Three weeks ago I wrote a blog called “What the United Airlines Fiasco Should Teach us about Business Acumen” in response to the unfortunate incident involving the passenger who was forcibly removed from an oversold flight.  In the blog I shared some ideas, insights, and lessons learned through the lenses of Business Acumen and Business Leadership skills that are required for company success.  During these past three weeks the blog has become one of the most popular blogs we’ve ever published and I have received feedback and comments every day since.  Because of this activity, I think it’s worthwhile to reflect on what has transpired since the incident and share the comments and reactions for additional learnings and application.  Below are several random but connected thoughts that I hope can enhance your ability to learn from the situation and improve and build upon your business leadership and business acumen skill set.

In a world of virtual information, there is no place to hide

The video of the Chicago transportation police dragging the passenger off the United Flight went viral within a few hours and was the topic of conversation for millions of people around the world within 24 hours.  25 years ago, it would have taken weeks if not months to achieve that level of penetration and in most likelihood, would never have reached millions of people because the story would have lost its legs much sooner.  The implication of this phenomenon to today’s leaders is profound.  In the blink of an eye and a share on Facebook the execution of your business strategy could be derailed forever; one of your most critical roles in this new world is to create a culture of “doing the right things” and anticipating the things that can and will go wrong and try to prevent them before they ever happen.

Customers aren’t inventory

In Business Acumen training, one of the first things you learn about are income statements and balance sheets.  An income statement illustrates revenues (what customers buy and pay for) and a balance sheet illustrates what a company owns (assets, inventories, etc.) and what a company owes (liabilities, debt, etc.).  A lesson that isn’t taught – but perhaps it should be – is that customers aren’t inventory!  Customers provide revenues and ultimately profit in exchange for a service rendered or a product delivered; they can’t be treated like a box of product in a warehouse and you certainly can’t pick they up by their arms and legs and throw them onto another flight.  I know these last few sentences sound ridiculous, but it’s the lesson learned.

Cost justification analysis

Another valuable lesson taught in most Business Acumen program is the concept of the cost justification analysis.  How much would you invest ($X) to have an outcome of ($Y)?  In most cases, business leaders understand and benchmark the analysis in business terms and can make the right decisions.  In the case of United, I think that lesson is now learned.  United recently announced that they have given local decision makers the ability to go up to $10,000 in travel vouchers in exchange for a passenger giving up a seat.  When compared to the millions of dollars in settlement and legal fees, that $10,000 seems like a very wise decision.

“But’s that’s my job!”

Perhaps the most valuable lesson of all is that existing airlines are making a distinct effort to make sure this never happens again.  During the past few weeks I’ve been on at least 8 flights and the difference is noticeable.  I almost exclusively fly #AmericanAirlines and I have noticed that everyone – from the ticketing agents, to the gate team, to the pilots, to the flight staff – has been more accommodating, friendly, and customer centric.  On my most recent flight from Philadelphia to Chicago I thanked the lead flight attendant for what I perceived as services beyond the core and she replied with a big smile, “But that’s my job.”  It was funny, refreshing, and much appreciated.

In summary, sometimes good business outcomes come from bad business situations.  I had my doubts, but it is clear to me now that the existing airlines have “received the message” and aren’t going to sit around and do nothing about it.  There are lessons here for us all…

Week in and week out, I have the unique opportunity of working with different levels of business leaders from many different industries; some weeks I could be running a developmental workshop for senior executives, and some weeks I could be facilitating a leadership development workshop for new leaders taking on their first teams and leadership responsibilities.  After every learning journey, I reflect back on the sessions looking for patterns of effective leadership challenges and development opportunities to share with the readers of this blog.

One of the most enjoyable and enriching audiences I work with are the mid-level leaders who report to the executives who set the strategy and lead the workers and contributors who execute the strategy by doing the actual work.  The reason I enjoy working with these leaders so much is that they are the catalysts for success and they can still learn new things to make an impact and difference.

