Debashis Chatterjee,Leadership and Wisdom in Uncertain Times

The New Normal

‘What is happening to your business in these uncertain times?’, I asked a retailer in the city.

‘Don’t ask me’, he said. ‘Traditional retail is going downhill. People are distancing themselves socially. They are buying less from places that require community gathering. The global supply chain is disrupted. All the certainties of business are now gone’.

He then turned around and asked me, ‘So, does one fix it all?’

I said, ‘You can fix a product. But how can you fix a mindset that is not functioning? How do you fix your thinking in these turbulent times?’

‘True, tell me more’, he said.

‘Think of the word, “karma”’, I said.

‘That’s so fatalistic!’, he groaned!

‘Karma has nothing to do with fate’, I said.

‘Then, what does it mean?’

‘It simply means conscious and thoughtful action’.

‘Please explain more!’

‘Karma does not mean fate. It is the context you find yourself in. The current situation you are facing in business is a result of your past thoughts. However, the future of your business will depend entirely on the quality of your actions in the present’.

‘What is the first step towards conscious action?’

‘The first step is to be conscious of an old mindset that you are carrying in your head about business as usual. Yet you can see that business as usual does not work anymore, just as business school as usual does not work for me anymore’.

‘Why, what happened to the business school?’ he queried.

I clarified, ‘On-campus learning is turning out to be more expensive than online learning. Learning has broken tough old mindsets of space and time. Students do not want to learn within the limitations imposed by 90-minutes’ periods. They want to learn in flexitime. Learning is turning out to be a function of human attention rather than a period of time. Likewise, learning is going to happen a lot less in a place called “the classroom” and a lot more in spaces that are digitally interconnected. It has moved from a physical class to a digital hub’.

‘So, how about the first step?’

‘The first step is the most critical step, as the first button of your coat. If you get that wrong, the whole alignment of buttons is gone for a toss’.

‘The first step is to be conscious of the old mindset about leading your enterprise that you are carrying inside your head. That is the old normal’.

‘And what is the new normal?’

‘The new normal is not sitting there like a target you have to hit. The new normal is what you create through your karma—your thoughtful and conscious action’.

I shared with him the following story to help navigate and lead in the world of uncertainty.

When businesses failed during the great depression, P&G came out of economic distress. They thought that soap is still an essential commodity in crisis while other companies cut costs for advertising. The president of Procter and Gamble (P&G), at that time, Richard Dupree, in spite of objections from the shareholders, increased its advertising expenditure and came out of it unscathed. He actively pursued new marketing channels which, at the time, included the then rising commercial radio broadcasts that not only focused on the product but also the daily drama of people he imagined were like the people who bought P&G products. One of these campaigns involved becoming the chief sponsor of daytime serial dramas aimed at housewives—the company’s primary market. The shows were associated with sponsors such as P&G’s Oxydol, Duz and Ivory soaps and were dubbed ‘soap operas’. In 1933, P&G debuted its first serial, Oxydol’s Own Ma Perkins, and housewives around the country quickly fell in love with the daily stories. Similar daily serial dramas were created to bolster its other brands and, by 1939, the company was producing 21 of these so-called ‘soap operas’. Thus, two industries were thriving due to the investments made by one.

Fewer Takers for Talent: A Lot More for Attitude

One of the insights that business leaders have often had is that talent is largely overrated. I agree. In times of uncertainty, where jobs are scarce, more and more talent will chase fewer jobs. Organisations that could not afford to hire very talented people will now not only be able to attract them for lesser salaries but also retain them longer because of job insecurity in the market.

But honestly, what will count in the long run is the kind of attitude talented employees bring to the enterprise. Think of a new generation of youngsters who have graduated through the COVID-19 world. This kind of graduation through the school of life has taught them many things that they would not have learnt in a classroom. It has taught them the virtues of essentialism—emphasis on using minimum resources, conserving energy, saving more and consuming less.

The new attitude that Generation Z will bring to the enterprise will shift businesses thinking from consuming to caring. This will have an impact on consumption patterns. The new generation will see attitudes shifting from the egocentric managerial world towards a more eco-centric, purposeful business. Businesses will be a lot more accountable for carbon footprints they leave behind. Enterprises will be hauled up more for outsourcing the social and environmental cost of doing business and making money.

Another attitudinal shift that will come about in organisations is the movement from the rigidity of structures and processes to flexibility and freedom to innovate. Leaders should give the graduates of the COVID-19 world the flexibility to manage their own time. This generation will work smarter and a lot harder if they have autonomy over the use of their time. At least, most of the generation tends to think that way.

Most talented, young managers come to an organisation with a chip on their shoulders. Arrogance becomes their calling card. They become prisoners of what Stanford researcher Carol Dweck classifies as the ‘fixed mindset’. Those with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence is a fixed commodity and does not change.

