Definitions Of Success You Should Never Ignore in 2021
“What happened to my resolve?” a leader remarked in the middle of a session.
We were discussing how we're navigating the second wave of the pandemic and responding to the breaking news that a vaccine might be on the horizon. On the surface, everything was fine: The business was thriving and his company was in a good position.
Still, that remark captured his true concern: On a personal level he was experiencing a loss of agency, determination, and energy. The “steady hand” approach and rapid action mindset that had characterized his leadership during the first wave were becoming fuzzy, less ingenious, and much more volatile.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook had begun to wonder whether it might be time to rethink their opportunistic approach to the expansion of their small restaurant empire in Philadelphia, CooknSolo. The pandemic, however, caused an abrupt and intense change of focus-the goal was no longer expansion, but survival. Solomonov had overcome much in his life, including addiction and the death of his younger brother; these experiences had given him the perspective to take on great challenges in his career, the COVID-19 pandemic being the greatest challenge yet. As the economy cautiously started to reopen in June 2020, how should Solomonov and Cook proceed? How should they think about their business in terms of survival through the duration of the pandemic and set themselves up to come back even stronger in the post-pandemic world?
Explore the life and career of rapper and music producer Swizz Beatz. Set in 2019, it covers the evolution of Swizz's musical career and his new venture into the commercial art market.
A good number of executives accept the cliché that success always demands a price and that the price is usually deterioration of private life. This cliché does not always reflect reality, however—some executives seem to be exempt. What distinguishes the executives who pay a heavy personal price for their success from those who are able to maintain and develop fulfilling private lives?
Undeniably, many people who reach executive levels in organizations do so at the expense of their personal lives. They spend long hours at difficult and tension-filled jobs and retreat to their homes not for comfort and sustenance but for a place to hide or to vent feelings left over from a bad day at the office. Yet other executives who endure the same long hours and tension-filled jobs come home full of energy and excited by the day. What distinguishes the two groups of people?
As we dug through the layers of the organization, it turned out that the feeling was widespread among other leaders and managers. Stress incidents were on the rise, people’s emotional reactions were becoming more polarized, and there were more team defections.
After studying more than 2,000 executives and interviewing many husbands and wives, these authors have found that, psychological differences aside, the executives who successfully cross the line from job to private life are able to do three things better than the other executives. They adapt well to change in jobs, they find the right jobs for them, and they handle career disappointments well. The authors discuss these sources of potential negative emotional spillover; then they investigate how organizations might minimize obstacles to coordinating one’s private and professional lives.
The same is likely true across a broad range of companies and sectors. It goes by different names: “pandemic fatigue,” “mental fog,” “work/life blur,” “extended vacuum,” and an “endless wait,” just to mention a few phrases I have heard leaders use. Clients mention that they are fed up and bored and that “2020 has been beyond heavy.” Even those working in booming industries report that they feel “emotionally amputated.” “The other day I cried for no reason,” another (usually hard-nosed) client told me. Others struggle with not being able to do things like exercise with great enthusiasm, as they did during the first wave of the pandemic. Their brand-new collection of home fitness gear is gathering dust. And no one gets a kick from yet another virtual “happy hour” at work.
It feels like the whole world is tired. Even though the vaccine shines a light at the end of the tunnel, the home stretch will be long and perhaps take a greater toll on our professional and personal lives than we expect it to.
To move through the second wave successfully, leaders need to reexamine their personal resilience and that of their team members: the ability and strength to overcome obstacles, bounce back, and recover in the face of challenges. How strong are you under pressure? How quickly do you bounce back from defeat?
Most importantly: How can you find the mental strength to lead through the last mile?
How to Lead When the Whole World Is Tired
Compared to the adrenaline-fueled response in the spring and the false dawn about the recovery over the summer, the second wave requires a new understanding of personal resilience. In the first wave, personal resilience relied on a psychological emergency response called arousal. Shocks, threats, and sudden uncertainty make us super alert and we activate resources that are skin-deep: Adrenaline, fighting spirit, and pulling together. This response is impulsive, almost universal, and immediately recognizable across many teams.
Personal resilience in the second wave is a different story because it relies on psychological stamina. Psychological stamina rests on more deep-seated emotional patterns shaped by our individual needs, histories, and experiences. Stamina is required because, frankly, the second wave is not exciting at all. People report feeling bored, disconnected, and unnerved. In contrast to the skin-deep reactions of the first wave, the second wave requires perseverance, endurance, and even defiance against the randomness, gloom, and burden of the pandemic.
Cultivating resilience requires some emotional rewiring and calls for a different kind of appeal to team members and colleagues. The essential task is to identify your biggest challenges over the next year and then tap the psychological stamina you and your team needs to get there. There are three key steps: understanding the difference between urgency and importance; balancing comfort with containment; and finding new ways to energize yourself and others.