Over the past several months, I have seen and experienced firsthand the anxiety facing these mid-level managers.  They are anxious because they are truly living in the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world of global business.  Geopolitical issues such as Brexit, the unexpected election of President Trump, the animosity and instability in Asia, a potential new leader in France, and a continued slow global economy continue to accelerate and get more complex and are the primary factors contributing to an uncomfortable and uncertain future for most business leaders.

Five Leadership Tips

In order to help other leaders deal with these issues, I have put together a list of five leadership tips to help lead into an uncertain future. This list of 5 tips was compiled from discussions, workshops, and action planning and outlines the keys elements of effective leadership. 

Manage expectations

One of the most import  leader skills needed when leading in uncertain times is to manage expectations in a real and authentic manner.  There is no reason to exaggerate and over-promise and the more realistic you are, the better you are managing their expectations and ability to focus and concentrate on the specific work.

Manage to Expect the unexpected

Nothing is ever going to go as planned; especially in uncertain times. Great leadership manage to create an environment where employees can learn to expect the unexpected and deal with all of the uncertainties of their worlds inside and outside of work. A tip to do this?  Practice dealing with change.  Throw a few curve balls at your team and see how they react. Juggle teams, change priorities and help them understand they won’t be penalized for making mistakes as long as they are learning and evolving.

Communicate early and often

There is no such thing as too much communicating and the best leaders figure out ways to communicate early and often.  These communications don’t have to be formal and they don’t need to be long; they need to be plentiful and they need to deliver the right messages.

Set realistic goals

Like managing expectation, you must set goals and the goals must be realistic.  In times of uncertainly, don’t set unrealistic stretch goals, set realistic goals that can be achieved and measured without a lot of complications.

Adapt and change goals quickly

The business will change quickly and adaptability is a key to survival and then long-term success.  Good leaders can adapt and change goals quickly and create an environment for employees to be able to adapt quickly and re-set their focus depending on their circumstances and leadership ability.

One of the most important decisions a leader will ever make is to outsource production of their products to a third party contract manufacturing organization (CMO).  In most cases, making this decision is a win-win in terms of efficiencies, focus, and the quality of the products being delivered to customers.  But as we all know, nothing in business is as easy as it seems.  I recently had the chance to sit down and interview a group of Sales Professionals in a business-to-business company that recently shifted all their manufacturing to a CMO.  They shared that despite the promises of everyone involved, there were a couple of issues that occurred, the most serious being a missed delivery because the CMO ran out of a key chemical for cleaning their equipment after a batch run.  Although the delay was only a day, it left the sales team scrambling and delivering bad news in a time when competition is breathing down their necks with low prices and guaranteed on-time delivery.

Whether you are a brand-new leader, an emerging leader, a mid-career leader, or a leader looking to retire within the next 10 years, you are facing the same challenges; it is a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business world out there and your people are looking to you for answers and guidance.

“Leadership” means many things to many people and if you Google it you see 795,000,000 hits in 1.25 seconds.  To help me as both a trainer of leadership and the leader of my company, I have a very simple definition that “Leadership is equal to the execution of your business strategy.”  Great leaders understand it’s all about developing the right business strategy, creating alignment within your organization to execute, providing objectives and goals for achievement, coaching to success, empowering, and creating a culture of accountability.

In the Business Leadership development learning journeys I lead I often ask participants to share some of the most critical challenges they are seeing in this VUCA world when it comes to leadership.  Last week I had a significant number of participants asking about communication skills.  At the highest level, communication skills are the language of leadership; it’s how you connect the strategy to the alignment to the ability to get things done through other people.

Based on research from the academic world, the consulting world, and my own experiences working with leaders for more than 25 years, I’ve put together an up-to-the-minute list of 3 leadership tips to help you to better communicate in these VUCA times.

Keep the communication simple

Thanks to the growth of communication technologies, systems, tools, and platforms communicating has never been as easy…or hard.  We live in the Twitter age of 140 characters and I for one love it.  @jack have given is the tools we need to craft simple, meaningful messages that get right to the point.  There is no need for long drawn out speeches, emails, or custom videos.  Great leaders of today can figure out ways of cutting through the VUCA world clutter by keeping it simple and to the point.

Think about ways of communicating strategy in a tweet:

• “All, remember, our strategy is Product Leadership. Keep pumping out great products!”

