Leading in Times of Uncertainty and Turbulence - When the Wolf Is Knocking and the Fear Won't Go Away “Courage,” Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion once said, “is knowing how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not be feared.” In times of uncertainty, when projects are being reassessed and jobs are being cut, it’s hard to tell the difference between “what ought to be feared and what ought not be feared.” Intellectually, we know that we can’t count on employment for life. Yet, we still speak about career paths and career ladders as if they could take us forward on a straight-ahead trajectory. It’s a shock to be displaced, passed over for promotion or asked to shift priorities. It’s sad to see an end to the camaraderie that we worked so hard to establish. What ought to be feared when you’re being tossed around by turbulence? When your job is redefined, what’s best for the organization may not be the job you were originally recruited for — or the promotion you groomed yourself to be ready to take. Should you sign on, if the assignments you are offered seem pedestrian in comparison to the work that you used to do? It may feel like you are putting the enterprise at risk when you say, “No” or “Not now.” A new reporting structure may have you working for someone who used to work for you. How much bargaining power do you really have when you should draw the line and say, “Enough,” because the workload or the travel schedule is more than you can handle and still maintain some balance in your life? What ought not be feared? After a downsizing or restructuring, most people want some reassurance that the turbulence is temporary and the uncertainty will end. Yet, rumors abound and undo whatever reassurance there is. There’s so much noise and so many people are clamoring to cut the best deal they possibly can that you don’t know whom to believe, even when you’re told, “This is the best we can offer” or “This is the way it will be.” Cynicism and worst-case scenarios take root like stubborn weeds in a garden and threaten to choke out the new growth you are trying to cultivate. “Give me a year-and-a- half with no more change,” one recent Courage Institute participant said in an exasperated tone of voice, “and I’ll trust that our executive team knows what they’re doing at the helm of this company,” oblivious to the fact that she was asking for an impossible guarantee. In the change-management workshops we conducted recently for a client undergoing a major reorganization, we offered the 5 Courage Factors as a roadmap for avoiding what ought not be feared — and for coping with the things that ought to be feared. Candor: The courage to speak and hear the truth. Saying, “No more change,” might not have been the brightest or most reasonable request for a director-level manager to put forward. But better the request is “out there,” where it can be dealt with and addressed, rather than lurking in hushed whispers and innuendos. During times of uncertainty and turbulence, savvy leaders get out of their offices and go looking for bad news. They ask, “How’s it going?” and wait patiently while people work up the nerve to give a straight answers. They pay attention to the look in people’s eyes and the stress or tiredness in their voices. They even devote part of their staff meeting to a “can-you-top-this” session where people present the rumors they’ve heard during the past week and decide how to respond to those rumors. Purpose: The courage to pursue lofty and audacious goals. Change is a whole lot easier to accept when you know why it was initiated and what it’s supposed to accomplish, when you “get it” and feel personally connected to its purpose. But what should you do when no one offers a good explanation and when the decisions seem arbitrary, politically motivated or just plain wrong? First, you can assume that there is a rational explanation. It may require a real leap of faith to shift from “look what they’re doing to me,” and, instead, “look at what they’re doing to take enterprise-wide success to a higher level.” If you’re not open-minded enough to hear the logic behind the change, even the most candid and straightforward explanation will fall on deaf ears. Second, you can look at the change as if you were an outside business analyst and take your ego and your entitlements out of the equation. You may need to raise your level of business, marketing or technical acumen to understand the change. You may need to ask questions. You may need to accept the fact that some decisions about feasibility are financially driven or market driven, even when the engineering or scientific data tell you that a project was viable. You may need to take pride in contributing to the well-being of your customer or patient, even when the product or service you’re providing isn’t the most sophisticated or expensive one in your repertoire. As a formal or informal leader, purpose doesn’t end when you wrap your head around the change. You strengthen courage when you can explain what’s mission-critical and how your efforts are serving a high and noble purpose. Will: The courage to inspire hope, spirit and promise. Intellectually, we know that we can’t count on employment for life. No matter where we are in the hierarchy and no matter how much we are achieving, chances are that we’ll all find ourselves somewhere else doing something new before it’s time to hang up our spurs and call it quits. How strange it is, then, that we see ourselves as “survivors” and “victims” in the turbulence of downsizing or rationalizing the company’s portfolio, based on whether we have a job that’s continuing or a job that’s being phased out. How strange it is that we extend the same pity and condolences to the so-called victims that we would extend to a colleague who was diagnosed with a terminal illness or who suffered a death in the family. Our emotions would be very different if we treated displaced colleagues like alumni who were graduating or who’d just received their discharge papers from the armed services and were entering a new phase of life. True, we’d experience pangs of sadness because “the old gang is splitting up.” But, beyond that, we’d congratulate one another on a job well done, help them network and reassure them about bright prospects for the future. We’re not suggesting that it’s pleasant to be out of