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Originally published by Business2Community.In the past, businesses facing change saw it as a temporary disruption with a beginning, middle, and end. After a new normal is achieved, the thinking goes, the business “recovers” and life returns to normal. That mindset no longer reflects the changes that organizations face. Product life cycles are a fraction of before, customer experience is a huge part of connecting with consumers, and disruptive competitors with compelling value propositions emerge suddenly.To keep up, organizations have to make change a way of working and make constant adaptation a permanent part of their cultures.

Why Change Has Changed

When John Kotter formulated his eight-step process for change management in 1995, the goal was to reach a specific point: to arrive at a new status quo. Though updated in 2012, the model itself hasn’t changed much: It still involves creating urgency and a vision, building a team of volunteers, and getting short-term wins to help ease the company into the shift.Given how much change itself has changed, why do we still cling to this model? Kotter’s thinking was certainly not wrong, but now change happens on a much shorter cycle. Businesses used to introduce new products every few years, resulting in much longer, more stable life cycles. If companies changed, they maintained the same business model and reordered certain processes. With today’s continuous product releases, however, processes constantly shift.Our understanding of the customer experience was also vastly different. Companies could research what consumers bought and wanted to buy, but they couldn’t tap into what motivated their customers every day. A business’s goal was to create a popular new product rather than change how companies treated customers.On the rare occasions that mandated new technologies, the waterfall process of spec, design, test, pilot, implement, learn, and use could take years. In every case, the goal was to reach a point when the change was over.

How to Keep Up With Change When It’s a Constant

In an era of constant change, organizations need to develop mindsets that embrace change as part of everyday business. Taking these steps makes an organization better prepared to implement and withstand change:1. Set dynamic outcomes instead of static benchmarks. When companies view change as a means to an end, the plan for change is fairly clear-cut, so it makes sense to wait until the plan is set before enacting it. When change happens constantly, however, waiting for fully detailed deliverables will make keeping up almost impossible — and they will never be completely right anyway.Instead, set emergent outcomes that are defined enough to move forward but not so well-defined that they become disempowering for the next level of leaders. Outcomes include defining what changing expectations leaders will face in the new environment and what strategies and practices they should develop to meet those expectations.2. Create change leaders, not cheerleaders. An “army of the willing,” as Kotter called it, may be the least confrontational approach to take — if you have the time. But when you see change as a part of the new business model, all leaders need to be change leaders.Change leaders must shift the source of their confidence from certainty around their plan to faith in their own abilities to lead and in their teams’ abilities to execute. The best way to create change leaders is to immerse employees in the experience of the future state. PowerPointing the highlights won’t work: Leaders need to be engaged in that future experience and then apply it through real work. Immersion shows them firsthand what new levers they must pull to accomplish their objectives.3. Shift the company’s mindset entirely. When an organization views change differently, it transforms its entire outlook on how it does business, treats employees, and serves customers. As a result, people have to change their behavior, which means changing their mindsets in several ways. As Tony Robbins often mentions, that involves carefully framing the questions they ask themselves.When a client was launching a new strategy, we helped them identify the pivotal moments when reimagining and making different choices would move them toward new business results faster. For example, when preparing for and conducting their quarterly business reviews, we helped them shift away from parsing out “How did we do?” and “What didn’t work?” Reviews instead became focused, asking “What can we do next” and “How do we remove the obstacles?” A seemingly small change at a pivotal moment dramatically accelerated the success of their strategy.4. Build a change-centered culture. Achieving transformational change in an organization is more than just the cumulation of individual behavior shifts; it’s a communal activity. Therefore, people in organizations need support beyond the individual level. They need to know that the system — including behaviors and culture — is changing, too.From the start, companies can create a supportive network through structured leader-led meetings, with intact teams focusing on the same kind of content, material, and expectations. Alternately, cross-enterprise teams simultaneously focusing on the same leader expectation or cultural element can have a similar tipping-point effect. Brief, regular opportunities to collaborate and learn from peers helps change leaders gain the confidence and support to overhaul their daily operating rhythms, norms, and ways of working.Change is no longer an occasional challenge to resolve as soon as possible. Instead, it’s the defining characteristic of virtually every marketplace. The most prepared companies make constant change their prevailing business models.To learn more about how to activate new ways of working through transformational moments, download this whitepaper.

Kathryn Clubb, Head of Change and Transformation at BTS shares how to develop Change-Ready leaders.

This article was originally published in Chief Executive here.

You need your team to give their best effort—but they won't deliver if they're living in a culture of fear. As CEO, you can help break that cycle.

Imagine this scenario: One of your employees comes to you, frustrated with a colleague who seems to be blocking their intention to embark on a new project.What do you do? How you manage these kinds of situations determines whether you create a psychologically safe environment that allows your employees to thrive.A two-year study of team performance at Google found that teams that allow employees to take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed are consistently the highest-performing. That’s because employees can say or do what they know is really needed without worrying about others’ responses or getting negative feedback from the boss.Psychological safety relies on trust: Employees need the security of knowing that others won’t think less of them if they say what they think, make a mistake, or share a crazy idea. As CEO, you play a central role: Studies consistently find that empathetic leaders more effectively create trusting relationships that translate into higher employee satisfaction and performance. Conversely, leaders who don’t relate to their teams often struggle to motivate employees.If you can help others become more empathetic and open to the thoughts and ideas of people who are different from them, you will go a long way toward building psychological safety and, as a result, a high-performing organization.

