Sometimes it’s only when everything falls to pieces around us that we begin to examine limiting beliefs we have that we are weak, inadequate, and broken in some way. We are not. We have the opportunity to overcome change blindness and grow stronger and resilient instead.
“Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient.”
Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
Without a stable foundation, all your hard work and dreams will crumble. Do you have the foundation you need when shift hits the fan? If not, you better create one. There will be more change in the next 10 years than in the last 100. Our window of tolerance has been stretched to the limit more than ever. Uncertainty and change are not new problems but it’s taken the pandemic to catapult many people into the awareness that they need new human systems so people can remain stable and contributing no matter what comes at them. How people react, adapt and evolve in your business will become the measure of your success. Now is the opportunity for crucial personal, professional and organizational growth and evolvement. Here are some key predictions to heed:
You may have a problem with change blindness and if you don’t address it, you will not commit to what’s needed for success. As a leader, you must go out of your way to create the kind of culture you need for success. Protecting yourself from seeming outdated keeps you small, stuck and makes you the very thing you fear, irrelevant and incompetent. Be courageous to update your systems because the world won’t wait long for you to catch up.
If you do not invest in learning and adapting to the evolution of organizational culture, most initiatives in your business will be disappointing and fail. Today, change is happening so fast it causes confusion and stress in most individuals and teams. Outdated, autocratic approaches no longer work and new systems that are here now, are needed. These promote emotional intelligence and personal responsibility. The glue that holds your business together in the future must be based on trustworthy teamwork and collaboration, with supportive, regular mentoring.
You must help your people develop internal motivation rather than seek to motivate them externally. Otherwise, you get compliance rather than commitment, disengagement and mediocre results. The top competitive advantage for your business, is investing a responsibility-based culture. What is this? A responsibility-based culture is one where you have buy-in from everyone at every level. Only then do your people show up strong. Everyone works together collaboratively, embracing a common mission. The environment is supportive and inclusive, so work gets done quickly and efficiently. Your organization thrives and you see rewards everywhere.
Without repeatable, sustainable systems including those addressing the human component, you will not achieve sustainable, consistent or outstanding outcomes. Systems are the game-changers needed for your incredible future. Because of globalization, diversity, and technology, you need sustainable and scalable systems that ensure resiliency, consistency, and high performance. They must support agility. This only occurs when power is shared, people function from purpose and values and leadership and emotional intelligence is developed in everyone; from CEO to front line staff. Most importantly, people must learn and have opportunities to develop flexible, inter-changeable leader and follower skills so that cross-functional teamwork is strong.
Without a commitment to, practice of and execution of, professional common behaviors based on purpose, values and emotional intelligence, you cannot confidently achieve agility and collaboration. Operating by purpose and values and developing emotional intelligence must take precedence over profitability first as the top priority. Only then does higher profit occur naturally, abundantly. People must learn about and adopt conditions and conversations needed to interrupt cycles of long-standing struggles within people and between them that impedes innovative solutions and progress.
An important concept to promote is social interest; when people recognize the consequences they cause others so they intentionally help rather than hinder coworkers. When your workforce sustains a positive, holistic view of people, only then do they continually and fully engage in their work.
This article was published in St. Louis Small Business Monthly in the column The Extraordinary Workplace, June 2020.
