Enduring Organizations and Avoiding the Woolly Mammoth
Nine years and 11 months ago today, I decided to put my fear in check and jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Around that time, I started recognizing that the effects of fear had held me back for much of my life. I missed out on having new experiences, making the right decisions for my wellness, and embracing new opportunities. Skydiving wasn’t necessarily on my “bucket list.” But it was something I thought I’d never be brave enough to do. So, on August 22, 2011, I decided to jump into courage, and out of fear (and a plane… I also jumped out of an airplane).
Although I embraced those ten seconds of insane courage, my physical reaction to the fear showed up vindictively and on cue. The body’s biological response to fear and stress is well-documented. Waiting anxiously in my seat aboard the Dehavilland Twin Otter as we gained altitude, I experienced all of the responses I’d studied for years while working to gain a deeper understanding of human behavior. My sympathetic nervous system kicked into overdrive and my heart rate began to rise. My breathing accelerated. My hands were cool and clammy and I was hypersensitive to my surroundings. I watched as one… two… three people poured out the open door strapped to the tandem skydiving instructor. Mostly, they were smiling. I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand why. And then, it was my turn. Within milliseconds, my body flooded with cortisol and adrenaline. I kept telling myself, “Don’t look down… don’t look down.”
Restoring the Distinctive Nature of Leadership
Last week we launched our website—a gateway to our leadership and organizational sustainability philosophies. For me, it meant finally hammering a stake firmly in the ground. For Crescent Leadership, our Collaborators, and our clients, it meant that we were ready to commit publicly to strive for something that oftentimes seems out of reach for Leaders—enduring growth able to withstand the staunchest competitor, or the most grueling existential crisis.
You cannot scroll a news feed or flip a page in a business book without hearing about the importance of “people” in making an organization successful, and that success starts with leadership. We agree. But it’s not that simple. The misguided use of “human resources” to improve the bottom line only pummels away at the growing chasm between achieving results and ensuring those results endure. The word, “leader,” has become so commoditized… so bastardized… that its distinctive nature is lost, unrecognizable. Please don’t hear me say that there are no true Leaders anymore. There are. And there are many more on the precipice of emerging as Leaders. We consider these people to be allies in our work.
The Global Leadership Crisis Continues to Grow
There has never been a more important time in history to work together to restore the distinctive nature of leadership and to put people back at the center of organizational success. I know. It’s pretty easy for me to sit in my home office, my fuzzy blanket wrapped around my knees, with my idealist thinking spewing onto the page. I know that the act of doing the work is extraordinarily more challenging. But we need to start, no matter how challenging or revolutionary the work will be.
In 2015, The World Economic Forum published the results of its Survey on the Global Agenda. 86% of respondents identified that we were in the midst of a leadership crisis. With our own eyes we have witnessed the crisis of leadership play out time and again. Corporate empires collapse under the weight of ethics violations and corruption. Nonprofit organizations and entire movements crumble surrounded by scandal and mismanagement. Political institutions become more polarizing, and less focused on advancing the greater good.
We are living in an age of constant change. Organizational change is predicated on everything from competition, to changing customer needs, to environmental threats. To achieve the results needed to stay relevant into today’s marketplace, change is inevitable. The Survey on the Global Agenda was published a full five years before the coronavirus pandemic knocked us on our collective behinds. It tested and continues to test the resolve of Leaders not only sustain their organizations, but to evolve to meet the demand of a world that is forever changed. Those organizations, that chose to ignore the fact that they must continually evolve or they will die a slow and painful death, got slapped in the face when the pandemic hit. They are gone now, or their rate of decline has increased significantly.
For those that did evolve, they pivoted quickly to ensure the survival of the organization. But have they since returned to those innovative shifts to put in place the right systems and hone the right competencies to ensure sustainability? Over the course of my career, I’ve witnessed countless organizations focus on the wrong things—measuring KPIs, hitting the numbers, and driving for results. Don’t get me wrong. Measuring performance and achieving results are critically important, but when results become the output instead of the outcome, the organization will achieve superficial gains and unsustainable growth, at best. This is the thing—organizational behavior is collective human behavior. Ignoring the human side of organizational health, and focusing on achieving results instead of the behaviors and actions that create those results, is a recipe for disaster.
The Amygdala Hijack
Our prehistoric ancestors encountered danger around every corner. Threats to life and safety were constant. Our stress and fear response, fight-or-flight, optimized for long-term survival of the species—avoiding eating poisonous plants and falling off a cliff, or outrunning a woolly mammoth! Flight-or-fight response is still immensely important, but sometimes our amygdala over reaches. Something as seemingly simple as giving a presentation at work can evoke the same level of physical fear response as turning a corner and coming face-to-face with a woolly mammoth.
When I work with teams on developing emotional intelligence, we talk about the Amygdala Hijack. When you get hijacked, the amygdala activates the fight-or-flight response, and on cue, all of the physiological responses to fear and stress take over your body and conscious mind. At its greatest intensity, the amygdala hijacking is like Dr. Bruce Banner going green and turning into the Hulk. Suddenly it’s like you’re hovering above yourself watching what happens below, but you’ve been stripped of your advanced logic and you have little control over the outcome. People that actively work to improve emotional intelligence can learn to regulate fear and stress response through cognitive reappraisal. But the amygdala is a powerful force, and it is always there, working behind the scenes to protect us from that next woolly mammoth encounter.
Leader-First, People at the Center
The physical, neurological response I experienced sitting inside that Dehavilland Twin Otter nearly ten years ago is the same type of response employees feel when organizational change is amidst. And there is a fair amount of change amidst right now, wouldn’t you say? Managers and supervisors often make the flawed assumption that when employees resist change, they are resisting because they are difficult, incompetent, or uncommitted. Most of the time, those managers and supervisors are wrong. Change teams put so much time and effort into designing the change itself—a new product, a new organizational design, a plan to engage a new market segment—but they place too little, if any, focus on the implementation of the change. Worse, they lose sight of the impact of the change on the very people that must implement the change. To build enduring organizations in an ever-changing environment, Leaders must acknowledge, understand, empathize, and plan for the human, biologically-grounded response to change. Leaders cannot choose to avoid this critical part of change management, no matter how difficult, time-consuming, and inconvenient.
Unless you like woolly mammoths, of course.
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