Despite the terrible impacts and challenges we’ve faced in the last few months, I think its fair to say, in workplace change terms, more positive change has happed in the last 8 weeks than the preceding 20 years. So why does it take a one in a hundred year crisis to drive changes which are good for most people anyway?
As someone that has led organisational change for most of their career, the last few weeks has been an interesting, exciting but also frustrating time in change terms. Change professionals can often take on the role of prophet crying in the desert in many organisations. The pace of change is often interminably slow. For many of us that have been the soothsayers of the needs of fourth industrial revolution in our workplaces, we can see the last 8 weeks as our age of enlightenment. A sudden global realisation that workplace structures and cultures have been stuck on a precipice of risk for a very long time.
The fact that Climate Change - a much bigger existential threat than the one we are currently experiencing, has not been enough to stimulate mass change in organisations and markets is something we should all think about when all this over. How do we understand what real risk is? As leaders we shouldn’t need to be slapped in the face with a wet kipper like we are now to make us realise where our organisations will end up if we don’t make more proactive changes.
Aside from this current experience, the global paradigm is evolving at such a rapid pace it can be hard to work out what to focus on, or to judge whether anything we’ve done in the last 20 years still has any relevance.
In this context the role of leadership is more challenging than ever. People continue to look to the top to set a 5 or 10 year strategy, to give a sense of certainty. In reality, things are changing so quickly that kind of certainty is now a complete illusion. Leaders need to make sure they understand that themselves. We are going to go through a long period of simply not knowing how things will work out. Being able to lead in this period is going to be very tricky. Giving people emotional comfort (if not security) but not giving in to the urge to lurch into a pre-defined cul de sac, simply to show leadership will be key.
In this context, what change initiatives should we invest in during this time? For me, I think there are three key elements that will provide the firmest foundation for the future;
Sentiment is everything.
Understanding the powerful emotions and sentiments driving markets and teams will need to be a key focus in our change efforts. We’ve all been impacted to lesser or greater degree by a collective trauma. Much like the post war period, this is driving a move towards collectivism over the individualism so often hard baked into capitalist models. Pretty much every brand will need to re-position itself in this new context. How you connect emotionally with your market and the perceived collective value of your products and services will be key.
Organisationally, a shift to peer support leadership models over hierarchical ones will help re-balance the tricky power shifts that are taking place between leaders and the front line. If you work in an organisation that delivers public goods (in the broadest sense) your customer and employee experience will take on a powerful positive or negative currency.
Organisations will need to focus in the recovery period on fairness and equality of treatment. We may need to accept that loss making activities that promote these principles are a key part of your business model. So don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Revenue forecasts will need to shift to integrating these costs in the long term.
The potential higher costs of some elements of this model are a challenge as we all try to recover from the hardest recession in history. The counter-balance will be the need for a much more purposeful process of realising value in your systems and processes.
Automated process transition to drive back office cost reduction has to remain a central priority, with much more rapid delivery. Resist the urge to take a short term view of these costs and put them on hold. Pure cost cutting exercises or narratives of scarcity with employees and customers that have seen you through this period will not be recoverable in the long term. This is primarily about empathic decision making within a new framework of what “value” really means.
We’ve started so we need to finish
One of the most positive things to come out of this time is undoubtedly the shift towards greater home working. Its good for most people, and certainly for the environment. We do though, need to ensure that in the long term our remote working becomes strategic, streamlined and thoughtful. It doesn’t work for everyone. Even those companies that had committed to the model before the crisis had to work hard to make it really work at an organisational level.
For those companies that have “fallen” into it, investment in your management styles and structure is going to be really key. If you hadn’t already adopted the approach large scale before the crisis - ask yourself, why not? Was it because you didn’t understand how it could work for you? or were you worried you didn’t have the skills in your managers to lead it properly?
If you had a particularly hierarchical or presenteism based management culture , remote working can be a recipe for workplace anxiety. Whatever those reasons were before, they still exist in your organisational psyche unless you take proactive action.
The first action will be to firstly accept and own what your culture was before and then do the hard yards. Large scale culture change is a very difficult business. There is no quick fix to create the kind of leaders and engagement that support this model of working effectively.
Don’t be fooled into thinking you’ve cracked it in the last few weeks - a few Zoom meetings with a manager wearing a silly hat does not an engaged culture make! In reality, without a purposeful management and leadership development strategy for this transition, we could be facing long term problems of team disintegration and poor wellbeing in our companies.
Innovate, don’t replicate
We are now facing not only the management of a crisis but the tipping point into a new industrial era on a global scale. Just tweaking your existing costs to survive is not going to work in the long term. Everything is changing; market structures, competition and how we will function as a society.
There are a whole new range of human problems that will need to be solved by your products and services. Spending time with people who can help your collective thinking about the future is vital.
Multiplicity of perspectives are what you need right now. Taking time to define and de-risk scenarios in the coming months is a central change activity. Creating a diverse thought leadership approach with a wide range of people inside and outside of your business to really understand what your business will need to look like is a priority. In particular, be conscious of sector based echo chambers - they are full of people with the same perspectives - make sure you also look outside your industry to see what others are thinking.
In innovation terms this is a period of being “comfortably lost” - having to work through how we got here and where we go next with no road map. As a leader this is about marshalling collective effort, empathy, embracing trial and error, being brave, admitting historic failure and understanding the limitations of our current perspectives.
In other words, this is the era of mass transformational change of both companies and people. Successful transformation is always painful. As leaders, we need to ask ourselves, are we equipping ourselves to feel the burn?
Kate Still is Chief Executive of Recensere Associates