“This American system of ours . . . call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.” – Al Capone

Do most people, while not becoming notorious gangsters, follow Capone’s lead and look out first and foremost for Number One?

Not So Fast

Actually, they don’t. Instead, they act more in line with the reasoning of the Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen, who stated: “We should not fall into the trap of presuming that the assumption of pure self-interest is, in any sense, more elementary than assuming other values. Moral or social concerns can be just as basic or elementary.”

Even many conservatives have come around to recognizing the motivation to help others. The conservative Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson, for example, once asserted that “On balance, I think other-regarding features of human nature outweigh the self-regarding ones.”

Further, the philosophical brainchild of capitalist economic theory, Adam Smith, admitted that “How selfish soever man may be supposed; there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”

Could it be that we claim to be self-interested even though in reality we are just as—and sometimes more—interested in the welfare of others? Is it possible that, due to our need as human beings to belong to social groups to survive, we are physiologically constructed with larger brains and less able to care for ourselves in our early years than any other mammal because we value social connections—which require kindness, compassion and concern for others—more than maximizing benefits for ourselves?

Pretending to Be Selfish?

If this is the case, why would we tell people we are self-interested when we actually are not? Could it be because we have bought into Smith’s economic theory and the philosophical theories of Hume and Hobbes and others who advocate for self-interest, creating a cultural norm of self-interest?

Defying a norm is an act most of us would rather not engage in, primarily because, as University of Amsterdam emotion researcher Gerben Van Kleef has found, others tend to become angered when we do so. Honestly sharing that you are volunteering because you want to help others could earn you the wrath of someone angered by your norm violation. Such a person might claim you are trying to impress someone, a goodie-two-shoes, or just a socially inept nerd.

Numerous studies by Stanford social psychologist Dale Miller confirm that we often feign self-interest to conform to what we falsely believe to be a social norm. In one of Miller’s studies, for example, participants were asked how likely undergraduates would be to donate blood for either 15 dollars or nothing. They estimated that almost 100 percent more undergrads would give if there were a financial incentive. In other words, the norm of self-interest at work: no money, no honey, or so we believe.

As it turned out, less than 18 percent more of the students were willing to give blood if they were to receive cash for doing so. Sadly, our specious beliefs in the norm of self-interest cause us to act self-interested even if, at our core, we are not.

Buying In

“Maybe those students who were willing to give blood for free are not those who buy into the prevailing economic theories that make capitalism possible,” you may be thinking. If it is indeed the case that subscribing to the norm of self-interest is most common among those of us who also subscribe to the economic theories of free markets and laissez-faire capitalism, then wouldn’t it be the case that economics students would be the least likely to defy the norm of self-interest?

This is precisely the case. University of Wisconsin sociologist and behavioral economist Gerald Marwell conducted eleven experiments to test the free-rider hypothesis of classic economic theory and discovered that “people voluntarily contribute substantial portions of their resources…to the provision of a public good.” However, Marwell found one notable exception: graduate students in economics were less than half as likely as non-economics graduate students to contribute their resources to the group.

Similarly, in an economic “ultimatum game” in which you could offer your partner any amount between zero and ten dollars (they can choose to accept or refuse, and if they refuse both you and they receive nothing), the proposers who consistently defied the norms of a 50-50 split in their favor were economics students.

Why would economics students act more out of self-interest than others? According to a review of such studies by IESE Business School professor Fabrizio Ferraro, “many of the experimental results on the tendency of economics students and economists to defect more, cooperate less, and in general, behave more in accordance with the dictates of self-interest may be mediated by belief in the norm of self-interest and its prevalence.”

So what should an enlightened individual do? Help others and never pursue their own interests? Doesn’t sound very sustainable. Look out for Number One and ignore the needs of everyone else? Not sustainable either, considering that we need to belong to social groups—including groups of two, e.g., friendships and intimate relationships—in order to survive and thrive as human beings. It seems that some balance is required between advancing oneself and helping others.

To help find this balance, consider the advice Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos gave in an interview with PC Week in 1999: “Profits are the lifeblood of a company but not the reason to exist. You don’t live for your blood, but you couldn’t live without it.”

Helping Others Feels Good

At a primal level, you need your blood to exist. Yet research has increasingly found that you also need social relationships to live. People who cannot develop and sustain such relationships adequately tend to experience much higher risks to their physical (their wounds even take more time to heal) and mental (including increased anxiety and reduced self-esteem) health and die sooner.

This week, attune to your natural inclination to help others in need. Take note of how you feel afterward, and compare this feeling to other moments when you act purely to advance your interests. You may find the results of your sample-of-one experiment surprising—perhaps even transformative—and experience firsthand how helping others expands your happiness.

