What does organisational courage and resilience look like?

Fleur’s organisation is still standing after the Pandemic. That feels like a ‘win’.

She and her senior leadership team are undoubtedly feeling battered and bruised though, with the organisation having faced significant challenges. Revenue across their markets is down on pre-pandemic figures.

How can they solve this problem? How can they best deal with the challenges ahead? Fleur and her team are feeling uncharacteristically paralysed at the moment. They know that things can’t stay as they are. They know they are going to have to make some significant changes. They are just not sure they have the courage to make them. Or in fact the certainty of what the right moves might be.

Sound familiar?

I can’t tell you how many organisations I am hearing about who are in this space at the moment. Which is why a recent McKinsey article focused on just this, titled ‘Strategic Courage in an Age of Volatility.’ And, interestingly, the three types of edge it recommends honing are closely linked to three types of edge often discussed in sports coaching circles.

Before we look at these, let’s just examine the issue a bit more deeply. Again, sport provides a good analogy. Imagine a team going out to play a match in whatever is your favourite sport. They want to do well, they want to win. Their opponents are hard to read. They have been excellent some weeks, and terrible in others. A volatile opponent if there ever was one. Is our team going to go about this in a cautious and defensive way? One where they focus on the threats posed by the opposing team, and hunker down in ‘wait and watch’ mode. Or are they going to go out all guns blazing, not really considering the threat the other team poses, instead just ‘going for it’? Or, are they going to take both a defensive and offensive stance? One where they take note of the threat, take all the right defensive actions accordingly, but also lean in to the uncertainty, react, adapt and use the volatility as a catalyst for opportunities and new approaches?

McKinsey’s research would argue that the latter is by far the best approach. The ‘wait and watch’ approach from leaders and organisations, concentrating on the ‘here and now’ threats, balance sheet management, near-term efficiency drives, scenario planning, leads (so McKinsey argues) to only median company performance. Those of you who follow football might find the Lionesses coming to mind: on their brilliant journey this summer to their Euros win, one of their mantras was ‘nobody wins afraid of losing’ (apparently from a Chris Stapleton song!) What about the the ‘all guns blazing’, offense only approach? Well according to McKinsey this leads to occasional success mixed in with some catastrophic failures. Those however who are ambidextrous: prudent about managing the downside while aggressively pursuing the upside; thinking about the next decade, not the next month; spurring their organisations to rethink opportunities and reset the strategic gameboard in light of the current volatility. Prudent and bold. They are the most successful.

So how can organisations develop this capability?

So what are the edges that Mckinsey argue organisations need to focus on to develop this capability? Well, they are the three types of edge that we often talk about in sports coaching: insight; commitment; execution.

I played a tennis match at the weekend. In tennis, in each point you play, you are likely to have a better outcome if you have good insight into what is the best shot to play each time. You may not always get it right, I certainly don’t, but years of practice, learning, watching, coaching, have given me a good platform to have the right insight on what shot to play.

What comes next? Well you have to commit to your shot. Knowing what shot to play is only the first step. You have to commit to it. Promptly, and with sufficient ambition. Too much indecision and you’ve lost the opportunity. The ball is past you already.

We still have a missing piece though don’t we? Because I can commit to making a particular shot, and still not execute it well (and trust me, I did quite a bit of that at the weekend).

So how might this look for Fleur’s organisation?

Insight

When the world around you is relatively calm and predictable, certainty is easier. Fleur and her team often talk about how ‘back in the old days it was easy, we all knew what was going to happen next and could make decisions accordingly.’ The world though isn’t like that anymore. So Fleur and her team have to work harder at gaining the right insight. They need to go deeper, investing resources, time and effort to go beyond conventional analysis. They also need to go broader, making sure that they seek out perspectives from a broader range of people and information sources. Whilst it’s often claimed that ‘no one saw it coming’, in fact whatever it is has usually been noticed by a good number of people. So Fleur and her team need to make sure they are talking to all the right people, and looking at all the right information sources.

Commitment

For Fleur and her team, it’s not just going to be about using that insight then to move in the right direction. It’s going to be about doing so decisively. To act (and then adjust if need be), rather than watching and waiting and letting others have the edge. And they will need to commit the right resource. No point doing this in a half-hearted way, that way you are setting yourself up to fail.

Execution

The final edge comes from execution. Once Fleur and her team have committed to a particular approach/strategy, speed and high quality execution are paramount. Making sure things get done fast, and well. They need to make sure that they give themselves the best chance of successful execution. That their systems and processes allow for this. That they have the right capability. And the right capacity. That they target their resource in the right way.

Insight. Commitment. Execution. Ensuring that Fleur and her team are prudent about managing the downside, whilst ambitiously and courageously pursuing the upside. How do you and your organisation fare in these areas? Do you have a competitive edge, or are you getting left behind?

For more on this or any aspect of leadership, with a healthy dose of mindset, sport, and I hope usefulness thrown in, do feel free to browse through all the articles in the Huddle, or get in touch with me directly on catherine@sportandbeyond.co.uk. And for those who want to read the McKinsey article referred to, it can be found here