Transcript of Preparing Your Leadership Team for Transition to a New Normal

All right. Well, it's 1:01. We're about to get started here. Welcome to this month's edition of Great Leadership Teams webinar series, episode number 26. My name is Jack McGuinness. I'm the managing partner at Relationship Impact, a consulting firm focused on helping leadership teams get in shape, both structurally and relationally. So today's topic is an important one during this crazy time we're going through right now. I wanted to start with a caveat that suggests I'm not an expert at transitioning to a new normal, nor is anyone else, I guess. That's not the focus of what I do, but I've been learning a lot from the clients I'm working with and the CEO network that I'm engaged with and thought I would just put together some lessons learned from the work and the conversations I've been having with my clients and that network.

So that's what this is all about. And just in terms of focus, the focus is not so much on planning a transition to the new normal, it's how to help your leadership team prepare and focus themselves for this transition. And depending on where you are in the country, I guess there's people from abroad here as well, then a lot depends on that as well. So today's topic is preparing your leadership team for the transition to a new normal. Just a couple notes on logistics. As I say every time on our webinars first, our slides are thick with content. So I apologize for those of you who are PowerPoint aficionados and don't like as many words on the screen. That's just kind of how I do it so I can distribute the slides afterwards. Secondly, if you have any questions during the course of the webinar, please don't hesitate to use the chat feature and I'll do my best to answer the questions you have during the course of the discussion.

So with all that behind us, we have a good crew of people on the horn today. So look forward to imparting as much good knowledge as I've gathered in the last couple months on how to transition to a new normal. So let's start by, I'm a consultant at heart, or I am a consultant and been a consultant for most of my career, and I always have to put together some sort of model. So in preparing your leadership team, there are three things that we think are really important.

The first is mindset. We've been in this mindset of remote working and moving away from the office. So shifting the mindset is going to be an important thing for your leadership team to grapple with, and for them to help their teams grapple with. The second thing is modeling. When I mean modeling, I mean behavioral modeling. Modeling the behaviors you expect of the rest of the organization. A leadership team plays a strong role in any significant crisis like this, and particularly as you think about making some moves to transition, whenever that might be. And from our perspective it's not too soon to start thinking about it and planning.

The third thing is method, and this gets into more of the blocking and tackling around what some of our thoughts are and what we've been learning about from some of our clients around what they're thinking about, what they're doing practically to think through how to transition to a new normal. As I'll talk about a little bit further, this is an overused cliche or phrase, but no question that it's really meaningful at this point in most organization's lives. The only constant right now is uncertainty. I was just talking to one of my clients before about an article I read last week by a somewhat pretentious professor at Northwestern University, who, when you read it, you were like, wow, he really thinks he knows what's going to actually happen. And we don't know what's going to happen, but we can plan for it. And we can plan for and embrace the uncertainty as best we can. And that's what this discussion is all about.

So let's get into it a little. Let's talk about mindset. Before we get into that, talk a little bit about what I mean by uncertainty as a constant. There are a lot of things that are uncertain right now. Changes in the social contract in terms of how we interact publicly, changes in the roles and rules of institutions related to that. The roles of our police force, the roles of nonprofits, the roles of our government agencies, the roles of big corporations that are playing more of an altruistic role in society right now.

And then obviously, practically, unpredictability in terms of financing. I won't tell you, I'm looking at the list here. You're all certain of that the credit market is tough, raising capital is tough. The uncertainty around the SBA rules are still a challenge. And the next thing I think is something that business owners can't... Business owners, heads of associations, heads of nonprofits, heads of government contractors, government agencies, the permanence of our customer behavior changes is something that we can't take for granted. And we have to sort of get our heads wrapped around and plan for, and potentially leverage and seize the opportunity in.

And then the expectations for physical, emotional, financial, and digital safety. Expectations for safety is something that we're grappling with. So there's no certainty in any of these things as well, except for the fact that... And these are just five of many important things that organizations need to think through as they're planning for any transition.

