What does it look like to lead in a pandemic era, with COVID raging on, civil unrest all around, and a global shift in health, perspective, and politics? To answer this question, we spoke with leaders in all different industries to share how their leadership has changed since COVID. 

In speaking with these people, we uncovered the five tenets of courageous community building within workplaces: Unity, action, communication, agility, and empathy. Here’s how and why you need to bring these tenets into your leadership practice during our pandemic era.

Bring Unity to the Forefront

United we stand, divided we fall. It’s a phrase we’ve heard hundreds of times, and yet again, our world—and, more specifically, the communities within our companies—must come together, united as one. Countries and companies do well when we find common ground in a common cause to overcome a common foe. 

While a global pandemic, civil unrest, and political uprisings may not seem like topics that you, as a leader, need to consider in your role in the workplace, your role has shifted. As leaders in these uncertain times, when stress levels and anxiety are at an all-time high, we need to lead with empathy, transparency, and unity, being courageous community leaders for our teams.

Uniting your team doesn’t mean you need to share your personal beliefs and opinions. Instead, you need to adapt your leadership skills. As Elena Carstoiu, COO of Hubgets reminds us: 

“The Coronavirus pandemic might have taken the world by storm, but it didn’t change the guiding principles of leadership: transparent communication, hands-on mentorship, focus on mental and physical health, constant feedback, engagement, and empathy. The only changes lie in how these fundamentals are delivered and their pace of implementation.”

Bring unity to your remote- and in-house teams using the leadership principles you’ve always followed—but remember that empathy and transparency are more important than ever.

Don’t Ignore Communication

We all know that we need to communicate with our team, board members, stakeholders, and customers. Still, Bob Flynn, CEO of Deflecto, gives clarity around what that means as a leader during a pandemic era:

“I believe that real-time and frequent communication from leadership is more important than ever during these difficult times. Make it transparent, clear, and concise, so people know where they stand.” 

While this is critical for managing shifts in regulations, company policies, and the like, it’s also crucial for our employees’ mental health. As Flynn continues, “Any sense of normalcy about their company, career, and job can make the rest of the world and its issues easier to bear and take on.”

Be Agile and Ready to Shift

No one is certain about how the world might shift from the time we hit the pillow at night to the moment we wake up, which is why Michael Pellegrino, President & Chief Growth Officer of Sargento Foods, has focused heavily on agility within his organization. 

“We quickly learned the need for agility because some things were simply out of our control. Our normal planning playbook was definitely thrown out, but we knew we could leverage our capabilities across branding, innovation, and customer service to maintain our vital role in the nation’s food supply and keep our business growing.”

We, as leaders, need to lead by example through our agile decision-making. When employees see our agility, they’re empowered to, in turn, be agile in their own role. Yes, this may mean mistakes are made. Yes, this may mean that we learn lessons the hard way. But it also means that our organization is prepared for whatever headlines meet us each morning. 

Show Empathy Above All

Empathy has become somewhat of a buzzword in the business world since the onset of COVID, and for a good reason, as Pellegrino says: “Whether it’s remote work, new childcare needs, or figuring out our optimal team dynamic over video. We’re all a lot smarter than we were six months ago, but we need to keep listening and adjusting based on whatever comes our way in the future.”

Bill Gadala, CFO of Vera Security, brings the importance of this empathy to the forefront: “Without a larger dose of empathy, you risk alienating people, which hurts them and others in the team, as well as yourself.”

 This is also a fundamental tenet for Scott Baxter, President & CEO of Kontoor Brands. Baxter explains, “You never really know what’s going on in someone’s life. Each day also reveals new headlines about the consequences of systemic racism and inequities, which is deeply troubling.” 

As leaders, we need to shift our focus toward empathy now and in the future. 

Become a Great Pandemic-Era Leader

One thing is clear from all of these leaders: long gone are the days of one-note leadership. Leaders today, especially during a pandemic, must be multifaceted in ways we didn’t need to be in years past. Doug Gladstone, Managing Director of Comhar Partners, sums this up well, saying:  

“A good leader needs to step up on multiple fronts not only focusing on driving his/her company’s bottom line, but they now need to focus equally on their employee’s immediate needs and stay current on economic changes and how such could impact their overall business operations.”

As we continue to run our companies and lead our teams, don’t forget about what it means to be a good leader in today’s world, during a time of societal unrest, a global health pandemic, and political uncertainty. 

As leaders, we must continue to be action-oriented, empathetic, communicative, and agile. If we can bring all these key skills into our roles each day, we can bring unity and purpose to a world that’s divisive and ever-changing.

The pandemic holds opportunities for change, such as finding the human and economic advantages of working remotely. Will you see the glass as half-empty or half-full?

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that unexpected events are inevitable and often life-changing. Because the COVID-19 pandemic completely upended societies and economies around the world, nearly 90% of executives believe the resulting fallout will not only affect the way they do business for the next five years but also permanently impact customers’ needs.

