Your ability to lead through change is playing a major role in your value as a leader.
The pandemic has brought unprecedented change. Customer habits and demands have shifted faster than ever. Government restrictions have tightened and loosened only to tighten again. Your employees have dealt with kids being sent home from school, family members battling illness, and uncertainty about how long they’ll work from home.
The Mourn Phase
What’s your framework for dealing with change? How do you coach your leadership team to think about all that’s being thrown at them? We have a model you might find useful in considering how you – and your team – are navigating all that’s being thrown at you.
Anytime an undesired change happens in our lives we immediately enter a period of mourning. Divorce. Disease. Death. Job loss. Quarantine. Online school. Budget cuts. Customer demand shifts. They all lead to mourning.
We miss what was. We feel lost. Confused. Disappointed. Uncertain.
How long this phase lasts depends. It can be hours. Or decades. Not rushing through it provides healing and relief. Getting stuck here is destructive. It prevents us from experiencing what is or thriving in what is to come.
The Adapt Phase
Once we are willing to accept the past is the past and we want to be part of the future we begin to transition into the Adapt Phase. This phase requires changes in our mindset and our actions in order to survive in our new environment.
Listen to podcast episode on this topic:
There has never been a time in our lifetime when so many have had to adapt so many changes. The temptation in this phase is to celebrate survival. Doing so for a moment is healthy but stopping there robs us of growth. The popular song about change left out the most important word. What doesn’t kill you CAN make you stronger. And wiser. But neither are guaranteed.
Change gives us boasting rights. It gives us cool scars to show off. But it doesn’t necessarily make us wiser.
The Learn Phase
The growth available after change comes in the Learn Phase. This step requires reflection. Stop long enough to consider what you have learned. We challenge executives we coach to answer that question after every major change their team has had to adjust to in the marketplace. Capture the learning in 2-3 bullet points. Try to keep each to one or two words.
In the Covid era the one-word “learnings” executives have stated to me sound like: “relationships,” “preparation,” “focus,” “efficiency,” “adaptability,” and “ownership.” Each of those words has a narrative attached to it that captures what that executive and their team have learned from the massive change they’ve been through.
Your competitive advantage in an era of frequent changes is largely determined by your ability to learn and apply that wisdom quickly.