So what do I mean by mindset? So full disclosure, I stole this slide. It looked a little bit more creative than this one, but I stole this slide from a... Should I say adapted it. It's not exactly the same. But I adapted this content from the slide from Deloitte. And when I send you the slides, I'll have a link to the actual article on the bottom of the slide. Because it was really good in terms of thinking through more of a tactical planning approach. But from my perspective and the work that I'm doing with some of my clients perspective, it's really getting their heads wrapped around the change in mindset or the shift in mindset that is likely going to be important for their leadership teams to grapple with to help the rest of their organizations grapple with. Because we responded to this crisis, and it was an unpredictable situation. And to recover, we're going to have to... It's still a bit unpredictable, but we're going to have to plan for some interim sort of normalcy.

Our focus in terms of our response was very inward looking. How do we deal with a remote workforce? How do we deal with maintaining a rhythm? How do we deal with our interaction with our customers? And now it's, we have to be thinking about a market facing environment where we're really thinking about how do we recover lost revenue? How do we think about taking advantage of new opportunities? And from a management perspective, obviously we're in this whole crisis management mode and we're going to have to shift back to a more programmatic approach, I think. That's at least from our perspective. And again, from Deloitte's perspective as well, but I think it makes a lot of sense.

And then from planning in terms of contingencies to thinking through and having some foresight. I've been doing a lot of talking on LinkedIn and some short videos and doing a lot of talking to CEO groups about the need for foresight, particularly now. It's never been more important. And foresight doesn't mean predicting the future, it simply means being able to embrace all of the change and the information in our environment and sort of making sense of it and identifying what the key variables are that are most important for our industry and our company or organization. So for example, I'm working with a large trade association that does events and does education and a big variable that they're thinking about is travel. Corporate travel and their ability to travel. So I think that variable is a big one as they're thinking about planning.

And then attitude. Moving from a reactive mode to a more, how do we think, again, using our foresight. And how do we take advantage of some of the opportunities that we hadn't considered even before that are presented to us right now? Again, that same trade association, the CEO was hired about two years ago, I guess now. He came in and he was really big, big push to move to a lot of education virtually, but was getting a lot of pushback from multiple stakeholders internally, with his board, and also with his membership base. The silver lining for their organization now is that they're sort of reinventing themselves into a more virtual education organization. They'll have a combination of both.

They're also looking at, in terms of reinvention, they have some great office space that they use for training and they're thinking about how do we, given that other associations might be downsizing their office space, how do we use that as another revenue potential revenue source? So it's those types of things, from the strategic to the more tactical. So this is a shift in mindset, which I think is really important. And I think when you read this article in full you'll get an even better sense of the types of mindset shifts that may be important.

So what's the leadership team's role in any big transition like this? Probably shouldn't be much different than their role normally, but I'd like to focus on it as if that were the case. These things I think are characteristics of a leadership team's role that should be, from our perspective, be a constant. But if they're not, there's a few things that are really important, particularly as it relates to helping an organization transition or pivot during challenging times. So foresight, I talked about that a little earlier. It's not predicting the future, it's not being clairvoyant. It's really about being open and setting aside your own biases, political, economic even, and thinking and being open to listening to multiple perspectives, not just one. I've committed myself to reading The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times because I don't want to be biased by either one of them.

I still am. I still have my biases. I won't tell you which ones they are. Many of you on the call will know. But I think it's never been more important right now to have foresight. The ability to look at the environment and anticipate as best we can what some of the challenges and impacts to our industry and our organization might be. Sounds like a simple thing to do, but I'm seeing a lot of organizations look at their navels still and still just be dealing with the recovery mode.

