Owing to the impact of the pandemic, nearly everything has moved from offline to online. More than ever before, people are utilising online channels to conduct learning, business, and even communicate. All these unstable and vast changes seem to appear to be a little overwhelming and sometimes, even frightening.
To keep pace, leaders need to take on different strategy other than “leader as a hero” stereotype. Leaders organisations play an important role in establishing an effective organisation structure and communication protocols for both for their team and business. However, the article below suggests a new approach which is more humble, nimble, and based on a value-driven vision called “Sapient Leadership”.
Find out more below to have a better comprehension of “What It Takes To Lead Through An Exponential Change”.
What It Takes to Lead Through an Era of Exponential Change
To say that 2020 is a year of disruption and change is to understate the obvious. Our daily lives, from educating our kids, managing our health, and working from home, to simple social rituals like dinner with friends, underwent rapid multi-dimensional change. Nascent trends — virtualization of the workspace, online learning, virtual health, and e-commerce — accelerated exponentially. Changes anticipated to take years occurred in months and, in some cases, weeks and even days. Understandably, leaders have struggled mightily to address these overlapping changes simultaneously, dealing with economic, health, and logistical crises that have unfolded at top speed.
Much as we might like to think of 2020
as an anomaly, it may not be. Conditions for accelerating change have been
building for years. Advancements in information technology, automation, human interconnectivity,
Artificial Intelligence, and the network effects among them, created a new
reality where change is much more rapid, continual, and ubiquitous. Covid-19
and its derivatives laid bare a “new normal” of change, marked by three
dimensions:
It’s perpetual — occurring
all the time in an ongoing way.
It’s pervasive — unfolding
in multiple areas of life at once.
It’s exponential —
accelerating at an increasingly rapid rate.
This three-dimensional (3-D) change is
defining our emerging future and, as a consequence, effective leadership will
be defined by the ability to navigate this new reality.
The problem is, our models for
leadership weren’t built for this kind of 3-D change. Human minds evolved for
thinking linearly and locally in the face of challenge, not exponentially and
systemically. Noted futurist Ray Kurzweil asserted, “The future is widely
misunderstood. Our forebears expected it to be pretty much like their present,
which had been pretty much like their past.” But, projecting our pasts onto our
futures exposes a fundamental error: Linear thinking can never catch-up and
adapt to the perpetual, pervasive, and exponential change occurring around us —
it’s simply too fast and too complex.
We need a new form of leadership, better
equipped to navigate this unprecedented kind of change. For this purpose, we
gathered, under the Stanford University umbrella, world-class luminaries —
leaders who generate impact and change at a global scale — for conversations on
the future of leadership and change-making. What emerged was a new vision of
leadership, which we call Sapient Leadership. A Sapient Leader is characterized
by being wise, sagacious, and discerning in navigating change while also being
humane in the face of change that can often feel alien. This kind of leadership
emphasizes — counterintuitively — an anti-heroic leader. Sapient Leaders
exhibit authenticity, humility, and vulnerability, inspiring the necessary
trust and psychological safety that drives shared learning and intelligence,
resulting in enhanced collective performance and leading to a better future for
all.
Limits of Linear Thinking in an Era of
3-D Change
In a world that’s relatively stable and
mostly predictable, where change is incremental, punctuated by relatively few
bursts of large change — what’s often called “disruption” — a model of
leadership that relies on linear, local thinking can be useful. Much of the
leadership literature focuses on the qualities, skills, abilities of the leader
as an individual, and the linear and local maps they use to navigate the world.
However, 3-D change presents a “high seas” environment where the leader
navigates multiple domains — the waves and ever-evolving weather — of change
simultaneously. In this environment, linear and local thinking can never adapt
fast enough, leaving us increasingly ill-equipped to manage our rapidly
changing business and work environments, our physical and mental health and
well-being, and the major trends that shape our societies and cultures.
Change, by its nature, leaves people and
organizations feeling confused, vulnerable, and fractured at a time when
resilience, cohesion, and collaboration are necessary to perform at the highest
levels. An emerging body of literature points to psychological safety, shared purpose,
and distributed cognition as powerful drivers of leadership, team, and
organizational performance, particularly in rapidly changing environments. The
days of “leader as hero” — the solo, individualistic leader who inspires
certainty in a deterministic way forward — are over. This evolution in how we
think about change and leadership has only accelerated in the past year.
Fortuitously, our spring course at
Stanford University, LEAD 111 “Luminaries: Life Lessons from Leaders and
Change-makers” became a study of how top tier leaders embodied this emerging
approach to leadership. Finalized one week before the Covid-19 pandemic struck
the west coast, our original plan was to create a new framework of leadership
suitable for a time of disruption, accelerating change, and a highly polarized
political and social environment, and we designed the course to engage leaders
and change-makers in conversations across sectors, generations, and the
political spectrum. We wanted to know how change-oriented leaders operate. As
the pandemic unfolded, however, we expanded the course to create a new model of
leadership. And recognizing that these questions were of immediate and broad
interest, we invited more leaders within and beyond the Stanford community to
weigh in on how they were navigating this 3-D change.
