Each week, I’m featuring excerpts from a chapter of my leadership book When the Curveballs Keep Coming: A Leadership Playbook for an Uncertain World to provide insights that can help all leaders adjust to these times of unrelenting uncertainty.
Last week, we introduced the third and final step in becoming VUCA Ready™ – Proceed – where you fully deploy all three steps of the model to be ready for anything.
This week, we’ll outline how you can intentionally build the same skills, awareness and capacity in your team as you have been building in yourself. By doing so, you can create an environment where your newfound confidence can become contagious.
As you refine your skills and build confidence in the face of uncertainty, your team will feel more confident as well. To create this contagious confidence in your team, you must continue to examine the limiting beliefs and assumptions as we have in past chapters.
In these uncertain times, no one really knows the road ahead, so the idea of seeking a destination is not realistic. It is all about the journey now: one step at a time, one decision at a time, using the agency we often forget we have. That is how we will operate.
To get your team on the road to navigating uncertainty on their own, let’s take a look at one key assumption that you will likely need to address: The assumption your team will not embrace the concept that success looks very different now because their “best next move” looks nothing like the concrete, incremental wins they are used to.
This is a fundamental concept that all leaders need to embrace and embody to move through uncertainty. It’s hard to shake the belief that our prior experience, knowledge, and success are the currency that puts us in a position to know what is coming next. It is difficult for all of us to admit that we cannot rely on most of what we have worked so hard to learn, develop and build – the portfolio of what we bring to our work. It’s a big mindset shift to acknowledge that the game has changed.
So how do you help your team change their focus from relying on what they have done in the past, from what is known and comfortable? Your role as a leader is to help your team understand that expectations have shifted. We are all playing a different game now, one where we don’t know what is ahead, but where we need to confidently make our moves without knowing what the outcome will be. Armed with this confidence, you can watch your team rise to the occasion, which they will—if you don’t assume they are too afraid to face the unknown.
You will see this confidence transfer in action in the “Curveball” at the end of Chapter Nine, where Sara Coady, Head of Enterprise Sales at Stripe, shares how she has intentionally role-modeled this leadership approach to build top-performing sales teams in two high-growth companies.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little peek into Chapter 9 of my leadership book When the Curveballs Keep Coming: A Leadership Playbook for an Uncertain World. Next week, we will introduce the final chapter, where we lay out the road ahead for you and your team and give you a better idea of what this looks and feels like on the ground every day.
What you see here is just a “bite-size” sample of the leadership lessons and practical tips that I outline in my book. Buy your copy now at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or go to bobbielaporte.com/curveballs for more information about corporate bulk discounts.
#readyforcurveballs