Your data follows a similar pattern to Moore’s law. It doubles every few months. You might not even see the doubling, but your team is experiencing the effects of this exponential growth. 

Drowning in data isn’t the goal of any company. Every executive wants to use data to make better decisions and drive business outcomes. So how do teams end up in the deep end of the pool without a floating device? 

There are four reasons why teams fail to get insights out of their data. Let’s examine each one. 

Reason #1: No Practical Data Strategy 

Deciding to collect every data point around customer interaction isn’t a strategy. It’s a tactical plan, but it won’t quite get you to insights.  

The technical details of data are becoming easier with every passing day. Yet, the psychology for using data remains the same and grows more difficult as the volume of noise increases. 

I worked with a client that had fantastic data, but no one was using it. After asking some questions, I learned that the team didn’t trust the data. This then required an audit of the company’s major reports and working with several individuals to answer questions and build trust back into the data.  

There wasn’t anything technically wrong with the data, but the team needed assurances and training. You can tackle these kinds of challenges in a data strategy. Think about the people that will be using the data, the process to gather insights, and the providers (or technology) that you will need. 

Reason #2: No Training on How to Use Data 

Don’t assume that data is self-explanatory. In my experience, teams need basic training to understand how the data works and how to use it in their specific role. You can design your training in group, individual, and ad hoc formats to get people moving in the right direction. 

For some people, working with data is a throwback to statistics in college. In reality, they don’t need to know advanced statistics to find relevant insights — they need to know how to build relevant reports and look for patterns in the data. 

Reason #3: No Support from Data-Specific Roles 

Companies understand that they need to hire data-specific staff, such as data analysts, but these roles can quickly become bottlenecks. They have way too many requests and not enough time. They also have to deal with any changes in the data quality and ensure no technical issues. 

Here are a few ways to get the most out of your data analysts or data scientist: 

• Provide self-exploratory data tools 
• Limit requests to only the most important, and ask individuals to justify their requests 
• Automate as many reports as possible and make them easy to find 

Reason #4: No Tangible Motivation 

Your people are busy. They already have too many things on their plates, and asking them to dig into the data is just another to-do item. There needs to be serious motivation for them to commit to spending more time with their data.  

The motivation will come from seeing tangible cases in which the data helped other people in the company. The marketing team might have discovered hidden levers in their campaigns, or the product team increased customer satisfaction by understanding user behavior. 

Motivation, coupled with ease of use, reasons #2 and #3, will help team members believe they can do faster or better work by leveraging data. 

You don’t need to reinvent your entire approach to data. Instead, look for slight shifts in improvement that can get you closer to the ultimate goal: insights. 

The breadth of change for leaders and their teams during the global pandemic has been dramatic: what we’re doing, how we’re working, when, and of course, where.

During my hundreds of hours of coaching this past year, I’ve watched executives adopt significantly new and different routines and gain confidence over time. Broadly speaking, many challenges have been met. But I’ve also found that success in adapting as team leaders in these times has much to do with the leaders’ ability to shore up their own and their teams’ emotional and psychological reserves — to build resiliency.

Building resiliency includes viewing leadership as an experience instead of a role. Leaders consider their impact in each conversation, relationship, and meeting. What makes an experience satisfying will depend, in part, on the individual. But in these challenging times, reducing stress and overwhelm is critical to help teams focus and stay productive.

Given the preponderance of meetings leaders and teams are facing lately, here are four ways leaders can create satisfying experiences and build everyone’s resilience — including their own:

Create agendas with a beginning, middle, and end. 

Since working today often means there are no longer informal buffers between meetings, such as chats in the hallways or brief stops in a colleague’s office, leaders need to allocate some meeting time for mental, psychological, or emotional transitions. Not unlike closing one’s computer apps after use so that the operating system doesn’t crash, humans need to “close” and then “open” too. The benefit is a team that is more present and more effective.

Help people bring their whole self into the room. 

With video meetings often strung one after another, people tend to come into each meeting still processing the feelings, decisions, and implications that just happened in the meeting before. Leaders can help people close on their last experience by asking each person to check in and share their lingering thoughts and feelings before diving into the work at hand. Try these questions:

• What is sticking with you from our last meeting and why?
• Is there anything you need to say or do so that you can be fully present in this meeting?

Then, to help each person bring their whole self into the room and turn to the collective needs of the group, ask, for instance:

• What do you most want from today’s meeting?
• As a team, what do we collectively need to pay attention to as we begin?
• What is one wish or one concern about today’s meeting?

To assess the emotional tenor of the room, build rapport, or lift energy levels, leaders can ask:

• How are you feeling as we begin this meeting?  
• What’s the best thing that happened to you today? How can you stay with it in this meeting?

