Transformation Traps, and How Leaders Can Avoid Them

Uncertainty is the new certainty.

That our world will continue to change, and we need to be prepared to adapt and adjust, is the new normal.  And as leaders, developing, executing, and innovating on strategy is fundamentally about becoming great at leading through uncertainty by facing it directly. This typically follows a cycle as you guide your organization through a loop of stabilizing the business to survive the immediate turbulence, resetting the strategy as the situation changes, and then placing yourself back on a performance pathway to thrive in the future. To outperform in turbulent times you need to constantly go through rounds of Survive, Reset, and Thrive.

Some things are simple, but that does not make them easy. Moving through the constant growth loop of stabilization, resetting, and thriving is one of those simple things that is hard to do.

And the CEO, or top leadership role, is critical to success.  The pathway often looks more straightforward than it is and just because you are eager and motivated doesn’t mean that the ride will be smooth. Our natural reaction to uncertainty as negative can get in our way, as can be unwilling to acknowledge the situation has changed and we need a reset.  But even those who commit to the Reset can fall into some traps.  Below are other common reasons I see leaders getting in their own way, as well as practices to employ to overcome these.

1. “I’ve got this”
   You have led companies through past shocks, so you are confident you can lead them through this one without a problem.  You attempt to put in place the same steps for this situation as the last time the company went into survival mode. You don’t bother to vet or test your old assumptions—things haven’t changed that much.  Or, even after identifying your top priorities, you assume the team ‘gets it,’ as execution is execution, so you do not change anything in your operational rhythm.  They’ll figure it out.What happens? From my experience: failure to thrive. Different shocks present different kickers and killers. Your old assumptions may very well be worthless in a changed environment.  Using them could steer the company directly onto the rocks or you could miss out on potential game-changing kickers just because you haven’t looked for them.  Executing a new reset strategy requires ongoing learning, testing, and micro-adaptations. If you don’t build change into the strategy, you will struggle when it (inevitably) crops up.

   How to overcome: Watch out for the framing or biases you may have about the next-order effects of situations.  Move to active testing of your beliefs and assumptions and invest incrementally as you learn more.  Build strategic capability in the team to help you do this. Do not assume as soon as you have set priorities the situation will stabilize.

2. Paralysis by Analysis 
   You are facing uncertainty, and you are not sure what’s going to happen next.  You don’t want to make any decisions yet; you want to wait until you know more.  But the more you learn in the market, the more uncertain you become. You keep pausing any major decisions, effectively placing your company in an ongoing holding pattern.What happens? Faster-moving competitors get ahead, the team becomes wary of the holding pattern, and you miss out on opportunities.

   How to overcome: Build a system to actively test your top beliefs and assumptions, especially any big, game changing assumptions.  Begin low-resource commitments and small bets as you test the market.  Identify and execute on ‘no-regret moves,’ until you can fully reset your must-win-battles.

3. They ‘just don’t get it’
   You worked with the team to answer all the important questions for the reset strategy, but you feel they’re too operationally minded, they’re not strategic enough, and they just don’t get it. You rip up the script and start over, this time on your own. You assume you must do it yourself, as the team does not have the capacity or experience to understand this situation.What happens? A strategy that only considers one perspective is going to miss something important, especially in a changing context. Plus, the team feels defeated, under-valued, and their trust in you starts wavering. They will not participate in strategy discussions going forward, as they believe they are a waste of time.  They also start giving less energy and commitment to initiatives, assuming you will change your mind once more anyway.

   How to overcome: Be selective in building your Reset team; if you purposely placed team members there to test their strategic aptitude, don’t be surprised by the results.  Use the guidance of the small team and move discussions from “what is a good idea?’ to ‘what needs to be true?’ Stress test assumptions.  Focus on building the capability of the team, as you need strategic distributed leaders to Thrive, and address gaps by working with your head of people to bring in the needed skillsets.

4. Boredom
   You get through the survival phase and the strategy process.  You have a new list of strategic priorities with owners and milestones.  The team is beginning to execute, and it’s almost working.  The problem – even though you won’t admit it – is you miss the heightened energy of survival mode or the strategic stimulation of the strategy reset.  Executing a set of priorities doesn’t excite you, so you look for things that do.  Acquisitions, innovation projects, or other new, shiny things become your focus, and you start bringing your team into these discussions.What happens? The team is confused about their priorities. They start to question the organization’s commitment to the new strategy. Their attention is divided, which slows progress on those must-win-battles.