We engaged leaders across sectors to
analyze — in real time — how they adapted: captains of industry, such as Doug
McMillon, president and CEO of Walmart and chairman of the Business Roundtable;
innovators in health care such as Toby Cosgrove, former CEO of the Cleveland
Clinic, heart surgeon, and White House advisor; global social change-makers
such as Halla Tómasdóttir, CEO of The B Team, investor, co-founder of Reykjavik
University, and runner-up in Iceland’s 2016 presidential elections;
leading-edge technologists and innovators such as Bret Taylor, president and
COO of Salesforce, co-creator of Google Maps and the “Like” button, and board
member of Twitter.
The essential question we had was this:
If leadership is significantly defined by the ability to skillfully navigate
3-D change, what type of leadership is most effective for our emerging future,
one defined by perpetual, pervasive, and exponential change? The answers that
emerged formed the basis for Sapient Leadership.
How to Practice Sapient Leadership
The four pillars of Sapient Leadership
emerged out of the discussions with our luminaries as they were navigating 3-D
change in real-time — each leader, in some capacity, articulated a version of
these ideas. Leader humility, authenticity, and openness instills trust and
psychological safety. In turn, trust and psychological safety empower
individuals and teams to perform at their highest capabilities. Additionally,
continuously learning teams are essential for keeping pace with and effectively
navigating 3-D change. Finally, shared purpose and common values enhance focus,
cohesion, and resilience in the midst of 3-D change.
1. Leader humility, authenticity, and
openness instills trust and psychological safety.
In times of uncertainty, leaders often
posture themselves, maximizing perception of power and control. In contrast,
Halla Tómasdóttir modeled authenticity and humility when she reflected on her
challenges as a candidate during the Icelandic presidential election. She,
along with many of our luminaries, openly questioned the traditional paradigm
of a leader as an individualistic hero. Instead, she highlighted the need to
build trust through openness, saying, “what this crisis has shown us is that the
leadership style of ‘I know it all’ is not a good leadership style for this
moment or any other challenge we are going to continue to face and need to deal
with collectively, collaboratively, with compassion, and with care.”
In a world of 3-D change, leaders need
to continuously evolve themselves in order for their organization to evolve and
grow. Rather than bending the organization to the will of the leader, a leader
must be willing to instead exhibit humility and flexibility and change
according to what the organization and circumstances require. Tómasdóttir
exemplified this notion in her personal philosophy: “leadership is not given to
the few — it’s inside of all of us, and life is all about unleashing that
leadership.” This leadership style, which engenders trust and psychological
safety within teams and organizations, animates much of her work with the B
Team members that she’s leading — Sir Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, Ajay
Banga, Mary Robinson, and Marc Benioff, among others.
Our other luminaries echoed
Tómasdóttir’s message about Sapient Leadership in the context of 3-D change.
Doug McMillon said: “I don’t run Walmart, I help lead Walmart” asserting that
leadership of this sort needs to go beyond words. Leaders, he said, “have to
live it. It has to be authentic. It has to be habitual.”
2. Trust and psychological safety
empower individuals and teams.
3-D change amplifies our innate and
evolved human tendencies to skew towards threat perception, anxiety, and
divisiveness when experiencing stress and encountering ambiguity. As such,
psychological safety is even more important during these times change.
Individuals and the teams they comprise thrive in environments where trust and
psychological safety are present. In a recent extensive study at Google,
code-named Project Aristotle — for the maxim frequently attributed to him, “The
whole is greater than the sum of the parts” — researchers found that the most
important factor associated with the highest performing teams was psychological
safety. When team members feel safe to be vulnerable in front of one and to
take risks, they perform at their best.
A consistent theme running throughout
conversations with all of our luminaries was the essential nature of empowering
teams and individuals to perform at their highest capabilities, especially now.
“Change is not a solo sport,” said Bret Taylor, president and COO of
Salesforce. “All great change has been done by great teams, great communities,
and great networks.” When recalling times of rapid change throughout his career
— from the creation of Google Maps to inventing the “like” button to scaling
rapidly worldwide during the early days of Facebook — Bret asserted the
importance of leadership that motivates strong relationships, fluid
communication, and a foundation of trust to driving exceptional team
performance.
3. Continuously learning teams enable
effective navigation of 3-D change.
In a world where change is perpetual,
pervasive, and exponential, Sapient Leaders, their teams, and their organizations
must continually learn, update mental-maps, deploy new tools, and
course-correct based on the best ideas and practices. “If you want to make a
change in something you have to get into it deep,” said Toby Cosgrove,
describing his openness to learning transformative ideas from anywhere he
could. When he was the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic he regularly immersed
himself in contexts where he could learn a better way. “If I heard somebody was
doing something someplace in the world, I would pick up my pencil and paper and
I would go and watch them do it,” he said. “I traveled someplace, learned
something, and tried to bring it back and incorporate it.” What he was doing as
a leader was both modeling leadership as a process of continual learning so
others would replicate in their way, as well as disseminating what he learned
throughout the organization in order to improve on existing processes and
innovate new ones.