Having a greater good focus. We preach this a lot in the work that we do, and we try not to preach too much, but great leadership team members, I'm actually writing an article on this right now, but great leadership team members have a greater good focus. And what I mean by that is, sure they're good, functional representatives for the organization. The CFO, the head of membership, whatever it might be. But they really take a greater good view of the organization and look, and they have a passion about the right path than their own. They're not just focused on their own functional areas. Again, another simple thing to say, but oftentimes hard to do. And there's obviously a lot behind that sometimes. Sometimes if you don't have that functional focus, you get taken advantage of. There's a whole bunch of crap wrong with your team if that's the case.

Embracing uncertainty. Again, not what it's always thinking beyond the next few months, managing multiple scenarios. These all kind of go together. I think the next one's really important. Maintaining and modeling your firm's values and holding yourself and your teammates accountable and the rest of the organization accountable for those values. I had an interesting conversation with a bank CEO that I'm working with right now and he mentioned to me that he was very frustrated with his CFO because they're about to do a capital raise and was very frustrated with the CFO who chose or presented his opinion that they should go with some investment banking organization that really hadn't been loyal. Hadn't had provided them good service in the past. So that wasn't consistent of his values of loyalty and relationship building. And so he had to step in and override that decision, which is not something you want to do all the time. But what you really do want to do is make sure your firm, your organization, maintains consistency with it's values. Should be during the recovery, but also during transition.

And then I think a skill that is not often talked about is really important for a leadership team to model is a sense of curiosity. When you hear stuff that you're like, wow, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, or, wow, that seems wrong. Not dismissing it out of hand, not accepting it out of hand either, but just thinking, what's that all about? I wonder where that's coming from? Let's be open to thinking about things and not letting our own bias get in the way. So you hear some themes in the thoughts I'm putting across here, but leadership team's role in terms of modeling is really important. And these characteristics can help the team work with their teams to evolve the mindset that is necessary for transitioning.

So now let's get into the method. To get into a little bit of the method behind what is a potential transition planning look like? And I'm not here to prescribe any one method, but I am here to give some thoughts about the types of things that probably should be considered and how they should be considered in any transition. So the first thing is workforce transition. That's the basic blocking and tackling of how do I set up a safe space? How do I look at the local rules in the environment? How do we schedule people to come back to work, if we are? How do we deal with any additional outbreaks? All those kinds of things are really important to consider.

The thing I don't see a lot of folks talking about this is this next bucket of recovery and growth. I'm not stupid, I know there's probably the CEOs have got this on their mind for sure, but it's how do we recover lost revenue and how do we get back on a growth track or trajectory? So it's really thinking through and engaging your board, engaging... And in many organizations, nonprofits and associations I'm in contact with, one of the things I'm hearing from them is that they're having to pull their boards rather than get direction from their boards in terms of how they're going to recover and grow again, because their board members are mired in their own crap right now as well. They feel like they're holding the hands of their boards a little bit more than they used to.

But engaging your stakeholders and really understanding what your customer's environments are and recognizing that the customer behavior has changed a little bit and the behavior of their customers has changed a little bit. So how do we look at that in a way that we can, we capture some of the lost revenue and maybe take advantage of some new potential opportunities.

Thinking through some potential scenarios, working with... In my next CEO call, which is two weeks from now, I'm having a special guest on that has done some really good work on scenario planning for their organization. If you join that call, you'll see firsthand some of the different variables. He kept it simple, or their team kept it simple. He led the thing, but their team was really... scenario planning was driven by their team. Yeah, just he kept it simple and looked at what are the key variables that were going to help his organization think through what a bunch of scenarios might look like so they could get back on the growth trajectory. And that included things like travel, it included the behavior of their customers, and it included some variables in their supply chain.

And so they played with those three or four variables and thought through what's the most likely scenario, what's a potential scenario, and what's the least likely scenario. And that's how they did it. I'm sure that there are multiple ways of doing scenario planning. But just thinking through what are some of the variables out there that we have to be thinking through and presenting those back to the board so that you can get some input from them as well on what that might look like. And I guess subsumed within the scenario planning is this whole concept of business model shifts.