“I am discovering a whole new respect for chief sustainability officers,” I texted the facilitator of Leading the Sustainability Transformation.

I was general manager of a mock company, Rio Negro Bioproducts, with the express goal to transform it from a traditional business to a sustainable one — economically, environmentally and socially — over a 20-year period compressed into a 10-week virtual simulation.  

Powered by leadership readiness firm, WholeWorks through the University of Victoria, the simulation teamed me up with global counterparts, ranging from leaders at Griffith Foodsand Plant Tech Alliance to designers, consultants and a former Airbnb executive. We assumed the roles you would expect at a manufacturing site designed to supply a global market — supply chain, operations, HR, marketing, sales, IT, EHS — as well as the roles sometimes considered “fringe” but that are in reality critical success factors such as government officials (a local mayor) and civil society (an NGO leader).

We strove to adhere to Rio Negro’s vision and meet aggressive triple bottom-line targets as major systemic issues hit its operations — geopolitical tensions and natural disaster brought on by climate change. We did this all while facing, relentlessly, shareholder demands for their expected return on investment.

Companies are under immense public and competitive pressure to change — to positively contribute to problems that seem nearly impossible to solve including climate change, racial inequity, an increasing cultural divide and the global pandemic. Where should a business begin? 

The Leading the Sustainability Transformation is an opportunity to experiment with sustainable transformation — and accelerate the implications — both the good and the bad.

Here are my lessons learned.

1. Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation — embrace the mess

A common cultural expectation of managers is to know the answer in advance, to be confident and ready to move. Researcher Brene Brown has long pointed out vulnerability is basically uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. If it’s genuinely uncomfortable, why embrace it?

Real innovation requires walking into the unknown — sometimes alone, sometimes with others. It requires you lead by acknowledging what you don’t know and inviting others along with you. 

Sustainability is about aligning different departmental agendas and incentives, for which you have varying degrees of subject matter knowledge, to create a cohesive strategy. Allowing yourself to be vulnerable — to take risks — can open up business opportunity. Build an environment where individuals can introduce unproven or partial ideas that may not even make sense yet but have the seeds of something great. 

But how do we create the conditions for this kind of environment?

Applying the idea:

• Ask questions, rather than answer them. One person doesn’t need to have all the answers, and together with the knowledge of those around you, solutions can emerge that aren’t immediately obvious.
• When facing a particularly thorny problem, slow things down. Give people a chance to dwell more, instead of racing to the answer.

2. There are no absolutes — hypothesize, learn and adjust

When approaching systemic problems, you’re heading into a situation that’s naturally messy. It’s not quite clear where you’re going with it, so by definition, there cannot be one right universal or pre-determined answer. In some ways, the answer is the path you forge with the unique communities or stakeholders you’re working with to do that.

“Systemic problems affect people in so many different ways, there’s no one way to frame or define it. You can’t say at the onset this is one way to do it and we will know the solution when we’re done,” points out Matt Mayberry, Whole Works founder and designer of the LST curriculum.

This principle of always starting from a place of acknowledging uncertainties was an ongoing refrain throughout the course. At times, I thought something was absolutely the right answer, only to be reminded through the experience of my colleagues that I could see only one part of the whole picture. Even when I served in the most senior team role of senior vice president, blind spots were not in short supply. While perception often seems like hard facts, in reality, it’s often a subjective set of assumptions.

Applying the idea:

• Frame activities as experiments. Be upfront about your assumptions, uncertainties, and potential blind spots. This accelerates learning.  
• Move in shorter, faster intervals. What’s the easiest experiment you can do to test if what you think is aligned with where things really are? 

3. Have the courage to fail and take personal responsibility for it

Fail fast, learn and adjust. It’s a popularized notion, but it takes courage to fail. A less popular concept? Failure doesn’t feel good! Who wants to be in a high stakes situation and fail? Individuals and teams, for the most part, want to achieve their goals. Yet it’s inevitable: To create something that hasn’t been done before, you will fail along the way.

At one point in our simulation, I, along with a couple of others, made an operational call early on that took us a hypothetical decade to recover from. Those of us who made the decision said, “We feel awful about this, but we made this decision and these are the impacts.” The decision cost a lot of money. Thankfully, it was hypothetical.

Taking responsibility for the failure helped us move through it, learn and adjust. At one point, we thought our team wouldn’t recover. By acknowledging it in a provenly safe environment, our team helped others quickly learn from our failure.