Conclude the meeting with a check out. 

At the end of each meeting, a check out is beneficial to reveal unspoken assumptions and feelings about what just happened. It’s a powerful tool for helping others make sense of their experiences and others’ experiences, which is a way to support closure for each person before their next task. It’s also a perfect opportunity for teams to provide feedback for each other. Examples of check-outs include:

• What was the most important aspect of this meeting for you?
• How do you feel as we end this meeting?
• What did we achieve as a team, and what’s left to discuss for next time?
• Is there anything about our process you would like to see different in our next meeting?

Leaders need not respond to each comment or person. The goal is to give each person a space to share, process feeling and thoughts, and build trust by listening carefully and creating a safe environment. Let the statements stand on their own, or ask the team what they noticed about what was said — allowing them to make sense of the groups’ needs.

During meetings, consider when to switch from task to process, and back again. 

One of the most powerful aspects of being a team leader is the ability to influence the meeting’s progress. The importance of determining how much time should be allocated to a topic in the moment cannot be overstated. This is especially true in online environments, where it can be more challenging to bring unspoken feelings to the surface. When there is no safe opportunity to share, concerns stay covert, resulting in private chats between colleagues and a team that lacks cohesion.

Leaders have learned a lot about resilience during the last year. Their ability to create experiences that consider psychological processes will further build resilience in both themselves and their teams. And with more change on the horizon in 2021, leaders can take deliberate steps to do so — starting at their very next meeting.

Google “50 greatest coaches of all time,” and you’ll see a lot of debate on who is number two. Most lists have one name at the top: John Wooden. ESPN even named John Wooden the “Coach of the Century.”

So, what does a man who coached his last game in 1975 and passed away in 2010 have to say about how to be an excellent leader and coach, first of yourself, then of your team and business — coaching them all the way up?
 
The answer isn’t complicated. In fact, it’s quite simple: Be a teacher.
 
That is how the greatest coach of our time described himself: “I am just a teacher.” As a teacher, Coach understood human capacity, capability, and behavior. He brought out the best in individuals and teams, not by being an inspiring leader but by being an inspired teacher.
 
Coach taught character, teamwork, humility, and the process for the pursuit of excellence. Yes, he inspired, coached, and led others to go beyond what they thought they could accomplish. But, primarily, he taught them.
 
How? He followed these nine teaching techniques.

1. Be an expert.

No one studied the topics of basketball and life more than Coach, and he remained a student of each until the day he died. He demonstrated and modeled lifelong learning in the truest sense. He never let the pursuit of winning interfere with the pursuit of learning and teaching.
 
Every summer throughout his career, he’d conduct a research project on one aspect of the game he felt he and the team needed to improve. He looked at rebounding, free-throw shooting, and defensive strategy. He studied socks, shoes, and even shower solvent. Everything mattered. He never let his ego interfere: He constantly consulted with other coaches and performance experts who could provide the knowledge and understanding he lacked.
 

2. Be direct and precise in your explanations.

Coach was so exceptional at being direct he was the subject of an academic study. In a 2004 issue of The Sport Psychologist, Ronald Gallimore (UCLA) and Roland Tharp (University of California, Santa Cruz) published a revalidation of their 1976 case study: “What a Coach Can Teach a Teacher, 1975-2004: Reflections and Reanalysis of John Wooden’s Teaching Practices.”
 
They analyzed Coach’s afternoon practices for content, time, and direct communication with his team, and they recorded 2,326 teaching and instructional acts from Coach during 30 hours of practice. They found that more than 75 percent of his communication was instructional. Yet Coach never spoke for more than 20 seconds, and his demonstrations took no more than five seconds. Think about that when you’re preparing your next PowerPoint.

3. Be highly organized.

Gallimore and Tharp found that Coach’s practices were “exact and unvarying” in order to fit into his precise schedule. Individual work began at 3 p.m., and team practice ran from 3:29 to 5:29 p.m. No one dared to be late — ever.
 
Prior to that, Coach spent two hours every day with his assistants planning those practices. Each practice was recorded, tracked, and analyzed to see where improvements could be made, from the whole to the parts, right down to the minute. He had 27 years of well-organized notes and data he constantly referenced. No wonder he, his coaches, and his teams were always getting better.

4. Teach by example.

Coach was always on the floor with the team. Even in his final years as a coach, he could demonstrate proper footwork and balance. When Coach saw something not being done correctly, he would stop the action and follow a three-step process:

• Demonstrate the right way to do it.
• Demonstrate what the player or team was doing wrong.
• Demonstrate the right way to do it again. 

To eliminate repetitive mistakes, he was patient and maintained self-control when his team didn’t correct mistakes quickly. He was never in too big a hurry or too caught up in achieving immediate results to jeopardize doing something the right way. He never varied from the plan. If something didn’t work quite right, he made a note to work on and fix it the next day.