Last piece, the last bucket is this whole concept of operational continuity. And as I'm cheating over and looking over to the right hand side here, these things really must be... Thinking about these three buckets can't be done in isolation. You may assign a team for each one of these, depending on the size of your organization, or your senior team may address all three of these, but they can't be done in isolation. They are all fairly closely connected with each other. And this whole concept of operational continuity supports the first two. One organization I'm working with, they're saying... I'm talking to the COO and he said... He keeps beating us up because our technology wasn't prepared, and there is some truth to that. But even if we had the right technology, what has been exposed is the fact that some of our processes were pretty poorly designed. And so before we do any crazy enhancements to technology, we have to actually tweak the processes as well. And then obviously there's some technology improvements.

And it's not just for how do we continue to deal with remote work and onsite work? It's how do we potentially take advantage of new opportunities? So for example, the trade association I talked about before, their move to more virtual education has required them to adopt some new, potentially more robust technology to support their education platform.

Yeah, and then this whole concept, the concept of recognizing that operational continuity is perhaps the wrong word. It's just business continuity so that you can adapt to the uncertainty of things. I think that's a really big one. The operations folks tend to want to view things, not all of them, but tend to want to view things in a black and white. We'll fix this now and then we'll be all set. But I think that there's two things that has to happen as it relates to operational continuity. It's, we'll fix this now, but we're also planning for six months to 12 months from now because of some of the new opportunities we have in front of us. And so you got to do the end, not but thing, but the end thing.

And then obviously dealing with workforce economics. And what I simply mean by that is the workforce that you have right now may be the workforce that works for you in the next 12 months, but it may not be. You may have folks that are really good at in person training, for example, that may be not as good... Universities are dealing with this in spades, that you have some educators that are not necessarily good at online education, or that at least need some training in that. So how does that impact the workforce in terms of who stays, who goes, who needs development and training and that type of thing. And then there's obviously the reality of lost revenue sometimes means loss, reductions in force as well, or at least redeployment in force.

So again, workforce transition, recovering growth and operational continuity are things that... And again, the point here, it's a dimmer, not a light switch. You can't just switch these things on. You have to think them through, there's an evolution to this. And there has to be some kind of a continuity, or they have to be done in connection with each other. So again, the larger organizations that we're working with, they have teams. They might not be these exact same teams, but they have teams like this that are dedicated to addressing these topics and then coming back together an coalescing around what are we learning from each other? So that's the point with those things.

I recognize that I went through each one of these slides when I actually had another slide for each one of these. I'll try not to be redundant here. So workforce transition encompasses health monitoring, social distancing, site safety, capacity planning, all in the interest of providing a healthy, welcoming, productive, secure work environment. And so a few things that I've already talked about, having a dedicated focus. Making sure that you're scanning, taking a sense of the government, the municipality that you're working in, the healthcare environment, the public transportation. These are all basic blocking and tackling things. If you're a good operations person, you're probably going to think them through. What's the right work? What can be done on site, what can be done, continue to be done remotely? I know my wife is a partner at a big law firm and they're not planning on coming back for work for quite some time because they're doing quite well working remotely. So they don't want to clog up the public transportation system. They want to be good corporate citizens. But other organizations can't do that.

Employees. Taking a pulse from them is who's comfortable, who is essential to return to work and help begin to evolve the mindset as we talked about earlier. What I mean by comfortable, there are those that will be very reluctant to want to return to work. If they're essential, you may have to adapt, convince. I'm not sure exactly how that will work, but these considerations, nonetheless. And obviously the work environment.

And having a plan. Having a plan that's comprehensive, phased, and overcommunicated. And perhaps the word I should have put in here that's more important than any of it is that it's adaptable, because it likely will change as soon as you put it out there. So that's workforce transition.