On the contrary, managers lesser in talent but greater in attitude become quick learners. They represent what Dweck describes as people with ‘growth mindsets’. In times of uncertainty, the only way to grow is to accelerate the pace of learning. This requires an attitude of humility and an enduring belief that intelligence is not frozen but fluid in nature. Those with growth mindsets, according to Dweck, believe that intelligence can be enhanced with effort.

In the times of uncertainty, those with a growth mindset will be the ones who would survive and thrive.

How to Shift Your Attitude Towards Growth Mindset?

Three of the most unused critical tools in the arsenal for growth of new managers are listening, observing and failing.

Of the three, listening is the most important tool. Yet, young managers get trained in big business schools in the art and practice of speaking well. Listening is a primary management tool, and it must be honed by every young manager aspiring to lead in their profession. Aytekin Tank, Founder at JotForm.com, describes how listening to his 4.1 million users inspired a new product idea. He does not sell online forms. He just helps a few million customers to run smarter and more productive businesses. In uncertain times, most managers have to listen to their customers’ voices rather than their competition. They have to ask, ‘What would make the customers’ work life easier—on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis?’ Then they create that product or service. My thumb rule is that young managers should adopt a listening to speaking ratio of 3:1. That is three times more listening than speaking.

Observation is the key to understanding the reality of what a customer wants. Observation leads to deeper insights and better ways of presenting a value proposition to customers. Tank wrote that growing up in his professional life, he was waiting in line at a sports shop renting out boats—kayaks and canoes—for recreation. He observed a prominently displayed message:

‘We don’t sell boats. We sell time on the water’.

His keen observation may have been the basis for his start-up. He looked into what customers really wanted when they were dealing with tedious form-filling: (a) relief from excessive information load and (b) stress reduction. That is exactly what Tank was selling to his customers through his successful company.

Finally, failing, young managers do not realise that the more they succeed, the more they tend to repeat processes and tools they were successful with. In the age of uncertainty, this is a sure recipe for failure. What made you successful in the context of the past will fail you when the context has changed in the future. If using a hammer made you successful in breaking bricks, it does not necessarily mean that you should be using that hammer in extracting a painful tooth. A successful brick breaker will end up being a failed dentist if they continue to use their hammer. In uncertain times, successful recipes of the past would work less and less. Young managers need to fail fast and fail forward to succeed.

Leaders Do Not Hit Targets; They Grow People Who Hit Targets

In business, there is no escape from hitting targets. Most young managers experience their first job as a relentless exercise in target hitting. Leadership is much more than hitting the bull’s eye. There is a large human component in leadership behaviour. Young managers have to explore hitting deeper chords in human nature rather than just hitting targets.

Leadership is about mobilising the energy of people towards the strategic goals and tactical targets. Moving people is vastly different from moving paper on a desk or a cursor on a computer screen. Moving people demands that you learn to decode human psychology of high performance. Leadership is about getting people to hit targets not when they are told to but when they are inspired to. This makes the difference between a mechanical and a magical performer.

In the world of crisis and uncertainty, the target is rarely a fixed one. Volatility in the business landscape creates moving targets. The priority of a leader is to enable target hitters to have a clear vision. They need clarity about which of the moving targets to hit and when. Take this example. In the post-COVID-19 world, most governments have struggled to balance the targets of safety and economy. During prolonged lockdowns, the target was to secure the health and well-being of citizens. This slowed down the performance of governments in achieving their economic targets. Most leaders struggled to balance these two competing targets. But there were a few leaders who navigated the dynamic challenge of choosing their targets well. Surprisingly, some women heads of states did steer their countries better than their male counterparts. One of them is New Zealand’s young prime minister, Jacinda Ardern.

Under Ardern’s leadership, New Zealand, which relies significantly on revenue generated by tourism, closed its borders to international travel on 19 March 2020. This was done only 19 days after the first confirmed COVID-19 case. It was one of the earliest and most stringent lockdowns imposed. Ardern said, ‘A strategy that sacrifices people in favour of, supposedly, a better economic outcome is a false dichotomy and has been shown to produce the worst of both worlds: loss of life and prolonged economic pain’.

Balancing pragmatism and idealism, Ardern represents the ethos of new leadership in our volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous world. Jacinda Ardern, commenting on her style of leadership, said, ‘Very little of what I have done has been deliberate. It is intuitive. I think it is just the nature of an event like this. There is very little time to sit and think in those terms. You just do what feels right’.

Young managers will not have the luxury of problem-solving by elaborate meetings and threadbare analysis. They have to learn to fix a plane even while flying it. This will be the new normal in the post-COVID-19 world.