Applying the idea:

• Build an environment where individuals feel safe enough to acknowledge when an activity doesn’t meet expectations.
• Model taking personal responsibility by doing so if you experience failure. This sets the stage for others to do so.

4. Lead by asking what works

Cross-functional teams perform better when they focus on peak experiences and best practices compared to teams that focus on problems and gaps. Groups initially characterized by dysfunction and defensiveness can be revitalized and energized through an approach called Appreciative Inquiry. 

The Appreciative Inquiry approach asks what gives life to a system, what keeps it most healthy and alive. Ask questions about what’s working well and what are the possibilities of building on that. This creates a different frame than asking what is broken, who or what is causing it, and how it can be fixed. This approach does not suggest blindly ignore problems. It means leading by observing what is already giving healthy life to a system.

“When we focus on problems, we start from a hole that we must crawl our way out of” was a key principle pointed out by Mayberry during the course. “Unfortunately, when working with a group, creating a shared negative view of the world tends to lead us to dig ourselves even deeper. This is not an inspiring place to be if you’re trying to imagine a better future and think of creative ways to make it a reality.”

Applying the idea:

• When a group is faced with a difficult challenge, ask questions about what’s working well, what might be, and what should be? Frame an opportunity in a way that opens things up to a collaborative approach.
• Include the whole system in the room. Include stakeholders outside your immediate sphere of sight, such as those on the “fringe” — the poor, weak, isolated, non-legitimate and non-human (other species).

A flock of Black Swans is on our horizon. The unpredictable is becoming ever more predictable: global pandemic; climate change; inequality; and a rising demand for food, energy and water all threaten democracy, capitalism and our very lives.

In his book “Green Swans,” strategist and systems thinker John Elkington delineates between these existential crises and opportunities — described as Green Swans and Black Swans. Symbolized by an extraordinary bird that embodies grace and elegance, a Green Swan event catalyzes transformational change. Conversely, Black Swan events assume the same potential for transformation — however, these situations degenerate life on a systemic level.

Black Swans or Green Swans? It depends on your perception.

Leaders who see Green Swans — opportunity in these risks — move sustainability from the periphery of their business to its core. It requires both a shift in mindset and strategy.

Part one of this two-part article series focused on lessons I gleaned about mindset during Leading the Sustainability Transformation (LST), a virtual simulation that compressed 20 years of business transformation into 10 weeks, calling upon participants to practice building and executing a strategy transforming a corporation into a sustainable, circular and competitive business — and then to immediately apply those lessons to their own organizations.

This second part focuses on strategies for leading this transformation.

The dichotomy of creative destruction: embrace the paradox

All markets change. To survive and thrive, businesses must change. Creative destruction is the ability of a firm to destroy its current capabilities in favor of the innovations of tomorrow and create shareholder value. It’s a process of mutation that continuously revolutionizes the current structure from within.

With one leg in the present and the other in the future, businesses that lead through innovation embrace the paradox of creative destruction.

These types of companies navigate a fundamental tension between the two realities — managing today’s business and its pressure to realize short-term results and often shareholder demands, while simultaneously creating tomorrow’s technology and markets and fulfilling expectations for future growth.

The sustainable value framework developed by Stuart Hart, offers a way to manage tension by breaking down this dichotomy into a two-by-two perspective: first examining time — today and tomorrow — and then considering the needs of the organization and the needs of its stakeholders (shareholders, customers, suppliers, communities, etc.)

Do more with less

The first area in the business of today is about doing more with less. To an extent, it’s the most straightforward approach in Hart’s framework. It’s about reducing waste and optimizing resources.

While not the sexiest of topics, the efficiency of doing more with less reduces cost and corporate risk. It also has the potential to both inform and fund a broader sustainability agenda.

Applying the idea:

• Taking the LST scenario as an example, our job was to transform a manufacturing plant that was operated with high waste, high carbon emissions and high-power usage into an environmentally friendly, circular business model. Doing more with less meant intentionally considered integrated investments in capital, products, processes and employee development, while also investing in farmers in the supply chain and the broader community workforce. It meant leveraging green technologies inside and outside of the fence line.

This integrated approach led to a virtuous upwards cycle: less expense; better reputation; and productive workforce. It led to new products to meet customers’ demands, authentically earned value in the community, and ultimately a return on invested capital to meet the investors’ expectations.

Lean in and listen to the unfamiliar

Product stewardship is another strategy for managing the business of today. It’s about integrating stakeholder views into business processes, transparency and new forms of governance. It’s about accessing the voices beyond a company’s immediate control — those who would not ordinarily have a seat at the table: local communities; NGOs; the environment; the economically disadvantaged; and in some cases, even the non-human (other species) — and engaging these voices in the product lifecycle.