5. Teach by repetition.

Coach followed four laws of learning: explanation, demonstration, imitation, and repetition. As you might have guessed, Coach placed extra weight on repetition to create a correct habit that could be produced under pressure.
 
To ensure goals were achieved, he took these laws and expanded them to eight: explanation, demonstration, imitation, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, and repetition. He believed you could never work on the fundamentals too much. He never had to get back to basics — because he never left the basics.

6. Plan for the individual and the team.

“You can’t improve the team if you don’t improve each player,” Coach told us. “You have to know them to be able to do that, not only their skills but also their temperaments, attitudes, and what’s going on in their lives. How they think and what gets the response you’re looking for.”
 
Coach always knew where and how his players needed to improve, and he and his assistants were always ready with a plan and capable of teaching what was required for that improvement. He tracked his players’ practice routines to see where ongoing development was needed. This allowed him to anticipate mistakes before they happened.

7. Create a positive and disciplined environment.

Coach understood the difference between discipline and punishment. Punishment creates antagonism, and it’s hard to get positive results when you antagonize. You discipline to help, to correct, to teach, and to improve. Effective discipline is about learning and gaining improvement through correction and repetition. Those corrections should never be personal or degrading in any way, and new information should be aimed at the act, never the actor.

8. Break complex issues into simpler details.

Coach explained his teaching process and approach this way: “The greatest holiday feast is eaten one bite at a time. Gulp it down all at once, and you get indigestion. I discovered the same is true in teaching. Teach what you want and need to do best one simple step at a time. Little things done well are probably the greatest secret to success. If you do enough small things right, big things can happen.”

9. Teach more than your game.

To Coach, character was the foundation of individual success, a successful team, and a successful life. Persons with good character were the kind of people Coach believed made better teammates and a stronger team. Coach believed it was his job to model good character every day, in every situation.  
 
As Coach said: “Everyone is a teacher to someone; maybe it’s your children, maybe it’s your neighbor, maybe it’s someone under your supervision. In one way or another, you are teaching them by your
actions.”

LYNN GUERIN is CEO of The John R. Wooden Course and president and “Head Coach” of his family- owned coaching, training, and performance development firm, Guerin Marketing Services. For the past 20 years, he has had the unique privilege of partnering with legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden and the Wooden family.
 
JASON LAVIN is a coach, speaker, and CEO with more than 25 years of experience enhancing the performance of individuals, teams, and organizations. As president of The John R. Wooden Course and CEO of Golden Communications, Lavin helps organizations—from youth sports teams to Fortune 100 companies—refine their values, mission, and vision.

Their new book is Coach ‘Em Way Up: 5 Lessons for Leading the John Wooden Way.

“It’s not going away, and we have to face that reality.” That’s what the CEO and founder of a high-tech manufacturing startup with 180 employees told the leadership team in early July to convince them of the need to do a strategic pivot to address COVID.

Previously, the startup’s executives took things one step at a time, putting out the various COVID related fires that flared up more and more often: supply chain disruptions; cancelled orders; employees having difficulties with work-from-home setups or needing flex-time to manage kids or elderly relatives.

Seeing more of the broad picture, the CEO realized the company was going in the wrong direction. One of the members of the Board recommended my recently-published book on strategic pivoting to adapt to COVID and plan for the post-pandemic recovery.

After a quick read, the CEO convinced the other leadership team members that the company needed to do a strategic pivot to address COVID. He then had his executive assistant contact me and arrange for a facilitated strategic retreat dedicated to addressing COVID, which became my sixth of nine such engagements thus far. This article summarizes my experiences helping a range of companies — five startups, three established middle-market ones, and a Fortune 300 company business unit — pivot for our new abnormal reality.

Challenging Business Model Assumptions

Invariably, the first step involved reassessing assumptions about the organization’s business model. That meant an initial couple of brief meetings with the leadership team where we discussed the kind of fires they faced recently.

For example, the manufacturing startup faced a new challenge in selling its high-tech products. Known for their high quality, the products were flying off the shelf previously; the company had trouble keeping up with demand.

Now, the startup’s salespeople reported that the decision-making process changed. Accounting put much more pressure on operations managers to prove that the products’ quality brought sufficient ROI. Couldn’t they get by with lower-cost options?

While the manufacturing startup invested in innovation to ensure the quality of its high-tech products, it didn’t have a clear measurement of ROI for the innovation. After all, operations people focused on quality, not ROI. As a result, some of its customers, with apologies, chose to buy lower-cost alternatives.

Other companies faced a range of similar problems in sales and other areas. Often, the news came as a surprise to other leadership team members, even the CEO; all were busy fighting fires in their own areas.