Back to recovery and growth. What's the new vision? I'm working with a couple of CEOs that are just doing a... I'm learning so much from them. They're doing such a good job not putting their head in the sand and just thinking about, okay, this stinks. This was an awful situation. But how do we leverage what we're good at? How do we build some new capabilities and how do we lean into this thing so we can come out of the other side maintaining or stronger? And so that's, thinking through what that looks like is important. Again, recognizing you're not going to be perfectly right.

Assessing and learning. These same CEOs frankly, are thinking through who is really, particularly as it relates to the executive team, who's going to make it and who's not? Because some people that really have a tough time dealing with complexity and uncertainty. Some folks have a tough time taking that greater good focus, and to recover and grow, you need folks that have those skills. And then learning from what do we do well? A lot of firms that I'm talking about, two things I'll talk, one is strategic and one is sort of mundane. The strategic is, we think we can do this remote stuff a lot more than we were before. Does that mean we're going to get rid of all our office space? Probably not. But we probably will do some things differently to, even beyond the crisis to work differently.

To the mundane, and I don't really think this is mundane, but it's sort of a tactical issue is almost to an organization, the clients I'm working with, and again, I'm only working with five right now, but I hear this from other CEOs as well. They started this rhythm of daily leadership team meetings where they may have used to have them bimonthly or monthly even. And the teams are really liking them. They're short, they're half hour check-ins where they're talking about what's most important, or even just checking in and seeing how people are doing. One of them, few weeks back, a CEO heard something in this woman's voice, talked to her offline and realize that one of her kids is really struggling through this. Had some special needs. And sent her flowers and told her to take a couple of days off. Just having that compassion. Anyway, the assessing and learning what's going well is obviously the rhythm. Maybe you don't have daily meetings, but maybe there is a need for more check-in. Who knows. It's an idea.

Scenarios. We talked about that. Innovating and taking advantage of potential new opportunities. Prioritizing. You have a few scenarios, you got to pick something and go with it and adapt and learn from. One of the variables is not exactly what you thought it was going to be, then adjust your plan accordingly. So recovery and growth.

Next is evolving the infrastructure. This consulting language, but it's process, people, technology. It's what are we learning from the lockdown, just short term processes, revamp longterm processes, link them with the technology. People identify the stars and the challenges, continue to evolve the mindset. Mindset, mindset, mindset, and reinforce your values. And I say this a lot, reinforce your values and a lot of people have their eyes glaze over. But if you have strong values of people first, and we take care of our customers and stuff, those aren't trivial things, and they shouldn't be at least. And you need your leadership team, particularly in difficult times, to maintain those values.

Technology. Recommit to not only shore up the blemishes, but to enable innovation beyond the short term. The worst thing that you can have is, and I'm seeing this a little bit in a couple of clients I'm working with. The worst thing you can have is a really visionary CEO with a curmudgeonly COO, who just wants to get things back to the way they were. Or vice versa. And that will cause some lockdowns for you. You've got to get everyone on the same page in terms of what that vision looks like.

And so that's really all I got for you today. I hope that was helpful. So it's basically, you've got to get your leadership team in the right mindset, from recovery, some of this full reaction thing back to an interim new normal. And that's so they can help the rest of the organization adapt that similar mindset and continue to reinforce it. And then there's some behaviors that the leadership team needs to model, including foresight and a greater good focus and ability to deal with complexity. And then I just gave you some suggestions on potential method or framework for transition.

So that's all I got for you today. I was hoping there'd be some more questions. If anyone's got any questions, please ask them now. If not, I'm going to give you a plug here. I have a leadership team recharge consultation, where I'll give you 60 minutes with your team for a consultation with your team to assess where you're at. And then next webinar is refining your leadership team's decision making approach on June 24th. So until then, I look forward to hearing from you.

All right, I got a question. Let's see. Chat. Thank you for this good talk. Okay, thank you. Well, as always, I'll get these links to these slides and some other content out to you within the next 24 hours, and I look forward to seeing you on our next webinar. Thanks so much for participating.