Applying the idea:

In 2017, over 40 percent of Romanians were among the most exposed in Europe to the risks of poverty, social exclusion and stigmatization. Energy theft and fuel poverty in these groups was high. While many initiatives approached the theft through a punitive lens, renewables energy company, Enel, spotted opportunity. Why did these communities face persistent problems around energy access? How might Enel Romania engage them authentically?

Teaming up with local NGOs, Enel Romania took a customer-centric approach. It listened. Through dozens of community engagement meetings with citizens, an energy community mediator and a customer care team dedicated to solving energy access issues, the company immersed itself in the lives of people and voices beyond its immediate line of sight.

Issues became immediately apparent. As an example, in just one geography, families used improvised electrical heating during the winter that was dangerous and inefficient. Many found it difficult to navigate a large utility company such as Enel Romania. Buildings weren’t connected to the district’s heating and gas and were poorly insulated. All this resulted in a significant portion of the Romanian population in need of energy yet disengaged in electrical services.

In response, Enel Romania came up with a series of development initiatives that contributed to solving problems for these communities, ranging from energy efficiency and safety trainings to debt restructure to enable payments, better access education and medical services. This built trust in the community. Today, Enel Romania has a new and loyal customer segment, increased revenues and more effective business processes based on direct feedback from these communities.

Product stewardship requires managers to immerse themselves in perspectives they may not ordinarily encounter. While this sounds straightforward, it is challenging when managers’ view beyond a core set of stakeholders is limited. These perspectives are in many ways opposite of many managers’ current business context. It’s hard to see what you cannot see.

Invest in the future: It comes slowly – yet suddenly

The second axis — investing in tomorrow — is, in part, about acquiring the skills, competencies and technologies to position an organization for future growth. It’s about embracing new kinds of logic.

Weak signals, indicators of an emerging issue that may become significant in the future, can grow strong over time, building into trends can be blindsiding if one isn’t listening for them. A company that invests in the competencies and technologies for the future is positioning itself to develop these nascent signals into high-value opportunities and capitalize on them as they mature.

Applying the idea:

Patagonia created a corporate venture capital fund, Tin Shed Ventures, to invest in startups that offer solutions to the environmental crisis, and technologies for the future.

Bureo, a social enterprise and Patagonia grantee, has made a business of introducing plastic fishing nets into the company’s supply chain — as a raw material. Fishing supports a way of life across South America. Yet, hundreds of millions of pounds of nets live in the ocean, killing the marine life where fisherman continue to fish.

Bureo discovered that these nets are often highly recyclable. With Patagonia’s support, Bureo is partnering with fisheries across South America and has pulled 3.1 million pounds of plastics out of the ocean. These nets are in the raw material for Patagonia’s hat brims, previously made from virgin plastics. (Watch the story here.)

The mainstream pivot towards circular economy processes is still young. Bureo is just a couple of years old. Patagonia is investing in a scalable infrastructure by which it can reimagine some of its most iconic products. It’s also setting a standard that companies can model to remove exponentially more plastics from the ocean.

Co-create future markets with historically marginalized stakeholders

Managing tomorrow’s business is about building future markets through co-creation with stakeholders, many of whom have been overlooked or exploited by capitalism. It is about building business models in ways that reconstruct the current economic system to be more equitable and inclusive.  

Similar to the Enel Romania example, it’s about understanding the context of different communities and then building future competitive business models, and new products and services in collaboration with these stakeholders.

Applying the idea:

The Circular Cities Coalition, facilitated by PYXERA Global is one approach to this. This coalition of organizations is working together with U.S. and global city governments to create a new way of operating for urban and regional economies.

Underpinning the coalition’s approach is that of ownership and circularity — enabling economic transformation among historically marginalized and Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) communities by co-creating regenerative business models. Along with comprehensive landscape assessment in critical areas such as materials flow, impacts and policy gaps, Coalition members are conducting community engagement workshops in areas such as Nome, Alaska; Lake County, Montana; and Takoradi, Ghana, to design the needs, problems and opportunities encountered by these groups into the circular economy roadmaps.

The coalition is working with these communities to co-create a host of profitable and regenerative business models that will reset their economic foundation for years to come and leave ownership in the communities. These models range from repurposing and selling used plastics to standardizing re-sell and repair shops to investments in entrepreneurs who are creating and owning the next regenerative business model in their communities.

A Green Swan can emerge from a Black Swan

It takes insight, tenacity, vulnerability and a lot of experimentation to find the opportunities hidden in Black Swans. Shedding light on Black Swans turns them to Green.