When the world is in chaos, it’s easy to feel like you’ve lost control as a leader. COVID-19 resulted in terrible hardships — lost lives, economic disaster for many businesses and families, and a “new normal” that reduces social interactions — but viewing the pandemic solely as a crisis can be damaging. A negative outlook provokes stress, depression, fear, and anger. And those emotions prevent you from taking positive, proactive action.

If you operate from a place of fear, you won’t be able to make thoughtful strategic decisions and improve workplace performance. Plus, you’ll miss out on the opportunities the pandemic has presented, such as the progress gained in finding the human and economic advantages of remote work. Your perception will guide your company into the post-pandemic era. So the question is: Will you see the glass as half-empty or half-full?

Shifting Your Perspective and Mindset

In many ways, the crisis has shown leaders that they had been doing things inefficiently or in a way that hindered their growth and ability to create high-performance workplaces. You’ve likely had to consider how your previous status quo compares to the new normal. It can be tempting to view the pandemic as a short-term problem to be fixed, but that thinking won’t advance your company forward.

Leaders with growth mindsets have a significant business advantage: the opportunity to pivot their businesses strategically. We experienced this firsthand at HPWP Group. We’ve always hosted a highly experiential in-person workshop that transforms management thinking and behavior in just one week. Unfortunately, due to the high levels of personal interaction, this workshop didn’t translate easily to a virtual format. However, many of our other training products were convertible — it just wasn’t a priority until in-person workshops were off the table. With more time on our hands, we’ve been able to identify different market opportunities and diversify our offerings.

So, are you surviving or thriving? The future is unknowable, meaning you can no longer rely on best practices or earlier models. You need to pivot your organization appropriately and adopt a growth mindset. As Luke Burmeister, the chief financial officer of Didion Milling, said during a roundtable with us, “Fear is a reaction. Courage is a choice.” By having courage and choosing to see the pandemic as an opportunity, you’ll be able to gain a competitive advantage as the economy bounces back.

1. Reframe your thinking to be more empathetic.

Instead of focusing on any negative impacts, remember that this is everyone’s crisis. This reminder will help you be more inclusive and empathetic. One company in the Netherlands took this line of thinking further by requiring managers to visit every employee at home (while taking the appropriate safety precautions). The warmth and appreciation expressed by their employees had a significant impact on the managers. By visiting, the managers developed deeper personal relationships that will change their work environment in terms of loyalty and productivity.

You should follow by example. Take measures to step back, build relationships, and form solid foundations within your company. “With a longer-term view, great relationships are established, and a culture of trust is built within the organization,” Burmeister said. “When a crisis occurs, those relationships result in creative ways to continue working and even enhance the business.” 

2. Reach deeply into your organization to find solutions.

You don’t have to come up with solutions by yourself. After all, you are surrounded by smart people. Work with others in your organization to determine how to reduce costs, what partnerships are available, which new business ideas are viable, and when you should expand into new markets.

In the same roundtable mentioned earlier, Del Land, the chief financial officer of Pacesetter Steel, said, “Unless we were alive in 1917 for the Spanish Flu pandemic, our current crisis is new, and we have no playbook. Now we truly have an opportunity to create a new playbook!” Engage people and maximize their collective intelligence as you develop a new company strategy and focus on a high-performance workplace.

3. Promote innovation and find new ways to work smarter.

Without the coronavirus pandemic, it would have taken businesses years to embrace remote work fully. Today’s climate presents you with similarly unique opportunities. For example, we’ve heard that employees feel more empowered right now to decline meetings that aren’t applicable or valuable to them. Some people are contributing to discussions more because the remote format created a higher level of psychological safety. If something isn’t working, explore ways to fix it. If something is working exceptionally well, find ways to capitalize on it.

There might be a lot on your plate right now, but a lack of time for innovation is an excuse, not an obstacle. Leaders determine where and how they spend their time, so take a moment to review your company’s operations and core competencies. When you’re able to think this way about your company’s future, your business will be stronger and more successful because you will have created a solid foundation for post-crisis growth.

As a leader, you determine your mindset. You can see the pandemic as a negative event, or you can view it as an opportunity to pivot and improve workplace performance. It’s time to become agile. Crises are inevitable, but this particular one will end. Use this opportunity to become the organization you always wanted to be.

The COVID-19 pandemic is poised to change work culture and practices forever. But are business leaders paying attention? They have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create profound change or, otherwise, sleepwalk into the future. A critical issue to consider is harnessing what I call “brain diversity.” 

Modern neuroscience tells us that the human brain can power us to move through and beyond COVID-19. One shining example is the global scientific community, which models how to collaborate, share knowledge, think diversely, act with utmost agility, and balance caution and boldness. At its best, science is both blind and clear-sighted: blind to gender, color, and background, yet clear-sighted that diversity of thinking is essential to success. 