The way ahead may be to follow the example of a CEO I advise. Even though her business has been successful throughout Covid-19, she chose not to rest on her laurels but to ask: “How do we turn the short-term momentum into long-term advantages?” She asked her executive team to come up with ideas for the future and set up a task force with high-performing talents from across the organization. Specifically, she asked them to consider the steps they could take here and now, steps that would in the years to come eventually become longer-term competitive advantages.
Another approach would be to ask yourself and your colleagues whether you are in fact fully prepared for the feeding frenzy that will inevitably kick off in the wake of the vaccine. Companies will clamor to win back lost business and reclaim lost customers. For many businesses, dealing with the aftermath will be just as intense as dealing with the crisis.
Ask yourself and your teams: Are you doing all you can do to emerge from the crisis as a stronger company? The window for change may be closing and the time to turn good intentions into action is now.
Balancing Compassion and Containment
In order to act, you and your employees must be motivated to act. Specifically, action requires both compassion and containment.
First, let’s look at compassion. At this point in the crisis, the conditions that breed depression, loneliness, and anxiety are present: Working in isolation, health concerns, job insecurity, heavy workloads, and rapidly shifting priorities. A global survey conducted by Mercer found that the majority of the 270 insurance companies surveyed now rate mental health as being as much of a risk as smoking.
Leaders need to be serious about mental wellbeing and intervene sooner rather than later. This means that your employees need more warmth and comfort than they might have prior to the pandemic. But you can’t soothe your team with spreadsheets and plans; that takes listening and daring to stay in the hardest moments –daring to talk about doubt and discomfort — instead of skipping ahead to the next item on the agenda.
Compassion, though, must be balanced with containment. Containment is described by IMD professor Anand Narasimhan as “the ability to observe and absorb what is going on around you, but to provide a sense of stability.” Stability comes from setting limits, raising the bar, keeping the pressure at the optimal level, and helping each other snap out of self-pity and moodiness.
In fact, too much caring and compassion can drive people into a learned helplessness trap, believing that they can’t perform without help and support from others. As the father of modern positive psychology professor Martin Seligman demonstrated, we experience learned helplessness when we face uncontrollable and inescapable stress.
Yes, the current moment calls for compassion, but it also calls for a little more edge and collective defiance against the injustice of the virus. You want people to say “enough is enough” and rise to fight against the gloom. As with good parenting, the key is to find the right balance between caring and challenging, between compassion and containment, between saying “you are good enough as you are” and “get moving and get to the next level.”
Energize Everyone, Every Day
“I’m surprised that the hardest part right now is managing my own mind,” the CEO of a large cap company concluded with a sigh near the end of our session.
As we enter the last stretch, the greatest challenge for leaders may be to sustain energy in themselves and in their teams. We don’t quite know how long it will take to finish the last mile and we cannot rely on the urgency of the crisis any longer. Energy is not a given and must be generated and channeled internally.
Alternatively, if we face an obstacle thinking, “It is permanent, it is a general problem, and there is nothing I can do about it,” it leaves us with little or no power to act. People lacking resilience also tend to internalize the problem by ruminating and having thoughts like, “It is probably me. I am no good. I can’t do anything right.” This leaves the person paralyzed. You can probably imagine how these thoughts can spin out of control and end up in pure self-destruction.
If you had more money, do you think your anxiety would go away?
As a psychotherapist specializing in financial wellness, Amanda Clayman helps her clients uncover the motivations and roots underlying their money anxieties, so they can make better financial decisions.
It’s a problem Clayman understands intimately, as an entrepreneur who struggles with financial anxiety. But she says money isn’t always a problem that needs to be solved, if we can learn to understand what’s really going on when we stress out about money.
Georgia State University had developed a reputation for driving student success by nearly doubling its graduation rate for students of all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. It did so while growing its student body and the proportion of Black/African American, low-income, and first-generation students-groups with historically lower postsecondary graduation rates compared to national averages. Georgia State's Student Success team, led by Tim Renick and Allison Calhoun-Brown, used a data-based approach to deploy micro-grant programs to retain students, implemented predictive analytics to improve student advising, and optimized course sequencing to help students graduate before they exhausted their financial aid.
In 2016, they faced a growing "summer melt" problem where nearly 20% of incoming students who committed to attend never actually enrolled at Georgia State-and many never enrolled at any college. At the same time, they wondered how to balance continuing to incrementally improve student success at Georgia State and scaling their efforts to help the many other universities facing similar problems who sought to learn from their experience.
Definitions Of Success You Should Never Ignore in 2021
