While this was not the first time we’ve dealt with a crisis, nor is it the only issue humanity is faced with, this disruption seemed like an uninvited guest that barged into our homes. The suddenness, novelty, and brutality of the subsequent challenges have tested our human resilience and agility
COVID-19 has been a “wicked problem” for the world to deal with. It was around March of 2020, that the pandemic really took us by storm in South Africa. While this was not the first time we’ve dealt with a crisis, nor is it the only issue humanity is faced with, this disruption seemed like an uninvited guest that barged into our homes. The suddenness, novelty, and brutality of the subsequent challenges have tested our human resilience and agility. At the heart of the pandemic is the threat to our well-being. Through the epidemiological model, which most countries applied to curb the spread of the virus, we learn that COVID-19 is spread through close physical contact with an infected person. For me, this illustrated just how interconnected we are than I thought. In fact I remember jokingly saying how social distancing made me realize how “unhygienically close” our interactions were before COVID.
Nonetheless, here I am a year later, “chief introvert” that I am, voluntarily heading to the office twice a week because I miss the energy of the people there. I never thought I’d see the day!
And I was not alone. While our organization has given full liberty to individuals and teams to decide where to work, our snazzy new Africa HQ office was still buzzing just last Thursday at 4pm. I had not planned to be there until that late either, and my puppy would also later show me how unimpressed he was with this new behavior. I had gotten engrossed in the space, the work, the conversations, the people. There was something significant to this light bulb moment at a human experiential level that I sat for a moment too long, and soaked in.
I loved how collective human energy filled up the space.
Clearly there is something special about people that brings energy to organizations and business. Since business is created by people, this should be obvious, right? Yet, when we hear the popular aphorism “People are our greatest assets” many of us roll our eyes, unconvinced. In fact, I recently also found an article on Harvard Business Review with a title that screamed: “People Are Not Your Greatest Asset” . As society continues to deal with the collective trauma of how the pandemic unfolds – it is also not a coincidence that cases of injustice, gender-based violence, mental health and other social ills, are also bubbling to the surface. Subsequent organizational behaviour now reflects a more pressing story of the future of work, which now had the added layers of healing our collective trauma, and safe-guarding our collective well-being.
Leaders, who are often tasked with the tall order to navigate and shape the future, are logically expected to drive the “next normal” for economies and life to continue and thrive. Through such VUCA challenges, what we are rapidly learning is that “what got us here, won’t get us there”. The traditional bureaucratic structures that most organizations still use to organize themselves, do not lend themselves well to effectively responding to crisis situations. Disruptive challenges often require an engaged network of people, exploring with new ideas, making mistakes, resilience, and “failing forward”. At the core, this is about the capability to regenerate; constantly and collectively recreating ourselves (London Business School, 2020). Hamel (2021) further argues,
In a world of unrelenting change and unprecedented challenges, we need organizations that give everyone the opportunity to learn and innovate
The good news is that this capability is what makes us inherently human. In other words:
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According to psychologists, what differentiates us from other beings, is our open-ended ability to imagine and reflect on different situations, and our deep-seated drive to link our scenario-building minds together. Work does not have to be contradictory to the human experience. How do we then tap into this human essence and energy to allow the businesses we create to thrive? Here are a few pointers I have put together for leaders who are interested in humanizing business considering the current climate.
1.It’s a paradigm shift
It is nearly impossible for us to develop “best practice” a) in a short timeframe, and b) with the same mindset as before, even for Consulting houses. As the world drastically changes, we need a paradigm shift – a profound change in a fundamental way. Rushing too quickly to “best practice” and “future proofing” undermines the very nature of a wicked problem, which is often dynamic in nature. Bringing the human back into the center of business requires a complete paradigm shift.
Embracing new principles reflects the ability to reframe your worldview. Amidst the operational shifts required businesses need to also invest in leader development – processes like mindset transformation labs, think tanks to ask the big questions where people can imagine, experiment, play, and embrace new principles and ways of approaching the businesses they lead. I like the growing work on vertical development to elevate our sense-making, that Nick Petrie and team are doing on this. This leadership gap is often very intangibly felt – we all may have opinions about what is going on and what to do, but it only becomes impactful if we align more people to a common vision and hold everyone accountable for results. This is leadership at its best.