Now, let’s turn to the business world, where conversely, we see some dangerous patterns emerging. A new study by Qualtrics and theBoardlist finds that, among other groups, working during the pandemic is disproportionately affecting the careers of women. For instance, 57% of men say that working from home during the pandemic has positively impacted their career, while only 29% of women say the same. In addition, 34% of men with children at home say they’ve received a promotion while working remotely, compared to a scant 9% of women with children at home. Moreover, twice as many working fathers say they received a pay raise while working remotely than working mothers. 

No wonder, then, women are exiting the labor force en masse. (And as Time magazine reports, “That’s bad for everyone.”) In September alone, of the 1.1 million workers ages 20 and over who dropped out of the U.S. labor force, a whopping 865,000 — four in five — were women, according to a National Women’s Law Center analysis of the September jobs report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Meanwhile, one in four women are considering reducing work hours, moving to part-time roles, switching to less demanding jobs, taking leaves of absence from work, or stepping away from the workforce altogether, according to an annual Women in the Workplace study published in September by McKinsey & Co. and Lean In. “If we had a panic button, we’d be hitting it,” says Rachel Thomas, CEO of Lean In, a gender equity advocacy group co-founded by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg. “We have never seen numbers like these.”

Business leaders who allow this pattern to take hold do so at their peril: Without brain diversity, which leverages the significant, synergistic differences between the male and female brains, the future of work is at risk. 

A Neurobiological Reality

There are differences in how the male and female brain listen, process information, and solve problems. Now, to be clear, such differences are not binary. They are, however, a neurobiological reality. And at this moment, amid COVID-19 and a resulting recession (or “she-cession”), it is vitally important for business leaders to have the best of all brains at their disposal. Additionally, there is no time to lose. Starting at the very top, leaders must take three clear-cut actions — simple steps that nevertheless won’t come easy. 

First, they must demand deliberate diversity — and settle for nothing less. To start, they should consider their current team and then ask themselves, who do I have at the table? If more than half of the team look or think like them, they’re in the danger zone. 

Second, they must commit to ensuring absolute trust in the room, recognizing, too, that trust is a fragile thing — hard to earn and easy to lose. This is the only way to access optimal brain performance and diverse, next-level thinking for all present. 

And third, they must get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable as they inclusively tackle significant, weighty issues. While some may be good at hiring diversity, most fall short in genuinely including their contributions. 

So why won’t these actions come easy? Much of the answer lies in the ancient brain. Fundamentally, ancient brain chemistry can limit today’s leaders in three ways. 

1. Othering

The brain elicits a pre-conscious response to who is in our “in-group” and, in contrast, who is in our “out-group.” Likewise, brain research shows that most of us aren’t even aware of when we are othering people and, as a result, jump to wrong or dangerous conclusions. (The renowned American neuroscientist David Eagleman, a Guggenheim Fellow and the creator of the critically acclaimed international television documentary series The Brain with David Eagleman has done some captivatingly brilliant research on this topic.) Now, as COVID-19 is driving a hybrid work model, a two-tier workforce is emerging, where the in-group can make it into the office and, through no fault of their own, the out-group can’t. This has several perilous gender and social-group implications, most of which will inherently affect women more than men. 

2. Old habits

Under stress, the brain reverts to habit. This saves energy, which, in a crisis, can be helpful. Today, however, amid a deadly pandemic and Depression-era levels of joblessness and economic despair, many business leaders are reverting to old habits — and not in a beneficial way. The best solutions lie not in old patterns but new ways of thinking. The good news is that the brain is adept at adapting. And leaders who choose to adapt and capture diversity of thought will survive these times and thrive in the future. This requires deliberately bringing about brain diversity and a work culture that accesses those brain differences, including the power of the female brain. 

3. Self-soothing

We get what we focus on. That is the way the human brain and nervous system work. Yet when leaders focus on “the way it was” before COVID-19, they’re merely self-soothing. And that, to be sure, is a losing proposition. Focusing on the past won’t work today, let alone tomorrow. Smart leaders will take the pandemic as a wake-up call to thinking, acting, and behaving differently — and diversely.

Finally, business leaders should consider the current conditions as an opportunity to seize — not a problem to solve. And this will require brain diversity across the organization and deep within the work culture. It may be at risk now, but it’s nothing that great leadership can’t change. 

www.mindbridge.co.uk

Crystalizing your career plan is a tough business in a noisy world. This is why mentors exist: they bring your potential into focus from the perspective of somebody who has already traveled that journey. 

But sometimes you don’t need a mentor to achieve the clarity you need. It just takes somebody to capture a truth in a sentence or two. A purpose you know in your heart but have not yet identified. This project delves into the minds of 15 of today’s most successful founders to find vital lessons.  As a very challenging year for millions of people draws to a close, these indispensable nuggets of wisdom are more relevant than ever before. 

