When Everything Falls To Pieces

by Judy Ryan

“Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient.”
Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

Without a stable foundation, all your hard work and dreams will crumble. Do you have the foundation you need when shift hits the fan? If not, you better create one. There will be more change in the next 10 years than in the last 100. Our window of tolerance has been stretched to the limit more than ever. Uncertainty and change are not new problems. However, it’s taken the pandemic to catapult many people into the awareness that they need new human systems so people can remain stable and contributing no matter what comes at them. How people react, adapt, and evolve in your business will become the measure of your success. Now is the opportunity for crucial personal, professional, and organizational growth and evolvement. Here are some key predictions to heed:

You may have a problem with change blindness. If you don’t address it, you will not commit to what’s needed for success. As a leader, you must go out of your way to create the kind of culture you need for success. Protecting yourself from appearing outdated keeps you small, stuck, and makes you the very thing you fear: irrelevant and incompetent. Be courageous to update your systems because the world won’t wait for you to catch up.

If you do not invest in learning and adapting to the evolution of organizational culture, most initiatives in your business will be disappointing and fail. Today, change is happening so fast it causes confusion and stress for most individuals and teams. Outdated, autocratic approaches no longer work and new systems that are here now, are needed. These promote emotional intelligence and personal responsibility. The glue that holds your business together in the future must be based on trustworthy teamwork and collaboration, with supportive, regular mentoring.

You must help your people develop internal motivation rather than seek to motivate them externally. Otherwise, you get compliance rather than commitment, disengagement, and mediocre results. The top competitive advantage for your business is investing in a responsibility-based culture: a culture where you have buy-in from everyone at every level. Only then do your people show up strong. Everyone works together collaboratively to embrace a common mission. The environment is supportive and inclusive, so work gets done quickly and efficiently. Your organization thrives and you see rewards everywhere.

Without repeatable, sustainable systems including those addressing the human component, you will not achieve sustainable, consistent or outstanding outcomes. Systems are the game-changers needed for your incredible future. Because of globalization, diversity, and technology, you need sustainable and scalable systems that ensure resiliency, consistency, and high performance. These systems must support agility. This only occurs when power is shared. People function from purpose and values, and leadership and emotional intelligence is developed in everyone; from CEO to front line staff. Most importantly, people must learn and have opportunities to develop flexible, inter-changeable leader and follower skills so that cross-functional teamwork is strong.

Without a commitment to, practice of, and execution of professional common behaviors based on purpose, values and emotional intelligence, you cannot confidently achieve agility and collaboration. Operating by purpose and values and developing emotional intelligence must take precedence over profitability. Only then does higher profit occur naturally and abundantly. People must learn about and adopt conditions and conversations needed to interrupt cycles of long-standing struggles within people and between them that impedes innovative solutions and progress. An important concept to promote is social interest; when your people recognize the consequences they cause others so they intentionally help rather than hinder coworkers. When your workforce sustains a positive, holistic view of people, only then do they continually and fully engage in their work.

Judy Ryan (judy@LifeworkSystems.com), human systems specialist, is owner of LifeWork Systems. Join her in her mission to create a world in which all people love their lives. She can also be reached at 314-239-4727.
People hire LifeWork Systems because we help businesses become agile and manage their priority system: their human system. I hope this article helps you make sense of what’s most crucial to your evolving organization!