Gathering Internal Information

With more awareness of the business model assumptions challenged by the pandemic, the next step involved gathering internal information for a revised strategy and business model.

Each of the top leaders who led a department and would be present at the strategic retreat gathered feedback from their direct reports on how to revise each department’s goals, structure, and relationship to customers (external or internal) in light of the challenged assumptions in either of three scenarios.

• In the first scenario, a vaccine with over 90% effectiveness would be found by Spring of 2021, and the pandemic mostly over by Spring of 2022
• In the second, this vaccine would be found by Spring of 2022, and the pandemic mostly over by Spring of 2023
• In the third, we would never find a vaccine more effective than 50%, just like we haven’t found a vaccine more effective than that for the flu

Strategy Day

Next, go on to the strategic retreat, which should be a two-day event, with one day for broad strategy and another for operationalizing the strategy.

The high-tech manufacturing startup’s team had to struggle extensively with accepting the reality of changing marketplace demands. Its operations team established a sense of identity and team spirit around innovation as a core value; its marketing and sales made innovation a fundamental element of their pitches. They kept veering away from the reality of the need to shift from innovation to ROI measurement.

The CEO and I kept steering them back. I had to use the full range of my facilitation skills to keep the conversation on the right track, an especially challenging task since this was a virtual retreat.

The leadership team of a late-stage SaaS startup with over 500 employees was surprised that the large majority of their direct reports reported feelings of work-from-home burnout and “Zoom fatigue” among employees as one of the most serious problems.

It’s key to realize that the issues stemmed not simply from burnout but from much more. These include dealing with:

• Pandemic-related mental health challenges such as anxiety/depression/trauma/grief
• COVID-related pragmatic challenges, such as kids staying home
• Social isolation from friends, family, and community events, as well as our previous outside hobbies and entertainment
• Poor work-from-home environments with inadequate home office setups
• Lack of skills in effective virtual communication and collaboration
• Being deprived of the fulfillment of those basic human needs — sense of connection, tribe, meaning and purpose – that we naturally get from work

Even worse, the vast majority of us don’t realize we aren’t simply experiencing work-from-home burnout, and don’t recognize what we’re missing. To address this requires not simply financial support for home office setups or flex time to address pragmatic pandemic challenges. It also requires professional development in effective virtual communication and teamwork. Moreover, it requires professional development in emotional and social intelligence, to enable employees to recognize and address the emotional and social gaps left by the pandemic.

Operations Day

The next day should be focused on operationalizing the strategic changes in the business model. You need to address potential threats and opportunities in a variety of future scenarios and revise the previous day’s strategy if needed. These scenarios need to include at least the three different COVID futures described above, and several different potential economic recovery scenarios (K, U, W, V, L).

An enterprise data analytics startup with over 120 staff recognized an unexpected opportunity. It had long been trying to get some lucrative client accounts held by several competitors. The startup’s CEO knew that most of the competitors’ leaders had a dismissive attitude toward COVID.

The startup decided to adjust its marketing and sales to demonstrate the steps it took to be pandemic-proof. It would then have its salespeople call on the competitors’ client accounts and tell them about these steps. It would then offer to provide support if the pandemic lasted longer than the most optimistic predictions and the competitors couldn’t uphold their previous high standards.

Next Steps and Follow-Up

After the operations day, determine specific next steps for each new initiative that you discussed. Decide on resources required and the metrics of success. Choose one member of the leadership team accountable for implementing the initiative, with others potentially involved in the effort. Finally, prepare a report for the Board of Directors on the retreat, highlighting how the strategic pivot will help the company adapt to various scenarios of COVID and the economic recovery.

Follow up on all the next steps in the weekly leadership team meeting or whatever other leadership team forum your company already uses. Then, in a month, have a half-day event where you assess the strategy shift and make any corrections to strategy or implementation as needed. Do the same in three months.

Here are the key take-aways: remember, the first step, always, is challenging assumptions. Second, gather internal information; don’t skip this step, assuming your leadership team knows what’s truly going on. Third, spend at least a day revising your external and internal strategy. Fourth, operationalize your strategy, addressing threats and seizing opportunities in a variety of potential future scenarios. Fifth, commit to next steps, determining resources required, metrics of success, and who will be responsible for implementing each step, with a report to the Board on the event. Sixth, follow up regularly on all steps once a week, with one-month and three-month half-day follow-ups revising both strategy and implementation as needed.

While nothing can guarantee success, I can guarantee that taking these steps will maximize your chances of not only surviving but thriving in these troubled times.

I grew up in Florida, and as a pre-teen, I took piano lessons, but I secretly loved playing my sister’s guitar.