We often turn to the older generation for advice on many things in life. From love and relationships to financial and moral issues. It’s natural as human beings to seek an older person’s point of view as they’ve experienced many of the same things we have, and can offer many words of wisdom.

It’s likely that at some point in your life you’ve gone to an older person for assistance — whether a parent, grandparent, older friend, or even a neighbor. But, have you ever gone to an older person to seek advice on business, leadership or your career? Your job is one of the most time-consuming aspects of your life; you likely spend more time at your job than anything else, so it’s important that you enjoy what you do (and who you do it for). Below are four valuable tips from residents at an independent senior living community in NJ to the younger generation about business and how to be a successful leader.

1. Like Other Hardships in Life, Hardships in Business Will Pass, Too

We all know the cliche, “this too shall pass.” This mantra is not only true in stressful personal life situations, it’s also true and relevant in business and your job. Stressful situations at work, whether with coworkers or a business deal that went wrong, are not permanent. Of course, at the moment, it’s hard to tell yourself that some issues will pass and everything will be okay. However, to be a successful business owner, employee, or leader, you will need to familiarize yourself with this way of thinking.

2. Always Look for Ways to Be Inspired

Residents I spoke with agreed that continually looking for ways to be inspired is one of the best ways to grow as a leader and help your business live up to its fullest potential. Inspiration will keep you motivated to learn and try new things and become confident in your business endeavors. Likewise, looking for new ways to be inspired will help you connect with your employees as a leader, making you more relatable and interesting. Your employees will feel more confident in their work when they know that their leader, too, is still growing, learning, and evolving. 

3. Mentors Are Key

No matter how successful you become, and no matter how large your business ends up becoming, you will always need a mentor. Mentors will help you grow and become the best version of yourself — in business and life. When you have a mentor that has your best interests in mind, you’ll be able to make better-informed decisions around your business and have accessible leadership tips at any given time.

4. The People You Work With are Just as Crucial as Your Salary

We work to make money, and a lot of the time we think salary is an essential part of our job. Although your salary is important, the environment in which you work is just as critical. You should work in an environment where people build each other up and help each other become better employees and better people. The people you work with should want you to succeed and should make going to work enjoyable. If you’re in a leadership position, you likely have some power in choosing who you bring onto your team. If you’re in a position of power, try to choose employees that you know will be good employees and good people, too. Likewise, enforce this mentality with your current employees to create a healthier and happier workplace. 

Whether you have owned your own business for years, or have just started out, keep these tips in mind. The elderly people who offered this advice have worked in various roles and are familiar with the need to balance work, success, and happiness. As you work, try to make the most out of every situation and continuously strive to make your business, and yourself, the best version possible.

If we as leaders remain locked in our old way of thinking and the patterns of behavior that go with it, we start to lose touch with the world around us. There’s nothing moral in this loss — it doesn’t mean we’re bad people or fundamentally flawed — but over time, it means that we fade from relevance.

We become mismatched, maladapted, and eventually, irrelevant. When an organization loses touch with the world, it starts to fade from significance and relevance. Usually, this begins slowly; but it can be rapid, too.

Usually, the warning signs are there for many years. But senior leaders ignore the signs, repress them actively, or, more likely, cannot see them for what they are within their existing mindset. This is understandable. Our biology is geared to have us see the world not as it is, but as we want to see it — until we switch on and awaken from our slumber.

Many think that the warning signals of maladaptation are hard to spot. But to the transformational leader, the signals and symptoms are clear: organizations that focus on boosting accounting profits (bottom-line growth) instead of generating value for emerging customer types (top-line growth). Enterprises create products and services that become quickly commodified as margins race to the bottom rather than seeking sources of value in the future to capture with exponential ideas and innovations. We see little real growth in the value we add to the world even as armies of people work ten-hour days to produce returns.

We become vulnerable to competition from start-ups and up-starts, often from outside our traditional industry. We have to grow through expensive, often misguided and mismatched, mergers and acquisitions rather than drive forward home-grown transformational innovations. And we find ourselves churning out carbon, waste, and pollution, extracting resources without a thought to the costs, accumulating capital as if climate change and rampant inequality were not major risks to Business as Usual.

We might find ourselves in a position where, although our legacy KPIs are being met, we cannot seem to bring about positive change. We find that our customers are unhappy and churn. They’re not served well by our products and services, so they complain, often leaving to go elsewhere. Our employees complain, too, as the “offer” to them starts to fade from relevance. They, too, leave, and it becomes harder and harder to attract and retain the most creative, agile, and inspired talent.

We rely on byzantine processes — that have accreted over time to control people and avoid costly errors — to make business work even as they now create endless friction and drag. We maintain policies that were well-intentioned but now just frustrate and demean our people and suppliers. The hierarchies we’ve built that seem powerful and important within the enterprise aren’t quick enough to make use of new insights that would win us new customers and generate new value. We have a sense of constant overwhelm that paralyzes people. We might discover that, no matter how much we say we want to empower our teams, co-workers find it hard to step up after a lifetime of being told what to do and what not to do.

