Undoubtedly leading through uncertain times can be incredibly challenging. But while it’s certainly difficult, it’s not impossible. In Part I of this series, we discuss strategies and some practical key tips that can help leaders gain clarity to lead effectively in challenging, uncertain times.

Leader Defining Moment: Navigating Uncertainty

It’s exactly when uncertainty creates paralysis, erodes morale, and fragments organizations from within, that leaders have an opportunity to cut through the confusion to illuminate direction – not just for your team, but for yourself.

And it’s exactly when change disrupts the familiar and obscures the path forward, that leaders face a defining moment: help navigate through the uncertainty and chaos, or watch your team and your organization drift into disarray.

In this series, I share practical strategies to transform uncertainty from a threat into an opportunity for leaders faced with major complexity and change.

Strategy: Take a Knee – Time (and a Plan) is your Friend

The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot. ~Michael Altshuler, Author

Leaders often think that at the first sign of challenge, complexity, or chaos, we have to immediately spring to action and do something – anything. In life-or-death or fast-paced situations of course yes, but for most scenarios we experience, that is not the case. For most scenarios we experience, we can actually afford to use time to our advantage, strategically and proactively to gain clarity.

In the mid-2010s, I was given the assignment to spearhead a critical component of one of the largest human resource and pay modernization initiatives in decades for my organization – a complete modernization overhaul of our legacy financial system and structure. This wasn’t just another systems upgrade. It was a 20+ year transformation effort (still ongoing) that would fundamentally redefine organizational structures and pay processes across our organization. In other words – a massive, complicated effort.

With only a small team and a three-month deadline to deliver a comprehensive strategy forward, I faced what many (including myself) considered an impossible task. And I was even told directly by a co-worker: good luck with all the complexity … little did he know that I actually like challenges like this, lol.

So rather than rush to solutions or be overwhelmed by the task at hand, I felt the need to take a more deliberate, intentional approach: I slowed down to speed up. I knew that before I could lead this transition and transformation, I needed to understand its full scope and unite my team and executives around a shared vision for the future. And this is the strategy I used to do just that.

Using Time Strategically and Deliberately to Gain Clarity

In my scenario, I knew that the only way I could begin to make sense of the monumental confusion, complexity and uncertainty surrounding this transition and transformation, was to build in some deliberate time to proactively and deeply assess what I could about the situation at hand. With so much complexity, there was no way I could provide clarity on the way ahead without internal effort on my part and on the part of my team.

One strategy I employed out of many to facilitate gaining clarity in such a short time, was to actually use time much more deliberately by employing the easy-to-use time block method.

Special Note: The time-block method is a fairly common, easy-to-use tool and that’s why it was perfect for this scenario. When dealing with complexity, easy-to-use tools are the key. I urge you not to underestimate or disregard simple techniques and methods just because they seem “simple” or “easy”. Quoting the esteemed Ralph Waldo Emerson: “… to be simple is to be great”! Don’t add more complexity for yourself! Remember you’re trying to reduce complexity, keep it simple.

Key Tip/Tool: The Time Block Method (dependent on how much time you have!)

Time blocks are popular because they help you break work into time segments often down to the minutes and hours which allows you to focus max effort for smaller periods of time.

In my case, I knew I was crunched for time and had approximately 3 months before I needed to present a plan on the way ahead that was clear and understandable for myself, my team, and my executives. So I needed a method that was super time efficient.

To support what I needed to do for the next 3 months, I created 2 major time blocks: one for myself as the leader, and one for my team, up to 30 days at a time. These time blocks would help me guide myself and focus the team on a monumental effort to gain clarity and develop our plan.

〉 Leader Time Block (2 weeks to 30 days)

It’s a highly recommended and valuable best practice especially for leaders taking on a new project/position/team or even when operating after major change, to take time on your own to understand where you are and where you’re going. Doing your own internal work not only allows you a better grasp of what your role is, and how you can best serve and lead but it also builds proactivity – the act of intentionally looking for ways to change one’s environment rather than waiting to be forced to act (Bateman & Crant, 1993).

In this scenario, I gave myself internally approximately 2 weeks to 30 days to assess my environment, get a greater sense of the major objectives I needed to accomplish, learn my team, meet key executives and partners, etc., and then I created 30-day time blocks with my team for further work. Important as an outcome for my leader time was being able to identify the critical, priority items I absolutely had to analyze, assess, and understand to gain clarity. That understanding would help me prioritize those tasks first for my team during our team time block phase.

〉 Team Time Blocks (30 days+) and a Plan

In this phase, we did the analysis work together. There’s only so much I can do on my own. But the pre-work/analysis I completed in leader time helped inform how I could structure the team time blocks. In my scenario, I coordinated three 30-day blocks to accomplish a set of tasks that would allow us to get to the 3-month milestone.

Below is an example of our 90-day team schedule to get to our planning milestone:

Within these 30-day time blocks, we also had internal milestones we wanted to accomplish as an outcome of each time block, and in some cases, if we didn’t accomplish the milestone, we had to extend the time block to 40 days vs 30 days. Of note, it did impact our other time blocks if we had to shift time around but we were allowed to shift when needed. There was an acknowledgement from our executives that this was a very aggressive timeline and so we were allowed some flexibility to extend time when absolutely necessary.

Final Notes

Two key things to remember for this topic:

〉 1. Remember opposites. We’ll talk about opposites quite a bit because it’s important to understand that within the opposites, exists the clues for how to resolve your issues. In the case of chaos and complexity, the opposite of chaos is order and the opposite of complexity is simplicity. Therefore, to combat both, leaders need to do their best to provide both structure and simplicity in any way they can. In my case, I used the time I knew I had to provide a structure for how we could move towards gaining clarity and I used a simple method like time blocks to simplify what we needed to do.

〉 2. Stay realistic and flexible when dealing with time. Realistically, even though you think you have time to do all that you need, your senior leadership will ask you to move faster, they will interrupt your flow to introduce more information or in some cases, you may miss an internal milestones that will cause you to shift your schedule last minute but such is life. So even though you have a plan to use time blocks for example, you will need to be flexible and prepared to move faster (or slower) if you have no other choice. You want to stay true to your original plan as much as possible of course and advocate to keep your schedule as is, but if that can’t occur, flexibility is key. I always recommend in either case, you add some flexibility and buffer in the time schedule where you can find it. Know the critical areas that absolutely must be assessed and cannot be waived. Prioritize analysis of those. If you’re asked to move faster, do your pre-work/leader analysis first to see how you can shorten the time frames to give you what you need, focusing on the critical, priority items first then adjust, adapt and act!

Leaders, wishing you the best of luck out there. Feel free to share your observations, lessons learned, tips via social media either @carmen_igls, @thecreatvrs on Instagram or contact me directly at carmen@thecrv.com if you want to chat further.

And stay tuned for more tips for leaders in upcoming posts! ~Carmen

 

References:

Bateman, T., Crant, J.M (1993): “The Proactive Component of Organizational Behavior: A measure and correlates