I would sneak and sit in her closet in her room and grab her red guitar with the white tuning
knobs and play. She did not know I wanted to play it, so I had to sneak and play it. Finally, one day, she found me, and she realized she was never going to play that little red guitar, so she let me have it … in more ways than one. Since that time, I have not had to sneak her guitar, and I fell in love with learning to play. Music has taught me many things; the discipline of practice, playing fairly with friends, listening, connecting with others, and having fun.

I joined a band with some friends, and one of them was a fantastic guitar player; and I then realized that to stay in the group, I had to learn to play the bass guitar and up my game; I had to learn to practice in a whole new way. When playing the guitar, I played chords and rhythms, and practice was more casual. Taking up the bass forced me to realize the structure of the song and the foundation, and it dawned on me that I had to find a new approach to practicing the bass. And, this experience has laid the foundation for what music has taught me my entire life.

What is Deliberate Practice?

According to the American Psychological Association, “Deliberate practice occurs when an individual intentionally repeats an activity to improve performance. The Deliberate Practice framework claims that such behavior is necessary to achieve high levels of expert performance.”

Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, in his book The Mind and The Brain, references a study: “Robert Desimone of the National Institute of Mental Health, one of the country’s leading researchers into the physiology of attention, explains it this way: Attention seems to work by biasing the brain circuit for the important stimuli.” With deliberate practice, our brains naturally suppress distractions and improve focus. How can you use the principles of deliberate practice to improve your leadership or management skills?

According to the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, in an article titled “Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview,” by K. Anders Ericsson, Ph.D., states, “In direct contrast, aspiring experts continue to improve their performance as a function of more experience because it is coupled with Deliberate Practice.” To grow into a professional bassist, I embraced the principle of deliberate practice in every part of my personal and professional life.

Nurturing a Passion for Practicing

As a professional bassist and a certified business consultant, I discovered that most artists and business experts spend 95% of their time practicing, and maybe five percent of their time on stage, performing. If you received all of your joy from being on stage performing, then you would be unhappy 95% of the time, waiting to get on stage. And what happens if the performance doesn’t go well? You’ll miss the joy of becoming the person you desire to be. I realized I needed to nurture my desire to want to practice and enjoy it.

So, I discovered the power of visualizing myself mastering core skills. To become a world-class performer, most experts spend time imagining themselves delivering a world-class routine, whether giving a speech, writing a novel, developing code, or performing music on stage. Visualize yourself growing and mastering your skills works, and virtuoso musicians and world-class athletes visualize. They do it because it works.

Finally, I had to take 100% responsibility for my growth and develop a love for lifelong learning and practicing. Remember, you’ll spend 95% of your time preparing for the performance, so learn to enjoy the process.

Helping Your Team Be Successful

As a leader, your example will influence your team much more than your words ever will. What’s needed today is for leaders to lead by example and be the conductor of their organization and treat the team as an artist. A good conductor trusts that the musicians under his baton are there because they love what they do, and they have worked hard to learn their craft. It’s the conductor’s job to cast the vision for the performance and coach them on working together to create beautiful music.

To learn more about creating High-Performing teams, check out Workplace Jazz, published by Business Expert Press.

My teenage granddaughter and her friend asked me a stunning (but not surprising) question. “With all the craziness that’s going on, how can we possibly survive and move forward together?” Since I was expecting a request to order pizza, I wasn’t readily equipped with grandfatherly advice. 

I was astounded by their understanding of what’s happening in the world. Like a flash flood, they overwhelmed me with knowledge of climate-change science, insights into the history of social injustice, and deep frustration about our political divide. They asked if I thought people could, or would, change their behaviors. They were right to ask. They deserve a better response than a pat on the head and my assurance that it’ll all work out. 

During our conversation, I saw something essential that we’re NOT discussing with our children – and each other, for that matter. We are changing! We are already working together in droves to create a better future! 

Yet, few are talking about this in ways that shift the mainstream conversation. Understandably, we’re so suffocated by today’s monumental challenges that we haven’t breathed in the fresh air of change occurring right under our noses. From all walks of life, significant leadership breakthroughs are happening – with no focus on religion, race, political preference, economic status, or age.

For example, large groups and small pockets of people — from classrooms to board rooms and community groups to collective farms — address issues like hunger, environmental degradation, and social injustice. I told them about the remarkable change brought about in Oakland, CA, ranked as one of our nation’s top ten most dangerous cities for four decades, where community members came together with law enforcement, social service groups, probation departments, and school districts to reduce gun violence and cut homicides in half from 2012 to 2019.* Truly, an inspiring example for the rest of the country. 