The enterprise ends up with many managers but few genuine leaders. Managers might be reluctant to move beyond their technical expertise and step up to the transformational plate. Outdated behaviors and beliefs — like thinking we need to know more than our employees or micro-managing them even as we say we are delegating — lose our teams’ trust. Without trust, there can be no genuine transformation, as it’s the lubricant of effective change. We find it harder to motivate people using the old levers of promotion, power, and profit because these assets don’t appeal as much to younger team members.

Perhaps we retreat into micro-detail, creating the ultimate spreadsheets and the best reports, rather than spending time forging the future. We get hung up on having perfect data for decisions about an unknowable future. We constantly focus on forcing through continuous tweaks to existing products—whether it be construction or code—instead of building a culture where people feel empowered to, and passionate about, innovating value-creating products and service at the edges, where our emerging customers are.

All these phenomena, and many like them, are not the problems themselves. If you recognize your organization or yourself in them, each is evidence that you have yet to crack transformational challenges that are inviting you to resolve them through adaptation. They are symptoms of a deeper mismatch between how you think and feel and how the world is becoming. Simply put: there is no guarantee your organization has a right to exist in the future. There is no right to continue to be a senior, powerful leader or awesome entrepreneur.

The constant change in the outside world means that everything we do as leaders is becoming more or less valuable, but it is never the same. Twentieth Century mindsets see stasis where, in fact, there is constant flux. Our processes, procedures, products, and people are either becoming valuable more day by day because they fit the future world better as time goes on or are becoming less valuable with each passing day, but they are never static.

Please reread the last sentence, as it’s so crucial. If we stay the same and continue to do what we’ve always done, the changing world around us will make us obsolete in time. The period in which we can stay complacent is getting shorter and shorter. If we keep our products, services, management style, even our expenses, constant — or tweak them with small improvements to the same basic model — we will find ourselves going backward because the world is moving so fast. The proof is in the pudding.

The average age of a company has gone from 75 years in 1937 to just ten years in 2019. This is predicted to drop to only seven years by the end of the 2020s. In other words, the time in which a company can create a business model and find a way of generating value from it before competitors, or changing customer needs, disrupt it is now under a decade. This is why a Yale Management School professor has predicted that between 50% and 75% of Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies will be replaced by the year 2027.

We don’t have to look far to see this happening already. In 2018, over 20 companies left the Fortune 500. Only 60 companies that were in the Fortune 500 in 1955 were still in it in 2017.

What economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” — the death of old businesses and business models because of the innovation of new, better-adapted ones — is speeding up. Human beings took three centuries to create and optimize the wheel. Apple releases (often breakthrough) new products every few months to stay in step with its fast-changing customers’ needs, wants, and expectations (like privacy, for example).

We cannot try to stay neutral in the digital, disrupted, and damaged world and hope to get out of the workplace into retirement. We all have to deal with the transformational challenges and global crises at hand. There is nowhere to hide because even in a villa by the sea in Carmel or Provence, sea waters will rise, extreme weather will hit people, pension funds and stocks will dive with every pandemic, and descendants will look to us for answers. Therefore we either play our part in fitting the emerging future, or we fail, whether through underperformance or obsolescence.

When my wife and I first started dating, she made me promise I’d never take her on a rollercoaster. The jerky motion made her sick. Not long after marrying, I realized I might have broken my promise. I’d bought a franchise.

Over the next ten years, we experienced a journey much more tumultuous than riding The Cyclone. It was a wild ride with ups, downs—and a lot more we couldn’t predict or control.

Running a business is intense. You’ve invested your own money or, more likely, borrowed money you have to pay back. It’s your signature on all the contracts. You’re the last word on all significant decisions. You’re expected to be the ultimate problem solver. And if it turns out you don’t like the business, you can’t just quit. You’re on the hook. All of that with the hope of profit, but no guarantee.

I bought my first Edible Arrangements franchise thinking it’d be a simple fruit basket business. As great as the model was, I was still exposed to all the issues faced by small businesses with hourly workers. There were unreasonable customers and ghosting employees. There were delivery van breakdowns and middle-of-the-night break-ins. Fruit pricing and availability were in the hands of Mother Nature. One lady “fell” in our lobby and wanted compensation. There were great times too, but it’s the challenges that cause hair loss. 

What those ten years, along with many more years as a speaker, coach, and writer on franchise issues, have taught me is that we franchise owners don’t just run our business; we feel it. Right there, along with managing employees, serving customers, sales and marketing, paying bills, and bookkeeping are excitement, disappointment, pride, anxiety, joy, and total exhaustion. The journey is as emotional as it is financial.

