Times Are Changing

There’s a forceful enemy that’s gained strength and momentum over the past year and continues to flex its muscle with each passing day.

It’s time — and it’s pushing our outer limits more than it ever has.   

The past year has been the most revolutionary period of many of our lives. Patience and consistency have now given way to immediacy and spontaneity. Gone are the days of methodically constructing our teams and preparing them for tests long down the road.

The new leader must build powerfully and expeditiously, while being ready to change direction in a moment’s notice.

Trust has long been the result of consistency over time. But if our window of opportunity shrinks, so does the sample size to cultivate purposeful relationships. The formula must change. Trust will now be about genuine authenticity in the fleeting moments we’re afforded.

Naturally, that will lead us to make some errors in judgment. Can we still get someone to do something he/she doesn’t want to do?

Many leaders today continue to base their foundations on what they learned and observed decades prior. But the way of doing something yesterday is rarely the way of going about it tomorrow — which is particularly difficult to embrace if you’ve reached the upper echelon of your profession in the past.

The future is no longer three, six or nine months down the road. It’s 48 hours from now — and this shortened window is forcing us to eliminate our wants and focus only on our most pressing needs.

It will make us disregard what the competition is doing and demand that we conduct frequent internal autopsies. We will have to know ourselves better than we ever have while developing thicker skin and shorter-term memories. That can be remarkably difficult.

As leaders, we’ll either be moving forward, sideways or backwards. Only one of these is positive. 

Which direction are you heading in?