By helping your company see what other companies may be missing — managing for today, while building the future — you can identify opportunities inclusive, equitable business models that create disruptive change and redefine your industry.  

Ticking clocks are the enemy of listening, and COVID-19 has turned life into a pressure cooker for leaders worldwide. Their businesses require more attention, their employees require more support, their families’ routines have unraveled, and their pursuits have been neglected.

The more leaders feel besieged, the more they focus on reducing the time it takes to satisfy their obligations. Focusing on saving time typically drives leaders to choose communication approaches convenient for them, which shortens their delivery and loses empathy for their audiences, creating more problems and demands on their time — continuing the vicious cycle.

As their attention becomes even more divided, especially in a digital landscape, how can leaders hone their listening skills during a crisis? Below are five approaches leaders can use to improve their listening skills when the clock is ticking in the back of their mind:

Fix Your Focus

How leaders define success before their conversations directly impacts their engagement during these discussions. When success equals concluding conversations quickly, leaders communicate accordingly. Audiences who sense this priority often feel devalued, rushed and defensive. Leaders can do two things to avoid creating these barriers. First, focus on the information, value, or commitment they need to obtain during each conversation. Second, convey respect and demonstrate attentiveness by removing any distractions from their conversations.

Listen for Hidden Value

People react the strongest to what they hear first. This is especially true for leaders whose success has taught them to trust their judgment above nearly all others. Leaders are especially susceptible to reacting to the first word or gesture that appears to confirm their pre-conversation expectations. As stress levels rise, communications often become unstructured, and word choices become less focused. These stress-related deviations can create false impressions. Leaders looking to enhance connections and obtain critical information will benefit from suppressing their initial emotional responses and listening for indications of fears, interests, opportunities, and withheld information they can capitalize on.

Remain Contextually Aware

Tunnel vision can be fatal when leaders are navigating complex and dynamic business challenges. Leaders who look back at failed initiatives or missed opportunities and ask, “What did I miss?” or “How come I didn’t know that?” likely ignored previous warning signals. Emotions, pressures, goals, fears, distractions, and even the room’s physical setup can impact how leaders interpret their observations and their resulting decisions. Context is king. It is critical, especially in high-stakes conversations, that leaders remain contextually aware of the forces impacting their audiences’ communication and their own perceptions.

Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast

Leaders create their organizations’ communication climates. They make it exponentially more difficult for their audiences to share sensitive information when they are perceived to routinely rush to the point, inquire judgmentally, and focus on confirming their own beliefs. Certified forensic interviewers routinely obtain truthful confessions, without the benefit of evidence, in under 20 minutes. Leaders can get critical information in five minutes or less when they employ the right approach. Questions can be perceived as invitations or attacks. Leaders should invest the first few minutes of their conversations in setting a calm tone, demonstrating understanding of their audience’s current situation, and ask straightforward questions that invite their audience to let down their guard and share the information leaders genuinely need to hear.

Listen for changes in your audience’s delivery

Slowing down their conversations and dialing up their contextual awareness positions leaders to significantly increase their powers of observation. Leaders graduate from collecting information to identifying strategic intelligence when they shift their focus away from saving time and confirming their expectations. Formerly unrealized indications of emotional shifts and withheld information become crystal clear. They will identify when their audiences are suddenly talking faster or slower and louder or softer. They will start pinpointing when pauses before responding are too long or too short in relation to the question. Additional alert signals such as unfinished statements, misplaced pronouns, and vague descriptions will also become crystal clear. These enhanced observations will highlight opportunities for follow-up questions, additional due diligence, decisions to avoid, and opportunities to seize.

Life is a series of solvable problems. Leaders can choose to focus on the problem, or they can choose to focus on the solution. Concentrating on the sand draining from the hourglass is a problem-focused approach that prohibits leaders from creating the opportunities necessary to obtain critical information. Leaders employ solution-based methods when they identify the objectives they need to achieve, create the communication climate required to receive essential information, and filter all of their observations through each situation’s context.

Much of the world today seems to indulge in schadenfreude — taking pleasure from others’ misfortunes. But if we train ourselves to focus on cheering for others’ successes, we also create much more success for ourselves. We need to fundamentally understand that it’s a good thing for everyone when other people have success. It is not a poor reflection on us. It does not highlight our lack of achievement. Instead, it creates an environment of success for us all. 