Lead From a Place of Understanding

So how should this situation be handled? According to data from tens of thousands of similar scenarios, one response has a disproportionate impact. Teaching this response to your senior leadership and encouraging them to do the same with their teams will create a long-term impact and help drive your business:1. See: Get in other people’s shoes. When facing a situation like the one at the beginning of the article, the first challenge is helping your employee get into the other person’s shoes. If employees are struggling to influence their teams, it may be that their own judgments and experiences are getting in the way of understanding others’ perspectives. Help employees create trust, safety and connection by putting themselves in their colleagues’ shoes and seeing the world through their colleagues’ eyes. Letting go of preconceived notions and embracing other people’s perspectives creates empathy.2. Hear: Ensure others feel heard. The foundation of psychological safety is ensuring that the other person feels heard. Once you have helped the employee see the world from the other person’s perspective, the next step is helping them think about how to let the other party feel heard. Guide your employee toward listening with an open heart and reflecting what they hear. When people feel heard, they can more readily empathize with each other and make space for the other’s perspective. True listening creates a psychologically safe space for even difficult conversations. CEOs should model this style of empathetic listening with their direct reports.3. Connect: Speak to their needs. Once your employee has truly seen and heard their colleague’s perspective and ideas, they can share what is important to them in a way that aligns with the team’s needs. Your employee can show empathy and understanding by addressing the team’s concerns when they respond. If your employee has watched and listened with empathy, the message will be more compelling.The most high-impact conversations always follow this sequence. First, see the other person, then make them feel heard, then speak to their needs. Coaching employees to do this—and developing their empathy skills in the process—will create the atmosphere of psychological safety that businesses need to reach their full potential. When individuals and groups feel secure, they will uncover new insights and become truly innovative on all levels.

This article was originally published in CEOWORLD here.

The closest parallel to today’s COVID-19 pandemic might be the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, which is a time few living people can remember. Consequently, modern executives are now expected to make unprecedented management decisions without any direct experience or information. Still, that doesn’t mean they can’t evaluate what has worked and what hasn’t for other leaders — such as those from Italy.

Italy made early headlines as the first Western country to be impacted significantly by the coronavirus. This also means it could hold the seeds for managerial best practices. Did leaders inspire confidence? Were they able to navigate expected and unexpected employee reactions to lockdowns and quarantines? Did they foster anxiety or positivity? How do leaders prepare their businesses to emerge from this crisis in good shape?

My company has an office in Milan, and we’ve worked with them to interview business leaders in Northern Italy to identify moments that were critical for them. We also mapped out the optimal response to each scenario.

Leadership Tactics to Rely On

As the CEO of Italian tire company Pirelli said earlier this month, careful preparation could mean your company emerges from this pandemic stronger than ever. However, mobilizing and engaging employees in a changing or uncertain environment will present significant challenges.

So what would Italian leaders describe as being the core insights to learn from in responding to COVID-19? Here are five tried-and-tested tips leaders can keep in mind to ensure their companies — and their people — are supported through the pandemic:

1. Give people control in times of uncertainty. Telling a team that everything’s going to be fine doesn’t cut it or fuel empowerment. Instead, it sounds like a platitude — and that prediction might also be wrong. As The New York Times reported, one Italian Democratic Party leader told his constituents to carry on with life as usual at the end of February. By mid-March, he had been diagnosed with the virus, too.

Everyone understands the negative aspects of the pandemic — the danger here is that people end up feeling like they lack control. This can make people feel hopeless, then helpless: According to a 2020 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, helplessness leads to withdrawal and eventual disengagement.

Teams can take bad news. But great leaders find a way to frame challenges in a way people can respond to and give them something they can control. For instance, a leader might announce: “Times are tough, but we’re not giving in. We need to move our business online. How soon can you be ready?” This message is one of realism and grit, and it invites others to be part of solving a problem. It gives them back control despite any uncertainty.

2. Forge human connections. Empathy and emotional intelligence are valuable skills, but they’re especially important during uncertain times. Almost everyone is working remotely. Many people are juggling childcare and, as a result, need to flex their hours within the working day. With these sweeping changes, it’s crucial to approach each employee’s situation with sensitivity.

Humans also crave connection. Ironically, remote work has been heralded as everything from the key to heightened productivity to the inevitable wave of the future, but research from San José State University indicates that job satisfaction drops with more virtual hours.

This means leaders must also create and celebrate shareworthy moments. Otherwise, workers won’t feel bonded and critical informal conversations (such as noticing when colleagues have too much on their plates and offering to share the workload) will be missed.

In Italy, for instance, sheltering residents took it upon themselves to connect via impromptu outbursts of joy and resilience. This can certainly be replicated in a business context: Even 15-minute teleconferencing breaks or virtual watercooler chats allow for these vital informal connections.

