General Eisenhower once remarked that “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson offered the sports version of this quote when he observed “ Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Many CEOs had to readdress their plans as one could say they got “punched in the mouth” last year by a worldwide pandemic. And there are still punches being thrown!
I’ve been rereading Jim Collins’ Great by Choice. I was fortunate enough to be part of an intimate audience with him in January 2019 and having recently heard him again on the Brené Brown podcast, (really worth a listen) I was prompted to look back again at his writing on what makes an organisation move from good to great.
Collins has twelve questions that organisations should answer or at least explore. I want to focus on his third question. What are the brutal facts? Not opinions, not hearsay but the truth backed by facts.
The craziness of the past year made that question hard to answer. Certainly, we are given lots of information (and misinformation) about when we may restart our economic engine and resume some sort of social interaction. However, the only thing we can be certain of is the continued uncertainty as we navigate our way through this stage of the pandemic and the challenges we see here with Brexit.
For individuals, there is uncertainty about their future work prospects, their incomes, the value of their savings and what they will be able to spend their money on, how and where they will work. For organisations, there is uncertainty about buying trends, sustainability of online, can they source materials or product, liquidity, interest rates, and what changes they will have to make to their workplaces to accommodate social distancing requirements. All this requires clear and disciplined thought. In his book Collins cited that Good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought.
First, they confronted the facts. They developed a simple, yet insightful frame of reference for all decisions. We can only work with the things we can control, so what are the facts? What can we influence? And what must we not get distracted by which is totally out of our control.
Second step is to create a climate where the truth is heard. Great leaders lead with questions, not answers which helps them get an understanding of the facts. They use questions to gain information, to get below the surface, to ask more. My three go to questions are
“Say more about…”
“what’s most important to you about…”
”How are you feeling about…”
One of the brutal facts right now is that people are weary of lockdown, they are tired and they need hope and a plan of some sort to lift them from this grey cloud.
People fall into 3 categories when adversity occurs:
Those who are permanently dispirited by the event
Those who get their life back to normal
Those who use the experience as a defining event that made them stronger.
Good-to-great companies fall into this third category, those with the ‘hardiness factor’.
In order to build trust and get to the truth and uncover the facts, people need to know that you care not just about the work but about them. Non-agenda meetings are a good way to understand the current reality. Asking simply, “how are you?’ “What’s going on in your world?”
Leading does not mean coming up with answers and motivating people to follow your vision. Rather showing humility and perhaps even vulnerability with the aim of understanding more of their world and how they see it. Seek their perspective, listen to their answers to establish the facts (and some may be brutal) and then ask questions that will lead to the best possible results.
Collins states that there is no evidence that the Good-to-Great companies had more or better information than the comparison companies. The key lies not in better information, but in turning information into information that simply cannot be ignored.
The Stockdale Paradox
“Face the harshness of your current reality, but never lose faith you will prevail in the end. What separates great people or companies from the mediocre is not the absence of difficulties, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life” Admiral Jim Stockdale, the highest-ranking US officer to be taken prisoner in Vietnam for many years.
If you have the right people, they will be self-motivated. The key is not to de-motivate them by ignoring the brutal facts of reality. Invest now in creating a plan -a plan to give them hope, based on facts and keep planning as we navigate these still turbulent times.