“Smooth sea never made a skillful sailor.”- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Turbulence. We are living through a period of incredible turbulence impacting most every aspect of our lives. As we move through this turbulence within our businesses, what lessons can we apply about #resilience in #leadership.
How can we not only weather the storm, but make forward progress towards growth and innovation?
Resilience is often defined as the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. What is not explicit in the definition is the opportunity to recover in a stronger position. Not simply to return to form, but to re-form…to innovate.
Developing resilient innovation requires disciplined leadership. #Integrity, #curiosity, and #accountability are foundational.
Integrity requires defining and adhering to a set of operating principles. Without a consistently applied set of principles, decisions at one level may be over-ruled or altered further up the organization’s hierarchy. In time, people avoid making decisions as they realize, de facto, that they have no real authority. Constraining decision making in turbulent times contracts the capacity of the organization to adjust quickly and try new things.
Curiosity is another critical component of building resilient innovation. Without it there is limited creativity, experimentation, and risk taking. Opportunities presented by the turbulence can be overlooked. Survival takes priority. And if leadership integrity doesn’t exist, the likelihood of taking risk declines further. Organizations, if they emerge, are no better than before and, in some cases, weakened relative to their competitors.
Accountability is owning the action and outcome. It enables a positive approach to evaluating and learning from experience. It’s the application of those learnings and subsequent experiments that will lead to innovation. Without accountability, the learning cycle is broken as the evaluation process lacks honesty and transparency. The result is finger pointing, a decrease in decision making capacity and, in some cases, an increase in organizational fear.
These leadership traits of integrity, curiosity, and accountability are an important foundation from which to drive resilient innovation. In my next post, I’ll share some ideas about how.
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