We discussed the many people and organizations providing needed food to local food shelters. My granddaughter pointed to youth movements, such as anthropologist Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots empowering young community leaders, and how her mom’s company, Salesforce.com, is part of the environmental movement to plant a trillion trees. That brought up a host of initiatives run by thousands of companies focused on serving ALL stakeholders. We discussed how the Savory Institute, a network of farmers and ranchers worldwide, is implementing regenerative agriculture methods to eliminate carbon in our atmosphere and turn millions of acres of desert land into fertile, productive soil. 

We agreed not to let our adversities blind us to the number of conscious, courageous, and ethically inspired people and organizations applying everything from advanced science (like nanotechnology for regenerative medicine) to indigenous wisdom (like Pachamama Alliance working with the Achuar tribe to save the rainforest). 

Then, the girls asked this glaring question. “Is this change big enough and fast enough?”

Since none of us can be sure what the future will bring, it becomes a choice as to how we want to live our lives – like our friend who postponed her long-awaited retirement from nursing to help COVID patients – because she felt the breakdown is big enough. The possibility is compelling enough to act. 

Why not celebrate the changes that are happening and introduce more? It’s about momentum. If anything is self-evident this past year, it’s that people are paying attention, our kids in particular. The need to come together is painfully apparent. What we may not see is where people are already doing that. The road to the future is happening.

This is not a half glass full versus half glass half empty conversation offering sorely needed optimism to overtake deeply embedded pessimism. Instead, it’s a practical conversation noting what’s already happening on the ground with stirring examples of change in our organizations and communities.

Our inquiry uncovered a conversation missing in our national discourse — one that contrasts with the elephant in the room—the perspective that no real progress is possible due to our country’s divided state. Instead, it focused on those people who are already building a better world, the thinkers and doers who are coming together and acting, rebuilding and recovering, reimagining and reinventing the future for all of us.

It’s important, maybe even essential, to share this story of change with each other. Especially with our children, especially now.

* From 126 to 68 homicides and 561 non-fatal shootings to 277. See Mike McLively and Brittany Nieto’s “A Case Study in Hope: Lesson from Oakland’s Remarkable Reduction in Gun Violence” (April 2019: Gifford’s Law Center, Faith in Action, and BBGVPC), p. 5. Accessed September 11, 2020.

Plans are great, but as 2020 has reminded us, “Oops” moments in life are inevitable. In fact, it’s precisely when things don’t go according to plan that the real litmus tests for leadership and business strategy come to light. As Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until I hit them in the face.”

Leading during and through a crisis is one thing, but what happens in the aftermath? Let me be clear, the pandemic is not over yet, and none of us know when it will be. What we do know is that COVID-19 has contributed to systemic shifts that will likely be enduring. It has changed how we look at business, and this is a good thing. Here are three focus points that will help you lean in to what’s next, and how you can set up your business and those you lead for success in a post-pandemic world.

01  Reality Check 

As tragic as COVID has been on both a human and macro-economic level, in some respects, it did a favor for smart businesses: It served as Tyson’s proverbial punch in the face. Fact: Fueled by the optimism of riding the wave of the strongest economy in modern history, virtually every business carried unnecessary bloat into 2020. Businesses were people, processes, facilities, and debt heavy. They were also cash, talent, and innovation light. The good news is that for businesses agile and resilient enough to course-correct and make the necessary pivots, the future has been amplified and accelerated. The fastest path to the future is rooted in being brutally honest about present state dominant logic, institutional thinking, organizational faults, cultural disconnects, and talent deficits. 

02 Going Back to Work: Wrong Goal

The best leaders are not thinking about going back, but instead are thinking about going forward. Leaders looking to restore the past instead of ushering in the future are trying to live in a world that’s already passed them by. Innovation is no longer a nice to have, but a need to have. If you are not innovating in real-time, increasing velocity around the rate of change, and amplifying new business model design, you are ceding opportunity to those who are. There has never been a greater opportunity to reframe, reimagine, and reinvent. The question is, will you cling to the past or embrace the future? 

03 It’s the Talent, Stupid

I’ve never been impressed with leaders who cite the size of their workforce as a success metric. Bigger isn’t better – better is better. Here’s the thing: Low switching costs and the evisceration of other barriers to talent movement have changed workforce dynamics forever, and in my opinion, for the better. Companies that are blind to what intrigues and engages the best talent won’t be able to attract or retain them. Legacy-based operating models will always provide a safe harbor for mediocrity. Still, if you want to beat your competition to the future, it will only happen by engaging next-level talent. Up-skilling is table stakes – it’s code used by legacy-based companies for playing catch-up. The goal should never be to level the playing field but to tilt it to your advantage. Future skilling is the game-changer. 