Or how about reinforcing objectives:

• “Our new product called WOW is at 68% of goal; let’s create more market awareness”

Repeat it often using different modalities

The second tip is to repeat your messages often and use different modalities as obviously just tweeting short messages is not going to be very effective.  People will remember your leadership message if it’s engaging and if it comes in different forms. So try different techniques and think outside of the box.  You have access to video on your smartphones and on your computer systems, you can broadcast using web conferencing and you can even create a podcast of you want; the choices are limitless; all you must do is make it happen.

Suggestion: Build a leadership communications SMART Plan.  Take the time to create themes and list out all the things you want to say, when you are going to say them, and how you are going to say them.

Make it a conversation

Talking at people in a VUCA world won’t work.  You need to make sure it’s a conversation and that your people can, and do engage with you. It doesn’t matter if you have a team of 1 or a team of 65,000, you must take the extra time and effort to find ways of providing a two-way street where your people can ask you questions and more importantly provide you with the ideas and insights to change volatility into vision, uncertainty in and understanding, complexity into clarity, and ambiguity into alignment.

Do Your People Have the Skills to Handle It?

One of the most challenging aspects of business leadership is finding the right balances between accountability, delegation, and empowerment.  I recently had a fascinating conversation with an executive leader who was sharing some frustrations that I believe are very common patterns in many different companies when it comes to leadership and the skills needed to achieve success.

“Everyone is always complaining that they want to be empowered; until they are empowered and they don’t know what to do.”

I explored this provocative and interesting comment with him further…

“I have noticed a common pattern that too many mid- and even senior-level leaders think they aren’t empowered to make decisions, allocate resources, and execute the business plan how they see fit.  They always resort to inaccurate excuses like ‘if I make a mistake, I will be yelled out’ or I feel so micro-managed’ so I told them all that they won’t be yelled at and they aren’t being micro-managed.  The only thing I ask is that if they make a mistake they learn and move on quickly and not make the mistake again.  They have budgets, authority, accountability, and the resources they need to be successful.  So, what happens?  It’s a lot of tears and whining; believe me, they have the empowerment and they literally don’t know what to do with it.  They all very quickly realize that it’s not empowerment they have been missing all of this time; it’s the skills needed to be great leaders and business professionals to achieve success and be accountable for that success.”

As a talent development professional with more than 25 years of experience working with large companies building their skills in Business Acumen, Business Leadership, and Strategic Business Selling, I instantly understood this perspective and the unique lens on why his people didn’t feel the empowerment he thought they had.

Essentially, before a leader can become empowered, that leader must have the skills and tools to accept the empowerment and know what to do with it. 

While there are hundreds of macro and micro skills that are needed to accept empowerment, I present two primary competencies that can immediately be developed to prepare leaders for taking on an empowered role:

Drivers of Business Performance

Every business leader needs foundational business acumen skills and the ability to understand who a company makes money, how their own business makes money, and how their customers make money.  Understanding the drivers of business performance is the ability to see the big picture and realize how all of the levers of strategy, pricing, marketing, operations, and finance come together in a system that delivers value for customers, shareholders, and employees.

Fundamentals of business leadership

As John C. Maxwell points out in his book, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, the first phase of leadership growth is “Don’t Know What I Don’t Know” (p.27).

Maxwell suggests that most employees and especially most leaders don’t understand the value of good leadership; they think that leadership is for a chosen few executives and not for every leader.  In fact, every leader is passing up opportunities for growth and business impact if they don’t learn the power of leadership and how to become a strong business leader.

If you believe that leadership is equal to the execution of business strategy through other people, then you must understand and develop the skills that are needed, including understanding styles, coaching, delegating, having hard conversations, and utilizing influence effectively.  Unfortunately, most leaders don’t do this because they don’t know what they don’t know.

While I was writing this blog, I shared some of these ideas with the executive who was so frustrated by his people not being prepared to take on the empowerment that wanted.  He provided feedback that he thought I was on to something powerful and committed to trying some pilots and focus groups to see if providing these sorts of skills and tools could make a significant impact.

I will report back in a few months…