That’s why every day, we should practice encouraging others with our cheerleading powers. We need to lead by example and be the head cheerleader at home, at work, or in our community organizations. When your neighbor brings home a new Mercedes Benz, be the first to congratulate her. At work, be the boss who takes responsibility for all mistakes, gives their team credit for all successes, and develops their subordinates to one day take their position and even surpass them in their careers. Tremendous success and fulfillment come to those who cheer for others’ accomplishments and achievements simply because of the laws of attraction. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Use these three fundamental strategies to harness the power of success:

1. Believe in abundance, not scarcity.

We need to believe in abundance, not scarcity. We can’t think that just because someone else is enjoying a wonderful slice of pie, that there is less pie for the rest of us. We need to understand the pie is limitless. The servings are infinite. Technology and the onward march of humankind have continually proven that what we previously thought was finite is infinite. Abundance solutions have repeatedly dispelled our fears of lack of food, water, energy, and even space on the planet, and now Elon Musk is even moving us all to Mars.

The more people we connect to help each other and do business together, the more concentric circles of reward we create around ourselves. Restaurants counterintuitively group together in specific locations and pray that their competitors prosper because they know they will, in turn, also flourish. Car dealerships do the same. Starbucks cafes often locate diagonally across the street from each other because people don’t like to make left turns … well, except in London.

2. Help people recover when they fail.

When people fail, be the first one to help them recover. Don’t go to NASCAR races for the crashes, don’t watch a hockey game for the fights, and don’t take pleasure in others’ stumbles. Remind others that they only stumble when they take risks, but those risks are necessary for ultimate success. Encourage them to continue to stick their necks out. 

Don’t reinforce the system’s tendency to cause people to stay in the middle of the pack, head down and unscathed. Encourage them to stretch and reinforce the true definition of success — simply getting up one more time than they fall. I am living proof that great success can allow us to take our eye off the ball but that great failures can teach us profound lessons that have the power to propel us to the next level.

3. Compete only with yourself.

Compete only with yourself — but promise me you will compete. Get in the race or maybe get back in the race. Compete with whomever you were yesterday. Stop watching the shows about celebrities’ fabulous lives because we all know they are not actually fabulous. Stop watching the reality and talk shows displaying the terrible lives of underachievers so that we feel better about ourselves, thinking, “At least I’m not that bad” when we haven’t put ourselves out there.

Compete with yourself and focus on getting just a little bit better each day based on your benchmarks and grading system. Hold yourself accountable, but give others a break. We never know what mile has been walked in their shoes today.

A metaphor for my corporate golf outings: “Putt yours out but always ensure your clients’ putts in the leather are gimmees.” Those who understand will understand.

The world today needs more cheerleaders. We can mentor and cheerlead in so many ways. We can help someone get that job, help them get into the right school, or even help them get that first date. And, in turn, life is reciprocal. How do we get the most business referrals? By spending all day giving referrals to everyone else. How do we keep our office climate upbeat and exciting? By practicing management-by-walking-around and zapping everyone with positive energy.

Help your friends see opportunities instead of problems. Help your teammates see that when one door closes, another one opens. Be that mentor, that coach, that cheerleader. You will be greatly rewarded — and if you’re not careful, you also might make the world a better place.

Wise leaders build agile, inclusive, and sustainable businesses. But how can you do that in times of crisis? Here are eight mental models for building inner resilience to take responsible and sustainable actions in VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) situations.

When it comes to situations like the current pandemic, the climate emergency, and other societal challenges at a global scale, we don’t need leaders who only rely on their survival instincts or find opportunistic ways to leverage a crisis.

We need leaders who consciously use their intuition, logic, and emotions to choose appropriate emergency responses. We need wise leaders.

Why? Because wise CEOs create the best results in both the short and long term for the benefit of both society and the bottom line.

That’s the conclusion of a survey of 100 CEO emergency responses over the past 30 years, conducted by Navi Radjou and Prasad Kaipa, who are also co-authors of From Smart to Wise: Acting and Leading With Wisdom.

We need leaders who not only rely on their survival instincts or find opportunistic ways to leverage a crisis. We need leaders who consciously use their intuition, logic, and emotions to choose appropriate business responses that benefit society. We need wise leaders.

In their article, “Leading With your Head and Your Heart”, Radjou and Kaipa show how wise CEOs like Unilever’s Paul Polman and companies like Siemens and Danone are transforming their businesses into wise enterprises.

But what can a wise leader concretely do on a personal level to build inner resilience for taking responsible and sustainable actions in challenging times?

We’ve reached out to leadership transformation expert Sandja Brügmann, The Passion Institute, to co-create an infographic based on her eight mental models for wisdom leadership.

