senior leaders has led me to believe that different people have different motives for being leaders. From these observations and experiences, I have identified two types of leaders: real leaders and safe leaders. This distinction has been apparent to me across all market conditions but has been particularly evident in turbulent times. Tough economic conditions bring an intriguing quandary for leaders. These are the times when leaders must make a choice between settling in as safe leaders and stepping up to be real leaders.

What are some of the key differences between safe and real leaders?

Safe leaders

• Are driven by their needs for rewards, status, and power and are therefore unwilling to put themselves on the line for fear of losing their position if they get it wrong.

• Focus on what they need to do to ensure that they conform to company practices and procedures.

• Rarely innovate or challenge orthodoxy because their focus is almost exclusively on micromanaging in the short term.

• React mainly to immediate, day-to-day, ongoing issues.

• Are fearful of making mistakes because these might affect their job security.

• Look to blame others when things go wrong.

• Claim others’ successes as their own.

• View challenge as unhelpful and threatening.

• Encourage conformity to tried-and-tested methods.

• Pay lip service to change initiatives.

• Settle for good rather than pushing for great.

• Are reluctant and slow to tackle underperformance.

• Claim that they are only the messenger when it’s time to communicate tough decisions.

Real leaders

• Are driven by the challenge and opportunity to put themselves out there and make a difference—this is what leadership is all about for them.

• Focus on providing a good role model for their people.

• Empower others to focus on managing the short-term challenges so that their own minds can focus more on innovating and investing in the future.

• Create a road map for the future.

• Accept that they are highly visible.

• See mistakes as a key part of their development and learning.

• Accept responsibility and accountability when things go wrong.

• Are courageous in seeking to understand the causes of failure.

• Recognize the contributions of others to successes.

• Encourage challenge and collective problem solving.

• Encourage people to challenge accepted ways of thinking and acting.

• Challenge themselves and others to raise the performance bar.

• Address underperformance when it arises.

• Make and own tough decisions.

Safe leaders exist in various guises, so different leaders will exhibit the traits in varying degrees. What is common across them is their reluctance to put themselves on the line; they have too much to lose if they get it wrong.

I worked with one safe leader whose “motive” was noticeable in his resistance to identifying a vision and a long-term strategy and plan for his organization. Instead he chose to keep himself busy by reacting to the usual day-to-day events, and that kept him off the firing line.

In another case, a business unit head clearly hid behind an overt claim that her style was to lead through consensus. This led to excessive debate and conflict among her team of opinionated, strong-willed, and competitive individuals, and so she was too slow in making the decisions that needed to be made. She was playing it safe.

Real leaders also come in different shapes and sizes. One managing director of a large distribution company was very clear about what was non-negotiable when it came to providing quality customer service. This meant introducing metrics that would highlight areas of weakness and be unpopular with some of her people because they were at risk of being exposed as underperformers. Not all members of the company’s board of directors agreed with her either, but she was resolute in her rationale and the new metrics resulted in a significant improvement in customer satisfaction. Here was a real leader who was willing to challenge the status quo.

In another case I witnessed a managing director bring about a sharp increase in performance in his professional services company. The organization was already performing well, but the managing director thought this performance could still be significantly improved and that employees were not stretching themselves. He had a choice to make: he could either play it safe and oversee the continued success of the organization and enjoy his popularity when it came to bonus time, or he could challenge his people to stretch themselves and achieve their true potential. He chose to be a real leader and started to communicate his thoughts about how the future of the organization was threatened by a complacency that was becoming ever more apparent. His calls for everyone to raise the performance bar were met with derision by some of his people, but this turned out to be the foundation of the company’s step up to the next performance level.

RAISING THE STAKES

The differences between real and safe leaders are particularly evident and pronounced during tough and turbulent times for organizations. Remember that what lies at the core of safe leaders is role security. These leaders value the prestige, status, power, authority, and financial package that come with leadership. There is a lot to lose for these leaders, so much so that particularly in tough times, their main focus will be staying off the firing line and becoming even more risk averse; not taking risks, to them, means ensuring no mistakes. They withdraw into a sa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Leading Change: Adapting and Innovating in an Uncertain World
• Adaptability: What It Takes to Be a Quick-Change Artist
• Helping People Manage Transition
• Leading Yourself Through Change
• Change Factor: Making the Case for Executive Adaptability
• Flexible Flyers: A Leader’s Framework for Developing Adaptability
• Knowing Change Preferences Is a Boon for Leaders
• Leading a Changing Workforce: Lessons from the U.S. Army
• In Search of Authenticity: Now More Than Ever, Soft Skills Are Needed
• The Luxury of Tough Times: Five Terrific Questions
• Wired to Inspire: Leading Organizations Through Adversity
• After the Storm: Leading in the Wake of a Crisis
• Pressure Cooking: Real Leaders Thrive When the Chips Are Down
• The Narrative Lens and Organizational Change
• A Tale of Three Countries Offers Valuable Knowledge
• A Kinder, Gentler, and Better Way to Downsize
• About the Contributors