In a world of 3-D change, no one person
or organization can master all knowledge across all domains, no single person
or organization can master enough skills in breadth, depth, or pace, to keep
up. Instead, learning must be inspired by leadership, reinforced by culture,
occur across a variety of domains, coordinated through the whole and shared openly
and actionably to create the broader picture. The analogy here is to mosaic
vision, or the compound eye, where thousands of specific receptor units,
oriented in different directions, work in coordination to create a composite
perspective with a very wide angle of view, continually updating in real time
as the organism moves through time and space. Without data and input to
synthesize into understanding and action, a team or organization will be
perpetually impoverished. To keep pace with 3-D change, Sapient Leaders need to
enhance the breadth, depth, and pace of learning in their organizations to meet
the extent and velocity of change.
4. Shared purpose and values enhance
focus, cohesion, and resilience during 3-D change.
Professor Bill Damon, our esteemed
colleague at Stanford University and one of the world’s leading purpose
researchers, defines purpose as a stable intention to accomplish something that
is both personally meaningful and serves the world larger than the self.
Purpose, necessarily informed by our values and arising from a sense of
personal meaning, unites our inner world with our actions in the world around
us in a unique and powerful way in service of a vision larger than ourselves.
In times of 3-D change, which by its
nature amplifies uncertainty and ambiguity, shared purpose and values increase
organizational focus, enhance team cohesion, and amplify personal and
collective resilience. They can also powerfully mobilize large numbers of
people to solve complex problems together.
Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart and
chairman of the Business Roundtable, recounted Walmart’s Five Guiding
Principles, which provided the organization focus, resilience, and a basis for
cohesive action during the early challenging stages of the pandemic.
Start with the people: “Support our
associates financial health, physical health, and emotional health and
well-being. They are on the front line.”
Focus on the fundamentals and first
principles: “Serve our customers — we had to keep the food supply chain going to
avoid chaos.”
Make sure our own home is in order:
“Managing the business through the crisis — making sure inventory is under
control, making sure we have cash flow, etc.”
Keep building for the future, not for
the past: “Continue assertively into online e-commerce, grocery delivery,
leverage what’s already been put into play that customers want.”
We’re all in this together: “What can we
do to help other people through this crisis that does good for this company and
society?”
Doug recounted how these principles
guided Walmart’s actions during the early turbulence of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We received a call from the White House with a request to open drive-through
testing stations throughout the nation in Walmart parking lots,” he recalled.
“Although we didn’t know exactly how to do it and didn’t have a way to charge
for it, Walmart’s response was fully committed, rapid, at scale, and across
distributed geographies. Walmart’s ethos during this time: ‘Don’t worry about
the short-term financials. Go do what’s right and it will all eventually work
out.’”
The shared purpose and values
articulated in Walmart’s Five Guiding Principles allowed collective action that
was focused, cohesive, and resilient by many people across multiple geographies
in the early times of 3-D change. Focus and cohesion allowed rapid learning of
new skills, it allowed decisiveness during uncertainty, and it promoted working
together towards a shared goal bigger than any individual or the company.
Further, resilience allowed the courage to try something new and execute
quickly, without giving up, in the face of ongoing change and challenge.
The Future of Leadership
Along with the myriad challenges it
brought, the singular realization of 2020 is that 3-D change is the new normal.
Navigating perpetual, pervasive, and exponential change is the quintessential
test of effective leadership in this era. Leaders, teams, and organizations
that don’t skillfully navigate change will fail. Mastering this new reality
requires fundamental enhancements to our collective capabilities. Sapient
Leadership enables the creation of perpetual, pervasive, and exponential
capacity building necessary for handling 3-D change effectively. In addition,
our recent conversations with Sapient Leaders have uncovered new ways in which
exponential and transformative technologies can further enhance and amplify
human capabilities. This topic is the basis for a future article we are
preparing.
The key of Sapient Leadership is that it
fits into the long history of the evolution of our species. Sapient, in its
definition, refers to the nature of humans — it is in our nature to adapt or
risk perishing. The challenge of 3-D change is that it amplifies the pressures
on leaders, teams, and organizations to evolve and adapt faster, or become
irrelevant. Change that used to take place over years and decades is now taking
place in weeks or days. We, as a species, have never confronted change of this
magnitude or at this pace. Sapient Leadership is a framework that enables accelerated
adaptation in a wise and humane way. It builds into its structure the
imperative for leaders, teams, and organizations to continuously evolve in
order to overcome the challenges of 3-D change. Sapient Leaders and their
successful organizations change with change itself.
Article link:
https://hbr.org/2020/10/what-it-takes-to-lead-through-an-era-of-exponential-change
No comments:
Post a Comment