Unchecked emotions can be bad for business. They lead to poor decisions because of what I call the “Trigger to Trouble” syndrome. Events in your business can easily set off a process that leads to feelings and reactions. The triggering event might be an angry customer, a drop in sales, a new brand policy, or an offhand comment by a colleague. It could be something significant or something small. It doesn’t take much. Our brain instantly decides if this event is an opportunity or a threat, good or bad, pleasant or painful, fair or unjust. We recall similar events from the past and predict what it might mean for the future. We convert our objective observation of the event captured by our physical senses and develop a subjective perspective. The more subjective we are, the farther from the truth we get. That perspective leads to emotion. Finally, based on our subjectivity and feelings, we take action. All of this happens in a fraction of a second. The result is often a kneejerk reaction we’ll eventually regret.

There’s a correlation between your mental state and the state of your business. Your ability to manage your feelings is a huge determinant of how you’ll perform. The franchisees who thrive are those most in control of their mind. Their ability to keep a clear head and remain calm gives them a huge advantage. Their decisions are more responsible. They see opportunities and solutions their freaked-out counterparts miss. They’re able to inspire employees better and serve customers. I’ve met thousands of franchisees in my work and have gotten to know the best among them. Their heads are as cool as their businesses are profitable.

Some people are naturally calm. Others, myself included, have to be more deliberate about it. Fortunately, there are many things you can do to keep your emotions in check. Here are five:

1. Manage stress before managing your problems. Our first instinct, when faced with adversity, is to address the issue. We want relief. The problem is that when we’re stressed out, our brain function is impaired. Our amygdala kicks into gear, causing a fight or flight response. That makes us hyper-alert and winds us up. And when the amygdala is active, it blocks the neuropathways to the prefrontal cortex, where logic, reason, and problem-solving occur. That’s where the best decisions are made. In other words, the sooner we calm down, the sooner we access the part of the brain we need to find solutions. Avoid giving into the urgency of problems. Clear your head first. Take a moment to reset yourself. Breath. Walk. Meditate. Wait. But don’t act—until you’re calm.

2. Focus on the here and now. Business problems cause us to worry about the future. While we need to prepare for what lies ahead, what matters most is what’s going on today. A lot can happen between today and tomorrow. It’s hard to predict. Today is tangible. It’s real. And it’s where you have the most control. So, solve the problems in front of you. Keep doing right by your customers. Take care of your employees. Pay any bills that are due now. Learn something you can bring to your work the following day. You can’t know what the future will look like, but it’s safe to assume it will be different. New things will happen. Many of them will be good.

Focus on getting through today. Then do it again tomorrow.

3. Work through problems on paper. It’s hard to do complex math problems in your head. That’s true for business problems as well. You can’t see things clearly with all that noise in your noggin. On paper, they’re easier to manage. Try writing in a journal. I also like to write my concerns in list form, noting the conclusions I’m drawing, other possible perspectives, my ability to control the issue, and what action to take. The exercise is as cathartic as it is productive.

4. Beware of optimism. As destructive as negativity can be, positivity can be equally problematic. Many franchisees have made some pretty bad decisions based on hope. Faith won’t reduce your expenses. Optimism won’t bring in more customers. What will help your business is an objective understanding of what’s happening. Much better than positivity or negativity is clarity: seeing things as they are. If a positive attitude gets you out of bed and inspires you to act boldly, that’s great. Just make sure there’s data to back up your feelings.

5. Seek outside feedback. Other people with less emotional investment can help you see things more clearly. One franchisee from a well-known retail chain panicked about decreased sales when corporate opened a new location in an adjacent town. His field support consultant ran the numbers and pointed out that while gross sales were, in fact, down, his number of transactions was actually higher. More people were coming into his store, but his average ticket had decreased. In other words, he and his team weren’t selling well. He was grateful for the perspective. Emotions can blind us, so it can help to get a fresh pair of eyes from someone else.

Running a franchise is an emotional experience. Having feelings about what’s going on doesn’t make you weak; it makes you human. And that humanity will allow you to have empathy for customers and employees. So, don’t deny your emotions. Just monitor them. It’s an important step to keep your mind sound and your business profitable.

Scott Greenberg’s new book is The Wealthy Franchisee: Game-Changing Steps to Becoming a Thriving Franchise Superstar

We’re all caught up in how terrible and nasty today’s political climate is. But things could be—and have been—worse. Creativity consultant Nir Bashan shows how applying some historical context and a Creator Mindset makes our political present and future seem much brighter.           

Have you heard about what is going on in Washington? In our nation’s capital? This is the stuff that no one reports—but it needs to be told. Let’s take a look:

A politician was walking down the street on the way to the chamber in Capitol Hill. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he was beaten within an inch of life by someone from the opposite political party—simply because he disagreed with his political stance. Someone pulled out a gun and tried to shoot his opponent point-blank—in the face, no less. But the gun jammed and didn’t fire.