“For a while now, in CEO circles, we’ve talked about the world being VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous), and Covid-19 is showing us how interconnected and interdependent we all are. So we need leaders to navigate these uncertainties wisely if we want a safer and more thriving world for us all,” explains Brügmann, who helps organizations embed sustainability, wisdom, and purpose into the core of their business strategy and leadership skills.

We hope that this infographic will inform and inspire CEOs and serve as a reminder for all of us on how to take personal leadership and deal with the more “daily VUCA” situations.

If you are interested in integrating and leading through these principles, join The Passion Institute’s Wisdom Leadership Network, facilitated by Sandja Brügmann.

Sandja Brügmann is an internationally recognized leadership and business transformation expert, founder of The Passion Institute, a leadership development and business strategy consulting company specialized in the intersection of business strategy, consciousness, purpose, & the new paradigm of organizational design and leadership.

2020 was filled with heightened emotion as we found ourselves grappling with a pandemic, a U.S. election, and perennial social issues. For many business leaders, that meant using their businesses as voices of change, but you aren’t the only voice within your organization. So, how can you provide space for views that may differ from your own?

In this article, Genevieve Georget of Round Table Companies shares why leaders need to share their stories, not just their opinions, and outlines tips for removing the barriers between us through the brave act of sharing our stories.

It’s early June 2020, and I’m hopping on the phone with one of our company’s clients, a CEO. He’s writing his first book about the values of leadership and building a business with integrity. Within the first few seconds of the call, I can hear a heaviness in his voice. It’s been a pivotal week for the world as racial injustice reaches new heights; the moment to speak up is upon us. And he has spoken up. He’s spoken up beautifully, eloquently, and thoughtfully. He’s spoken up with truth, conviction, and credence. He’s also spoken up knowing that not everyone within his company feels the same way.

That in and of itself is creating a new tension for him. And he’s not alone.

The last year has been filled with heightened emotion as we’ve found ourselves amid a pandemic, a U.S. election, and many social issues that have gone on for far too long. Walking through the trenches of these various emotions are business leaders — individuals who are often the voice and face of many stories and opinions and trying to navigate the most sincere way to represent them all.

Many business leaders are currently standing in unfamiliar territory — wanting to use their businesses as voices of change in the world and recognizing that their voice isn’t the only one within the organization. Providing space within their business for views that may differ from their own is also a part of moving the needle toward the very change they’re seeking.

It’s not an easy road to walk, especially when our businesses are lived out in the public domain and our words are examined beneath a microscope. One misstep (even the most innocent one) could mean dire consequences in the world of public accountability now known as social media. This is part of the decision our leaders must now make: not just what to share, but how much of it to share.

The Importance of Values in Business

When our CEO client and I finally settled into the call, I asked him how he felt. He explained that his company just released a social media post supporting Black Lives Matter and that he knew some of his partners at the company, all of whom he respected, didn’t share that specific view. While he knew that everyone shared the core belief of ending racial injustice, he was concerned about the wording’s nuances that might leave room for unintended ambiguity. The words seemed to be well-received by the outside world, but he was already feeling discontent from within his organization — a feeling that wasn’t sitting well with him.

Our client’s business was built on the foundation that personal authenticity matters just as much as good profit margins. So when an important issue arose, he wanted to honor the issue from a very human perspective. However, we live in a politically charged climate, and the world is watching how he (and every other CEO) handles unrest. As a result, he found himself staring at the ceiling each night, not sleeping, just constantly wondering: How do we express our company values without being paralyzed by the “right way” to do it?

The reality is that people no longer engage with companies simply for their products or services. They engage with companies to belong to something — a large part of that belonging lies in shared values. People support businesses they believe in; therefore, leaders need to share what they believe in. They need to give consumers a look inside the work they do and the motivation behind it.

Every business has its own unique story, and it’s generally rooted in the founder’s humanity. Before there was a business with a name on the door, there was a person with a passion in their soul. All of us started somewhere, and that origin comes with its own set of beliefs and values. In a world full of reasons for us to feel divided, these values and stories enable us to remain connected.

Sharing Your Story Versus Your Opinion

The Oxford Dictionary defines opinion as “a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.” We all have our viewpoints; it’s the nature of being human. The challenge with opinions is that they create lines in the sand. If we deem our opinion as “right,” then anything different becomes inherently “wrong.” There’s rarely a path to understanding or unity found in this direction.

A story, on the other hand, is an experience. It’s a series of events that’s shaped who a person is, articulating the evolution of something. While an opinion will share our views, a story will share why we have those views. And the why behind our values is where our humanity lies.