2. If you want to change the world, start by looking in the mirror
If you are waiting for your organization or government to give you all the answers to the new problems we face, you may be on the backfoot. I encourage you to notice how you take the responsibility for how you show up with yourself first every morning, and then your lockdown house mates, teams you’re a part of, and the businesses we lead. As humans we can also get in our own way. I remember for the longest time I had developed a bad habit where I’d sit on my bed, tending to my anxious thoughts for far longer than need be because I did not feel at ease with ‘going to work’ in such craziness. By clinging to what’s familiar, we end up not being able to effectively adapt and fall back on outdated strategies that actually lead to further dehumanization of workplaces and erode our own wellbeing (Welcoa, 2019).
The revolution started with me through many hours of therapy – yes, even Psychologists need shrinks. There was so much chaos and uncertainty around me. I had to regroup. I remember suddenly changing my LinkedIn statement to “Humanizing business” a few months ago, intuitively answering the call to take on the responsibility. Give yourself a purpose, mission and/or vision. My mission was simple; to humanize business, I put it out there, and that is what gets me out of bed these days. As a result, I have unleashed so much joy and vitality at work and with my colleagues. A team member texted me after a meeting last week saying “I need some of your happy pills Doc”. This is the power of human energy. While not all of us may need therapy, the process of tending to your inner self is in essence ‘working on your energy’ – we all have a natural state, which is that of joy, wellness, growth, pleasure, and love, and it is always available for us.
3. Respond with simplexity and abundance
Most of my time back to full time Corporate Consulting life (after 4 years) has been spent trying to understand blueprints and big, regurgitated concepts that when I did some asking, I found out most of us hardly understand. We need to normalize the power of ‘simplexity’ in the business environment. Kluger (2008) introduces this concept to argue how complex things can be made simple. Executive Director at Monash, Sudder (2018) finds correlations on how to apply simplexity principles to aid business decision through principles such as creating detours for accelerated motion when need be, run simulations, be selective to the most significant part of the issue (not the whole issue), balancing short term with long term benefits, and passion for what you do.
Responding to situations an abundant mentality often holds much more promise and possibility for many elements to coexist and regenerate themselves.
A scarcity mentality says: We need to only focus on the numbers, and we don’t have time and money to do the “soft, fluffy stuff” (sometimes accompanied with a nice “people are our greatest asset” caveat if you’re lucky)
An abundant mentality says: We need to work on all the things that make our business tick, starting with our people, there are infinite possibilities to what this business can be.
4. Inject some freedom into the system.
We need a system that maximizes contribution, not conformity. A recent COVID-19 study found that frontline workers who responded with ingenuity and vigor to the ambiguities and complexities of the emerging crisis, were leveraging the temporarily freed up top-down structures and rules as the system dealt with the shock. The costs of “bureausclerosis” don’t show up on the P&L, but are reflected in long decision paths, discouraging employees from taking initiative, punitive systems that discourage risk taking, distortion of data, and my recent fav., politicking (London Business School, 2020).
Injecting freedom in the system means empowering your people to be change agents. The process of innovation, from reimagining a product or a business model, to solving a new client need, requires individuals who are deeply empowered and feel like entrepreneurs (Forbes, 2020). The authors further suggest breaking big units into smaller operating teams of about 15-50, give real profit and loss responsibility to each ‘tribe’, give tribes autonomy to make decisions (and manageable mistakes), present a meaning financial upside at a personal level, upgrade the business skills of client facing employees so that they approach opportunities with a holistic view – see the detail here.
5. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word”
Hope is the most important word leaders (and by extension all of us) need to evangelize as we influence the spaces we care about. This is the ‘lighthouse effect’ that Erica Keswin refers to in her book “Bring your human to work” (2018). While leaders do not have to have all the answers, the opportunity for leadership stands before us everyday, and the greatest task for leaders is to continue to instill hope. Heifetz and Linsky (2020) point out that every day we must decide whether or not to put our contributing voice out there, or keep it to ourselves to avoid upsetting anyone. Being a leader is a behavior, a practice, that requires us to be impeccable with our words, and the courage to go against the grain. This matters in times of crises more than ever, exposing who we really are, because
The process of developing as an extraordinary leader is the same process as becoming an extraordinary human.
It is therefore in human principle all of our responsibility to foster an inclusive environment, particularly, those of business in nature, to reflect the beauty and strength of our humanity – i.e. collective human energy. We have shared 5 fundamentals of humanizing business which form the very beginning of a beautifully unfolding conversation. We hope to continue these conversations with deep dives from experts and executives who have disruptive ideas about “creating organizations that are as Amazing as the people within them”.
Business is, because we are.
References (More reading for the nerds)