Didn’t hear about that? What about this? Let’s see if you’ve heard about it:

The president was recorded on tape saying, “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this. We’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down—not enough to make a difference.”

Have you heard about these things going on in our country’s capital?

The politician who beat Ohio Congressman Will Stanbury within an inch of his life was Sam Huston. The year was 1832. And the president who uttered that horrifically racist quote? That was Lyndon B. Johnson. The year was 1963.

When we look analytically at what is going on in our political system today here in the US, we see utter chaos. And in fact, we are supported in that view by social media and the media in general. It is a pessimistic view of a system in crisis. But simple creative truths are lost. And it’s so easy to get lost today. Trump vs. Biden, left vs. right, red vs. blue—it seems that everyone is on the extreme fringe. 

But if we instead choose to look at our political system creatively, we begin to see a fresh way to look at things. We begin to uncover some truths that cannot be seen with analytics alone.

Here are three incredibly powerful truths that arise from a Creator Mindset that might make you feel better about the whole darn thing. Let’s take a look:

#1: Things Are Getting Better. As humans, we all feel as if we are living through the worst of times, and our burden is the heaviest ever, no matter what. But that ignores a basic fact of life: things are in a constant state of change. And almost always, that is a constant state of change for the better. The truth is that not only has this—whatever the ‘this’ of the moment is—happened before, but indeed things have been far, far worse historically than they are today. The two incidents cited above are examples. Can you imagine if Hillary Clinton said something horrifically racist and awful like that? Or if Donald Trump was to beat Chuck Schumer in the streets within an inch of his life? Of course, these things would never happen today—no matter how bitter the rivalry is. But just a blink of an eye ago, in a historical context, Johnson said his racist tirade—and, by all accounts, this was one of his milder racist tirades. Today in Washington, that would be unthinkable, unfathomable, unmentionable. But just a short time ago, it really happened. 

When we begin to look at the world of politics creatively, we start to see that the view that everything is continually getting worse all the time is not true. By and large, the experience of the US political system has improved on its shortcomings from years past. And we can take a great measure of comfort in that.

#2: The Experiment Is Working. We live in a day and age where two politicians fighting in the streets and pulling a gun on one another is unfathomable. And that’s a good thing. When everyone is focused on the problems only, creativity sees a solution. It sees the silver lining. It sees positivity. What kind of positivity can be derived from this? Well, it’s a different way of looking at things. While the pundits scream at us from both ends of the political spectrum, telling us how bad things are, we instead shut them out when we look at the world creatively.

Our Constitution was a radical experiment that we are still experimenting with today. And that is a creative view. There is no hard and fast right to freedom, just the freedom we earn each day. That is a creative view. Protests and judicial appointments, and presidential debates are examples of the framework working. That is a creative view.

The experiment is working. 

It may not be working fast enough. And it may not be working well enough. But the truth is that gains are being made every day, and that, overall, is a good thing. You won’t see that with the analytical way of viewing things. But creatively, they are the fodder of opportunity to anyone who chooses to see it that way.

#3: Creativity Sees Hope and Optimism. Our political system is designed to go through highs and lows, very much like what we see today. It is designed for great accomplishments and not so great accomplishments. But that’s just the thing. If we can look creatively at what is going on today, we can cut through much of the pessimistic clutter and instead see our political system with optimism. Sadly, that optimism is in such short supply today.

We are able to vote, and each and every vote matters. We can elect officials who are supposed to have our best interests at heart. And if they don’t? We are able to vote them out. There are tons of places on earth where this is not the case. Those countries are rife with horrific violations of fundamental human rights, women’s rights, and basic sanitation, among other things. Looking creatively at what we have allows us to see solutions that can work in the United States and other parts of the world.

When we think about politics creatively, we activate a long-dormant part of the mind that is light-years away from the analytical view. While the analytical view sees only the negative of what is going on today, the creative view shows things positively and with optimism instead of negativity. And it is only with that optimism that we can move forward and solve the remaining problems in the great experiment we call the United States of America. 

Nir Bashan’s new book is The Creator Mindset: 92 Tools to Unlock the Secrets to Innovation, Growth, and Sustainability.

There aren’t many financial services chief executives today that don’t have ‘diversity and inclusion’ on their list of strategic priorities. Yet despite this focus, we have made very little progress across this industry to date. 

According to the Diversity Project, the proportion of female fund managers has hovered around 10% over the past four years, while 10% of the fund management industry identify as Asian and only 1% as Black.

The sad reality is that if you’re a woman, from a minority background, or didn’t go to a top university, a successful career in investment is more than likely still out of reach for you. 

Why? Because organizations are hard to change. We will naturally stick to what we know, who we know, how we’ve always done things, the most efficient methods, and what brings the quickest returns. 

However, if we want to build a more trusted industry, have more inclusive cultures, and engage diverse people in doing more meaningful work, something needs to change.