A week after my call with our client, he sent me a message letting me know that they’d sent out a companywide email. He shared the story of how one of his children had been bullied during their younger years and how heartbreaking it was for him, as a parent, to witness that kind of pain. Knowing that his fellow humans enduring racial injustice were going through a potentially similar feeling — amplified in such significant ways that he couldn’t even begin to understand — was something that he needed to speak to both internally and publicly.

He shared his heart and company values through the only lens he truly had at his disposal: his experience. He then invited employees to have personal conversations with him to share their views and experiences. And while the rest of us can’t always use this exact approach when addressing the public, there’s still wisdom to take away from the situation about knowing the difference between sharing our opinions and sharing our stories. Consider the following:

1. Ask yourself why.

When you approach your own opinions with a degree of curiosity, you begin to better understand your own stories and how you came to believe certain ideas. The more you understand yourself, the more understanding and context you can offer other people. This moves you out of just having an opinion and into sharing a story.

2. Consider whether the words you’re about to share position someone else as “wrong.”

You can hold a value close to your heart without making another person “wrong” or “bad” for not sharing that value. It’s the difference between saying, “I choose to be vegan because it makes me feel healthier,” and “You shouldn’t eat meat because you’re being cruel to animals.” It’s sharing your own path without declaring that others have to walk it with you. In turn, you hold space for the path that everyone is walking, even if it might differ from yours. That very space you create might be the invitation someone else needs to consider another point of view.

3. Tie your values back to your experiences. 

When you share your values and beliefs — especially on emotionally charged issues — can you tie them back to your own experience, either as a leader or a business? When you do this, you create more room for humanity in the equation and allow others to be more human themselves. Sharing your story helps move us past the curtain of politics and polarization and reminds us that we are people with our own feelings and belief systems. When in doubt, lean into what you know, which will always be your own experience.

I would be seriously remiss in advocating for the importance of sharing your story and beliefs if I wasn’t willing to share my own. The truth is, even writing this piece has felt a bit scary because this past year has given me a much deeper appreciation for what it means to have a voice in this world. 

And while I can encourage you to honor your voice, I don’t have the answer for how to appropriately navigate the many ways the ground is shaking beneath me. I don’t know the answer because I don’t believe there’s a single “right” answer. Like the CEO’s story that I shared with you at the beginning of this article, I’m just an imperfect human living in an imperfect world and trying to make my way through the ups and downs of any given moment. Maybe you can relate.

This leaves each of us with a choice to make: Do we move through our days holding one another on opposite sides of the fence by sharing only our opinions? Or do we go through our days intentionally removing the barriers between us through the brave act of sharing our stories?

While you should be connected to all of your direct reports, you can’t be everything to everyone, nor should you be.

As leaders, we want to encourage our teams to be connected and support one another in a way that is integrated into our daily work and our work routines, rather than relegated only to special events. There are simple steps to help you create opportunities for your teams to learn about one another, build trust, and enlist everyone’s help to create a supportive and safe environment. 

As you begin helping your team find ways to connect, here are three important precursors to help you be successful: 

• Enlist a couple of connectors. Who on your team is already pretty well connected? Ask if they will help you implement these strategies. A couple of enthusiastic partners will make it easier for team members who aren’t willing to be the first ones to jump in. 

• Experiment. People like to connect in different ways. What sounds fun to you may be tortuous for others. Give them lots of ideas, and let them choose which they want to experiment with. 

• Allow people to pass if they are not feeling comfortable with exercises. Modeling and encouraging others to participate can work wonders, but forced participation can backfire, creating resistance and causing the opposite emotional and behavioral changes to what you want. 

Connect Your Team Together

Team meetings are also one of the most powerful places to integrate important connecting activities into the workday. One simple exercise at the beginning of your regular team meetings can make a big impact.

In-Meeting Connection Ideas

Check-in questions.  Start weekly meetings with a quick check-in question that participants respond to one at a time in a round-robin style. Set a 30-second time limit per person and discourage comments or questions during the exercise (the goal is to create later conversations), and as always, allow anyone to pass. 

Here are some good questions to get you started: 

1. What are you looking forward to this [spring, fall, holiday season]? 
2. What’s happened recently that you’re proud of? 
3. What’s something you want to do in the next year that you’ve never done before? 
4. Who had the most influence on you growing up? 
5. What have you read or watched recently that you loved? 
6. What’s your superpower?  
7. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? 

And if your group is larger than 8 to 10 people, as an alternative to sharing with the full group, the group can split into pairs and answer the question with a little more time for connection. A time limit still applies, and the goal is deep listening — no questions, no offering advice or comments, repeating back what you hear. Make sure pairs switch each week and that someone is assigned to folks participating virtually. You can use breakout groups or have them call each other directly.