Leadership in a hostile, VUCA, environment
Patterns of leadership in troubled times
Skills for leadership are natural, learned and require continual refinement. New skills are forged in times of crisis. Conversely leadership as a position starts at a point in time, often when something new is started.
On the assumption that positional leadership starts when you start a company, division or something new, it is a truism that a leadership team will inevitably change over time, as the needs of the business change. Typically a founder will have a bias towards technology, science, innovation or marketing and will have created a new widget for someone who did not know they needed it. Such is the demand for growth that a founding skillset (innovation) has to quickly give way to finance, legal and management as scale is needed to satisfy stakeholder inquisitions. Leadership who leads knows that more (new) revenues are needed and will steer a team back towards skills that bring in creativity and innovation, leading to income. As more demand is generated with the limited resources available more and better controls are needed, as the pressure is to scale up processes for efficiency. And so the leadership challenge cycle continues.
In reality this often is not one leader or one leadership team following the ebbs and flows of change but a brutal change of leadership to create a more dramatic change faster. So we know the difference between how leadership should flow and how leadership actually changes; the red line of regime change.
How should a leadership team with flow, lead in troubled times?
Right now we live in a hostile environment, we are in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous situation. There is much written on VUCA, however what about flow of leadership in this time? Brutal regime change is not a solution so what should we be focussed on?
Right now the defence team is in control. They are dealing with a rapid move to new controls, new law, new regulations, new ideas and plain simple survival. The team are dealing with no previous experience of a global pandemic and collapse of economics. Data is not there, there is no historical data and any data we have is being generated now, without providence or lineage. We have no model. We cannot afford to wait for better data or a better model we have to make judgement. Previous ideas and concepts are of no value and we have to deal with what is in front of us. There is no pattern even though we keep searching for it. We are exhausted as we have to learn a whole new set of rules.
The defence team is all powerful, they have the voice and the ear of all the key stakeholders. Whilst no one has previous experience, some just know what to do.
Leadership is not looking for the flow. Right now defence rules, but leaders know you cannot win with defence. To win you have to score goals. Leadership needs the offensive team to be there and ready.
Right now the defence team are looking round for more cost saving and eyes up all those in the offensive team. R&D, training, innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, privacy, brand, HR, investment, research - easy targets as little value now. Leadership knows that these offensive teams will be needed but is not sure when and how to take a scalpel and not an axe to all teams.
Leaders in flow will be resting their offensive team now, getting them ready for when needed. But how to justify this is a defence team hell bent on survival. Sending the offensive team off to study, getting rest, finding new skills, discovering gaps in their knowledge, sense making for new models. They are being prepared for the next battle and need to be battle ready and fit.
The question is when will the time be right to stand down the defence team and seed control to the offensive team, surely when we have experience, we have data, we have rules and we have a model. Leadership in flow will sense when our team and the market is ready.
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