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 second step in our VUCA Ready™ Leadership Model: Practice. Practice is how you learn to develop a heightened level of discernment, so you can see beyond the obvious and predictable and always see what is possible.
This week, we’ll outline the third and final step in becoming VUCA Ready: Proceed. This is where you fully deploy what you developed in the first two steps to enter a state of readiness. This creates confidence in the face of unrelenting uncertainty for you to be ready for anything.
In an uncertain world, you will always be at the center of the storm, and everyone is looking to you to navigate them through it. In the Proceed step, you will amplify the skills, intuitions and awareness that you already possess in new ways. You’ll learn how to develop a state of personal readiness and become aware when you are slipping into autopilot mode. You’ll be more connected to the biases and automatic thinking that are keeping you from seeing beyond what is obvious. And you will develop a strengths-spotting orientation that enables you to discern, amplify, and deploy what individuals and organizations do well.
How do we define confidence in this environment? We’ve discussed previously how, as leaders, we were always the ones people looked up to for direction, answers and guidance. We were the ones that everyone expected to walk down the hallways projecting confidence and certainty. We were supposed to know what was around the corner and believe that we would instinctively know how to respond. We derived our confidence from a traditional reliance on functional skillsets, our domain knowledge, and our previous accomplishments.
But that has all changed in a world of unrelenting uncertainty. Our teams still expect us to show them the way, demonstrate some sense of certainty, and give them the guidance and hope that they cannot see themselves. They are saying: “Tell me what to do.” But we don’t have the answers either.
The big shift here is from telling them what to do to saying “Let’s figure this out together,” and giving them the agency to respond in the same way. To make this shift, you must understand your strengths and see how they can be used in a broader way to expand what you are capable of. It’s time to move beyond what you’ve done in the past to what you can do now.
You will see this new confidence in action in the “Curveball” at the end of Chapter Eight, where Mike Hamilton, Global Head of IT at Databricks, shares how his positive leadership approach and highly developed possibilities mindset helped him successful navigate three organizational changes in two years.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this little peek into Chapter 8 of my leadership book When the Curveballs Keep Coming: A Leadership Playbook for an Uncertain World. Next week we will show you how to make your newfound competence and confidence contagious, bringing your team along.
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.
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