   How to overcome: Getting a set of strategic priorities to the execution phase is a great thing – embrace it.  Find areas within the priorities you are passionate about; otherwise get out of the way of the champions and their teams.  Start the preparation for the next strategy cycle but only in a way that does not distract or confuse the team.

5. Your Board becomes your Customer
   The Board wants more updates during the survival phase. Quarterly meetings become monthly; monthly become weekly; weekly become daily.  All the meetings need reports, PowerPoint presentations, and talking points.  Then these meetings need notes summarized afterwards.  More than half of your time – and that of the team – is spent managing your Board, instead of testing and learning from your market.  You spend an order of magnitude more time talking to Board members as you do speaking about customers.What happens? Your Board is there for governance and direction, but it will not create value for you.  Spending more time on your Board than you do on the steering and guiding the business and interacting with customers will slow your progress through the growth loop and likely cause you to miss out on opportunities emerging from the uncertainty in the environment.

   How to overcome: Have an honest conversation with your Chairperson about the Board’s role in this phase and what you need from each other.  Manage the preparation as much as possible, ideally from reports that can be pulled automatically from your systems.  Have one Board member dedicated to the Survive mode that can meet with our team member assigned to this mode in smaller, focused meetings that do not drag the rest of the team back.

Leading a growth loop to Thrive: 

Above I provided some quick notes on overcoming each trap, but here’s three other pieces of guidance that have been effective for leaders during their growth strategy journeys.

Write yourself a memo: Write a memo to yourself on what the organization needs from you in all three modes: Survive, Reset, and Thrive.  Where will your strengths be of most use, and where are your weaknesses a potential trap?  How will you work with the team in Survive mode, and how will you manage the transition out? Where are you best in the strategic discussions of the Reset? How can you elicit the best strategic insights from the team? How can your network or contacts help in the fast testing of the assumptions? Where might your ego become a trap in the ‘Right to Win’ conversations?  Where may your biases prevent the right set of priorities from coming through? In Thrive, where across the organization are you needed the most?

Share this memo with a trusted advisor or Board member to get feedback.  Set aside some time to learn from others who have successfully gone through these modes already. Never hesitate to learn from another leader’s journey. Schedule an appointment with yourself to re-read your memo at least two times a year and at the beginning of entry into each mode.  Hold yourself accountable for living up to it.

Scale yourself: If you want to scale your business, you will need to scale yourself.  In Blitzscaling, Reid Hoffmann and Chris Yeh provide an excellent breakdown of ways to do this:

• Delegation: Ask what in the organization you and only you can do, and then focus on delegating all other tasks to the team.  Stop doing everything in which you do not have a unique value-add component and instead build a stronger team around you that can accomplish those tasks.
• Amplification: How can the time you spend and activities you do add more value to the organization?  How can site visits be optimized? What about customer meetings or public events? Review your activities for the past week and determine how you can amplify at least half of them further.  Some CEOs look to the Chief of Staff role to assist with this step.
• Improvement: Make yourself better. Ramping up your learning velocity is critical to helping the organization build its learning velocity.  Seek and be very open to feedback.  Prioritize specific areas of capability build each year.  Remember, helping yourself is helping the company.

Do not tell your team what to do, tell them where to go.  Draw from the wisdom of Helmuth von Moltke, who said:

‘…A leader who believes that he can make a positive difference through continual personal interventions is usually deluding himself.  He thereby takes over things other people are supposed to be doing, more or less dispenses with their efforts, and multiplies his own tasks to such an extent that he can no longer carry them all out. 

The demands made on a senior commander are severe enough as it is.  It is far more important that the person at the top retains a clear picture of the overall situation than whether some particular thing is done this way or that.’   

When things get uncertain and complex, you may feel like it’s your job to give more detailed guidance. This can become a trap: More and more details give your team less space to interpret and use their own knowledge and wisdom to execute when things don’t go according to plan.  von Moltke also said: Detail is the enemy of clarity.  The more detailed you try to be, the less clarity the team will have over what matters and what to do.

Your job is to set a clear intent and boundaries, and ensure your distributed leaders have the capabilities needed to execute towards the intent. Then get out of their way. A great team will push all the way to the boundaries without going over.

When things happen, avoid jumping in and doing it yourself. The easiest way to solve a problem is to do it yourself, but the best way to grow a company is to empower others to do it and become problem solvers themselves.

Written by Dr. Rebecca Homkes. Adapted from Survive Reset Thrive: Leading breakthrough growth strategy through volatile times by Rebecca Homkes.
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