The buzz phrase “war for talent” has been redefined in real-time. It’s not whether the talent exists – it does, and it’s abundant. The question is whether you recognize real talent and can successfully compete for it. The organizations with the smartest, most creative, and most diverse talent wins. Everything else is noise. When companies stop trying to put people in boxes and realize the goal is to free them from the boxes, they will take quantum leaps forward. The first step to better leadership is to stop playing big-brother. Stop checking-on people to make sure they’re working, and care enough to check-in on people to better support them. Organizations that don’t understand how to create self-led teams will die a slow, painful death. n

Why does it seem as if everyone has lost control? Research has shown that people with higher self-control levels are more successful, have better social skills, are happier, and are more trusted. So, what has happened?

Believe it or not, marshmallows at one time were thought to predict a person’s success! In the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Mischel tested hundreds of children between the ages of three and five on their ability to wait for a greater reward even if something less desirable was available immediately. The test went like this: the children sat at a desk, and the researcher left the room. If the children waited 15 minutes, they would be rewarded with two marshmallows. If they couldn’t wait, they could ring a bell, but they would only get one marshmallow. Less than a third of the kids could wait the fifteen minutes; most lasted five minutes! Dr. Mischel reconnected with these kids once they had taken the SATs. The kids who waited the full fifteen minutes on average scored 200 points higher on their SATs.

Further research conducted by Dr. Mischel and others found that trusting the system, maturation in willpower, and socio-economic status all played a role in people ultimately being successful. Nevertheless, marshmallows did garner a lot of attention for a while!

So, what is self-control? In my book, Science and the Leader-Follower Relationship, I define self-control as: control thoughts, regulate emotions, and inhibit impulses. It’s a lot for us to handle. In fact, researchers have found that self-control is like a muscle. It can become tired, therefore, making it difficult to have self-control in two sequential events. As indicated above, there are many self-control types, but they all use the same brain processes. The good news is that the muscle analogy also means that you can strengthen your ability to have self-control.

Self-control enables people to do jobs requiring a lot of work to get trained and highly valued by society. For example, doctors are socially rewarded with higher salaries, respect, and status. Interestingly, many people value others’ self-control more than their own. There’s a popular misconception that people want to maximize their enjoyment while minimizing their pain. However, Matthew Lieberman propounds in his book Social: Why our brains are wired to connect states: “In reality, we are actually built to overcome our own pleasure and increase our pain in the service of following society’s norms.”

How does this happen? The brain is wired to be social and to keep in line with social norms — whatever the norms are for the culture in which we mature. Simply the idea that we would be observed to be breaking these norms and then be evaluated and judged keeps most people in line with social expectations. We have survived as a species because we are members of social groups. In order to maintain social order, individual impulses have to be managed and controlled. Lieberman provides an example of an honesty box in a corporate breakroom, where you put money in a box for drinks. A poster that had eyes on it versus one with flowers yielded a 276% increase in donations. If we believe that we are being watched, we toe the line!

A key to our ability to build and maintain positive relationships is self-control. Self-control ensures that we harmonize with those around us. It makes us more likable and agreeable to others. So, what are some ways to improve your self-control? Overall, having some sort of regimen, such as meditation, exercise, or personal improvement, helps you to be centered and grounded, as well as confident in your own self-worth and being.

I earlier defined self-control as the control of thoughts, regulation of emotions, and inhibition of impulses. For each of these, there are additional practices, such as the following, to help strengthen that self-control muscle.

1. Control thoughts: This is a tough one. Ask anyone who meditates, as the goal is not to think. Try it for 30 seconds! For how long were you able to do it? Many of us fail after ten seconds. But don’t give up! It’s training your mind and training your attention. It’s catching yourself as you spiral out of control in the drama of a situation, or as you obsess about something, like talking about the same thing to anyone and everyone who will listen to you. Once again, reframing the situation, sitting quietly, and focusing your mind using a mantra will help control your thoughts.

2. Regulate emotions: This is also commonly referred to as emotional intelligence. Even though there are many definitions, the one that I prefer is the ability to control my strong emotions and reactions to others’ strong emotions.

Managing yourself can be tough if you regard yourself as the “victim” or feel like someone is continuously targeting you. A big step in dealing with this is reframing. For example, I may feel as if a colleague has betrayed me by trash-talking my latest project. I could go into “victim mode,” hating the competition and politics of the organization. Or, I could reframe and see it as an opportunity to get feedback from this person to find out where they think I have made mistakes. I could say to them: I am confused, as I thought we were all excited about this project. Help me understand what you see as the problems right now.

A way of managing another person’s strong emotions is to listen to them — ACTIVE LISTENING. By that, I mean paraphrasing, reflecting feelings, and even parroting if the other person is very upset. They won’t notice parroting if you do it well until they calm down. If they calm down, you have succeeded in listening. If they get more wound up, you’re not listening!

