What it Takes to Reopen: the new challenge for business leaders
Do you ever find yourself staring out the window, dreaming of the day you can return to your office building? It can’t be just me!
I think many of us are surprised by how much we want to get back to work, back to our routines, even back to the commutes we loved to complain about. It’s comforting to think that soon our leaders will name the date and everything will get back to “normal”.
Of course, if you play any part in your company’s decision to reopen, you know it’s not that simple.
I found myself wondering why. Why, with all the data we’ve gathered, is it so much harder to reopen successfully?
Leaders Make Choices
A quick disclaimer – this is not political commentary, medical advice, or an epidemiology debate. I’m simply interested in why some companies, industries, or communities are finding it easier to move out of the shutdown. On the flip side, why are many leaders way over their skis right now? I don’t believe it’s because they’re bad people or lazy, in fact I’m sure they are just the opposite.
But the leadership necessary to make the hundreds of complex, interwoven decisions to reopen a business is very different from the leadership it took to make one massive decision to shut everything down. Leadership is all about making choices. At the very top levels, leadership comes down to two different flavors of choices; expense efficiency and growth. The expense initiatives are easy. Turning off the economy is easy. That’s not to say that it’s always pleasant, but as a CEO I can announce: “We’re having trouble. We’re making a 10% expense cut across the board,” and everyone on down the line knows what they have to do to get that done.
Growth is just the opposite. If I walk out of a board meeting and say “we need to grow by 10% this year, go do it” I’m going to set off a lot of frantic scrambling without seeing much of a result.
Growth-focused Choices Require Wisdom
This is where my wisdom formula comes into play. Wisdom = Knowledge x Experience.
Reopening requires multi-layered choices, made with speed, decisiveness, and clarity. The only way to reach that level of decision-making is through wisdom; the combination of knowledge and experience. Very few of us leaders and teams have ever been through something like this before. There’s a pretty big wisdom gap at our conference table. This is why I believe we’re starting to see a huge disparity in outcomes on the backside of this pandemic.
My advice? Wherever possible, try and take a zoomed-out, unemotional look at some of your reopening choices. Where are the people who have done, or are doing, something similar? If we break them down, at some level our challenges have been met before. Ask for help, acknowledge where you’re still learning, and encourage your teams to do the same.
Wisdom at a Glance
If you find yourself wondering why some businesses struggle to reopen more than others, consider whether their leadership team has been focused on growth or expense cutting. Growth-oriented companies have the knowledge and experience it will take to rebuild momentum.
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