work with bills and obligations piling up, to feel passed over for an opportunity you coveted, or to uproot yourself and your family from a community you love. We’re not suggesting that it’s stress-free to be aware that you are auditioning for the opportunity to keep your job, or to know that your prospects are only as secure as your latest performance. But it can be an adventure, a learning experience, an opportunity to make a fresh start. When we’re afraid and insecure, we may not see that for ourselves — and may need some help from our friends to renew our hope and enthusiasm. Rigor: The courage to invent better protocols and make them “stick.” Nothing eliminates fear better than being “in of the loop” and having something meaningful to do. The quicker you can inform your teammates and move beyond pondering change to action and execution, the sooner fear will simply evaporate. As soon as the announcement of an acquisition spread through the office like a wildfire, the Vice President of Clinical Development pulled his team together for a town meeting. “I don’t have any more information than we know from the press release that was posted this morning on the internet,” he announced, adding, “Until we know differently, here are our priorities. I’ll be convening a task force to pull together plans for the transition. If there are things you’d like the transition team to consider as they pull together our recommendations for the new owners, this is the time to start letting them know.” The task force’s plan, it turned out, had to be redone several times before they got something together that would “stick.” But the team had more control of their destiny than they would have if they had waited for marching orders or if they tried to justify continuing with business as usual. During transition periods, it’s natural to take a “wait-and-see” attitude or to defend the status quo and justify why nothing should change. It’s natural to back off on new standards or to stop reassessing priorities and to try to protect your team from pressure to perform better rather than adding to their pressure. It's natural to dig in your heels and work against the new owners or the management team that's initiating change, rather than offering up your best proposals and rational transition plans. You may have to reach deep into your own internal reservoir of strength to reverse what’s natural and mobilize your team to get on with it, reassess priorities and business practices and ask, “If I owned this enterprise, what would I want to preserve and what would I want to re-examine to make us a more efficient and effective enterprise?” Risk: The courage to empower, trust and invest in relationships. “If our shop is downsized and becomes a satellite that’s controlled from across the ocean,” a senior director confided to one of our change-management consultants, “this isn’t a job I’d want anymore.” It was a matter-of-fact assertion, voiced without any hint of anger or resentment. This senior director wasn’t independently wealthy. With the medical expenses his family faced, he couldn’t afford to be out of work for a long time. Yet, with grace and honor, he worked himself out of a job and groomed a successor to take over the unit he had built from the ground up. “Our work is now in your hands,” one of the scientists told his colleagues at a workshop we were invited to conduct about the courage to manage through the transition. “It’s up to you to continue the work we started and do us proud.” In the midst of reorganization, human resource managers see the best and worst of human nature. We wish we could tell you that team players, like the senior director who put team and organizational success ahead of self-interest cut better deals than those who put the “me issues” and political gamespersonship first. What we can tell you is that solid team players come out with their professional reputations and their professional network in a better place and, ultimately, get better recommendations and have brighter prospects than those who choose to be bitter, petty or self-centered. A code d’honneur that defines the risks that you expect teammates to take for one another — and to fulfill their fiduciary and professional responsibilities — ensures a level of trustworthiness, integrity and civility, so we don’t face fears that we ought not fear. The 5 Courage Factors are a simple formula. These five strengths are easy to recognize when we see them in action. But just because it’s easy to learn the formula, that doesn’t mean it will be easy or comfortable to act with candor, purpose, will, rigor and risk when you are in the throws of heavy turbulence and are facing the uncertainty or tough choices that come with large-scale organizational change. Given a choice, most of us would prefer 18 months with no significant change, particularly if we were fortunate enough to find ourselves in a job we enjoyed, working with good people doing work that was professionally gratifying. But, in a business environment where organizations have to be agile and nimble to respond to new conditions and new opportunities, there are few guarantees and there’s little job security. Intellectually, of course, we all know that we can’t count on employment for life. No matter where we are or how much we are achieving, we’ll all find ourselves somewhere else doing something new before it’s time to hang up our spurs and call it quits. But that doesn’t mean we’re ready to move on and uproot our families or give up our pet projects, corner offices, our autonomy or the routines we’ve established. It doesn’t mean that we’re ready to shift allegiances or redefine our professional identities on a whim — or because someone “up there” has decided that they need to tweak the organizational structure. Workout a healthy measure of courage, it’s hard to envision us pulling together and performing at our best when we’re asked to work without a net, in a commercial and investor climate where we’re only as good as our latest commitment and our last performance and where our partners are continuously reassessing their options and their own best practices. With a health measure of courage, we can embrace the new world of working without a net as an adventure, knowing how to fear what we ought to fear and how not to fear what we ought not fear, without taking our eye off the prize.