But as a leader, where do we find the inspiration to break the financial services out of its cycle? Each of us has to dig deep and ask ourselves why is this important. The answer will be different for each person. 

My own inspiration is the late Indian social reformer Pandurang Shastri Athavale, a Templeton prize winner credited with liberating millions of Indian people from poverty during his lifetime. Athavale, or Dadaji, as he is often known, is the person who has had the greatest influence on my life, career, and approach to leadership. 

Here are a few specific things that I think can make the biggest difference in converting talk into action and catalyzing the change to which we all aspire. 

Start by working on yourself.

Dadaji believed that each person is a microcosm of the world. Any problems, biases, and barriers we see in our organizations start within us. Therefore, any external change has to be accompanied by an internal change in our leaders and, ultimately, our people.  

At my company, our leadership team is continuously pushing to be more open than we feel comfortable. We share our mistakes; we strive to create psychological safety, invite honest feedback, foster a continuous learning culture, and embed personal growth and development into pay and bonus discussions. 

We have found that the most effective place to start is with your hiring managers – they are the multipliers. Yet often, they are not included in the debates around diversity. It shouldn’t be surprising then, that you might attract cynicism from them. In our experience, getting line managers to engage, support each other, commit to change, and take feedback is transformational.

Our organizations’ potential for change is limited by our leaders’ capacity and willingness to change themselves.

Build bridges with empathy

At the heart of Dadaji’s work is the idea that we must consider our privileges to be a responsibility — that helps build bridges for those left behind in society. 

At Redington, we bring in diverse talent and perspectives, then work hard to listen to those different voices and encourage people to challenge each other in meetings. We build empathy by mentoring people that are different from us, and at least once a quarter, we invite a different perspective from across the firm. 

This empathetic approach is invaluable in helping us diagnose where the problems lie, barriers, and how our processes, habits, or culture are getting in the way of nurturing diverse talent.

It’s all about experimentation.

To ensure that we are creating an inclusive environment that enables diversity to flourish, we need to be willing to experiment. And importantly, we need to be ready to accept that not everything we do will be successful. We need to talk about these mistakes and lessons openly, in a spirit of learning, and with a commitment to change.

In my experience, this change takes time, you’re never really done, and you often take two steps back to take one step forward. But it starts with person-to-person dialogue, one conversation at a time. It needs to remain a strategic priority. 

I am fortunate to learn from and work alongside a team of responsible, compassionate, and action-oriented leaders who want to lead better teams and create a better organization. Together, we struggle, fail, learn, and persevere each and every day.

So, as Dadaji often said: “Don’t be an armchair philosopher.” Take action, experiment, share your lessons, and drive lasting change now, not tomorrow. Your shareholders, employees, society, and future generations will thank you.

Rob Waldron, CEO at education technology company Curriculum Associates, just celebrated 12 years as CEO. He shares the 12 best leadership lessons he learned during his time with the company.

1. It’s much more important to be an outstanding recruiter than an outstanding manager. 
It’s much better to be involved in choosing those people. Outstanding talent wins the day, and Curriculum Associates’ success has come from choosing those people.

2. Good questions drive good answers.
Great leaders ask great questions. I try to have 2x as many questions as answers because it promotes dialogue, community, and critical thinking.

3. Paranoia promotes performance.
We’re always trying to think about what could go wrong, what could happen with competitors, etc. which allows you to be better prepared for the future.

4. If you fire leaders who lie, everyone else will believe you.
There’s no room for lying in great organizations, and trust is paramount. Don’t keep anyone who lies in your business; it will only hurt you.

5. High-performance teams have a culture of grace.
A high-stress culture organization like Amazon won’t lead to long-term high performance. It’s just temporary because people will burn out. A culture of grace, respect, and realistic expectations will result in the highest performance from employees long-term.

6. Cross words cross paths. Kind deeds plant seeds.
The industry is small and never burn bridges. If you do/say something bad to someone, it will come back to bite you. Alternatively, if you do something kind, people will remember it down the road.

7. The most important person in the room is the one who can tell the best story.
It’s essential to be a storyteller, and our success comes from telling these stories. Great stories motivate others.

8. Equity requires proximity.
You need to be near people to serve them properly. If you want equity, we need to learn to treat people based on their unique needs. You need to pay attention to these unique needs instead of rubber-stamping everything.

9. The most successful organizations talk about their goals first, then everything else second.
The most successful districts talk about student achievement first and everything else second because student achievement is most important for our customers. This laser-focus is how they succeed in improving achievement.

10. Products don’t solve problems. Their great implementations do.
Great service leads to success. Without fantastic service, even the greatest product isn’t helpful.

11. Sleep. Move. Read.
It’s important to separate yourself from work. Rest, exercise, and stay healthy. Reading and learning things outside of work promotes better leadership.

12. Long-term thinking often drives the best short-term results.
I have a 20-year employment agreement. This has provided me with a long-term view, which has enabled us to be more successful in the short-term.