3. Inhibit impulses: This is about doing what needs to get done versus what you would really like to do. As a simple example: Do you have an exercise regimen that you stick to? Or do you crumble at the first chocolate bar? We all have tasks that we may find tiresome, but again, reframe and enjoy every task that you do – no matter how mundane. Just get it done, and be happy while you’re doing it! Having a daily regimen supports your self-control, and you will find that the world will respond more positively to your new-found self-control.

The last year has forced all of us to adapt swiftly to a world turned upside down. Almost overnight, we had little choice but to adopt new ways of working, connecting, collaborating, and leading.

It’s why the concept of unlearning and relearning has never been more relevant. As the futurist Alvin Toffler wrote: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

So if you’re wondering what you might need to unlearn right now, consider these approaches.  

Challenge your mental maps

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, a book title by Marshall Goldsmith, speaks to the deep need to continually upgrade the assumptions underpinning the mental maps in our heads. Sure, highly scripted memos from the CEO’s office may once have been effective ways of communicating, but that doesn’t mean they still are. Nowadays, leaders who hide behind over-curated, over-sanitized communications edited and re-edited by risk-averse handlers are considered inauthentic. In contrast, those willing to do a Facebook livestream are lauded.

Only by continually challenging your own best thinking — inviting others to play devil’s advocate on your assumptions and interrogate your thinking — can you do the requisite unlearning and relearning to make smarter decisions as you navigate unchartered ground ahead. Assumptions kill possibilities. So ask yourself, do you need to:

• Unlearn how you manage, motivate and lead people remotely?
• Unlearn how you make decisions and executive projects?
• Unlearn how you communicate to customers about your brand? 
• Unlearn your target market and what they value?
• Unlearn the skills you previously thought were sufficient to advance?

Trade cleverness for curiosity

We came into the world brimming with curiosity and open to learning. Yet, rigid educational systems that rewarded test scores over creativity sucked the joy out of learning for many. More’s the pity, because in today’s world, learning isn’t an exercise we finish in school. It’s imperative for flourishing in life. It’s how we improve ourselves, expand future possibilities and improve the status quo.

Our learning is capped to the extent of our questions. Most of us live with answers to questions we’ve never thought or bothered to ask. So as you consider the problems around, start asking more questions. How do we know this is the best approach? Since we’re all wired with confirmation bias, we must proactively seek out information to contradict our assumptions. 

Be humble

Ever met someone who was too full of their own brilliance? Of course, you have. They abound. Yet IQ is not the strongest predictor of success. Likewise, the best solutions can only be found when we are brave enough to admit we don’t have a monopoly on knowledge and humble enough to listen to others whose perspectives could broaden our own.  

In recounting a conversation he had with President Eisenhower as a boy and later with President G.W. Bush, Bill Marriott, Chairman of Marriott Hotels, shared with me that leadership requires humility. “If you think you’re the smartest person in the room, pretty soon you’ll be the only guy in the room.”

So if you like to think you’d qualify for Mensa, be extra vigilant. Those who believe they are the smartest in the room risk walking through life with blinkers, unaware of their own blind spots and closed off to ideas that would improve their own. 

Consult your future self

Think of a challenge or opportunity you’re currently facing and imagine you are looking at it for the very first time. Or step into the shoes of Doc from Back to the Future to imagine it’s 2050, and you’re looking back thirty years at the situation you are in today. How do you see it differently?

In 1899, Charles Duel, Director of the US patents office, said, “Everything that can be invented already has been invented.”  Yes, it’s easy to laugh at the ridiculousness of that comment now but ten, much less thirty years from now, we will look back on this time and see with greater clarity how we were stuck in obsolete paradigms that constricted our own approaches. 

Embrace discomfort

Given the choice to press cut+paste or moving clumsily through the learning curve, copy+paste holds appeal. It’s less mentally and emotionally taxing. At least in the short term.

We are creatures of comfort, and venturing into new unexplored territory, trying out new ideas, innovating new products, and re-engineering old systems will always meet with resistance. Conscious or unconscious.

Yet while sticking to ‘how things are done around here’ can spare psychological discomfort, it puts you at risk of losing your place in a world marching, charging, rapidly forward. All of this will ultimately put you in a lot less comfortable position down the track.

What do you need to unlearn and relearn? 

The leaders and companies seizing the opportunities that the cascading crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic holds will not be using yesterday’s rules, rubrics, or reasoning. They’ll be deeply engaged in ongoing learning, unlearning, and relearning.

Remember, unlearning and relearning is not a means to an end. It’s an end in itself. As such, the key to unlearning doesn’t lie in the teacher. It lies in the student. In you. In your openness to being challenged — to letting go of what you think you know, so you can relearn what you need to know.