3. Banish preconceived biases. “People issues” don’t go away during a crisis. All leaders will still have high and low performers and people who are easy and difficult to work with. What we’ve learned from Italy, however, is that the judgments and biases we’ve built up about people in previous years must be treated with care. The situation is different, and individuals are under complex (and often unexpected) pressure.

We heard many stories from Italy about this: Leaders who took a few extra minutes to hold back their judgments — and really seek to understand what was going on in their new context — saw their compassion pay out in dividends.

Is it hard to disregard past data and jettison biases? Absolutely. However, it’s important to give everyone the benefit of the doubt (at least initially) and view situations through different lenses based on changing workplace dynamics. Instead of operating on “transmit” rather than “receive” impulses, executives should listen and understand before offering feedback.

4. Turn meltdowns into learning moments. Leaders in Italy said that if your team is big enough, you can almost guarantee that one or more people will have a meltdown. Those people might express their feelings if they trust you enough, but others will bottle it up. This is inevitable.

Individuals are gripped in fear because of COVID-19’s potential impact: They might fear losing their job or believe that their career is over. Meltdowns can come swiftly when people feel overly stressed, so it’s important for leaders to understand how to help employees deal with these concerns.

Unfortunately, too many executives try to make workers feel better or try to fix the problem temporarily. That’s not the answer. The only way to successfully coach people through a meltdown is to allow them to express their feelings and concerns. Only then can everyone gain perspective and discuss realistic ways forward.

5. Be open to a new reality with customer behavior. Customers aren’t showing the same purchasing habits in this changing world, which means we all have to let go of our pre-coronavirus assumptions. It’s a myth that uneducated people get stuck in their ways. The brightest ones are usually the most attached to their beliefs: They’ve seen those beliefs ring true in the past, and they have the intellect to keep justifying their position. But the world is changing fast.

As an article in Harvard Business Review explained, Italy’s initial intervention delays were because of confirmation bias. In other words, people in power treated COVID-19 like something familiar. It wasn’t, and it didn’t transmit as expected. Therefore, countless Italian citizens fell ill because everyone was unprepared for a virus that behaved unlike anything they had seen before.

We saw this pattern emerge with Italian business leaders as well. Customers’ buying patterns changed, and their needs shifted. Italian leaders found their teams responding using old mindsets and assumptions, which meant more deals were lost.

It might seem challenging to adapt, but we do it every day when we synthesize incoming information. During this crisis, leaders must acknowledge the changing world and rapidly pivot when customers postpone or cancel orders. That way, companies can maintain and nurture key relationships.

Over the coming months and years, leaders will be judged on their actions surrounding and responses to COVID-19. Those who learn from the missteps of others will rise to the forefront as proactive, flexible, and compassionate.

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Envision your ideal annual sales kickoff. It’s probably an exciting event where you rally the troops so that they’ll spend the year closing deals left and right, inevitably dominating the competition and boosting your bottom line to new heights. Right? The problem is, most businesses usually don’t experience such dramatic success.

That’s because most businesses treat their sales kickoffs as one-time events without integrating their main strategic messages into follow-up activities and training throughout the rest of the year. In fact, 71% of organizations don’t deliver any follow-up training after their annual kickoff events. So how do you ensure your company does things differently?

For your sales kickoff to yield real results, you need a well-thought-out plan for following up with sales reps that reinforces key messages and maintains the team alignment created during your kickoff.

Igniting year-round success

Big annual kickoff events can act as powerful catalysts for a successful sales year, building momentum and generating the excitement necessary to overcome the day-to-day obstacles. But sales kickoffs can’t and don’t happen year-round. They leave vast in-between stretches for expectations to be forgotten and motivation to dwindle.

However, when companies treat their sales kickoffs like springboards for the entire year and make it clear that more information will be coming after the initial event, they’ll see better compliance among the sales reps and better alignment on their teams.

The key to boosting morale and powering momentum is creating a truly engaging event that’s tied to overarching strategic goals. A sales kickoff will be hard to forget if it contextualizes the strategy in what reps really experience on the job and is coupled with follow-up trainings that bring reps back to the emotional connection they felt during the kickoff. Sales kickoffs that go beyond the event and take the strategy off the paper and put it into action help carry alignment and excitement throughout the year.

Planning Beyond the Event

To create effective follow-ups with sales teams that achieve lasting change, implement these four best practices in your kickoff planning:

1. Design a Road Map.

Don’t wait until after your kickoff to plan the follow-up. As a very first step, design a full map of every step you plan to take: where you’re starting and where you want to go, the vision driving your strategy, and the “how” you’ll need to keep sales reps informed and engaged. A map keeps your strategy cohesive and makes communicating your plans considerably easier.

Focus on significant milestones and analytics that align with your overall business strategy, and tailor the plan to fit your organization’s unique needs, processes, and culture. Make sure your map is simple enough to read quickly and easily and aligns everyone in terms of purpose and expectations so that they know the end goal upfront. After all, it’s easier to jump on board with a plan when its purpose is clear.

2. Keep in Touch Quarterly.

Keeping in touch can mean a variety of things, but be sure to check in with the sales team at least quarterly. If it makes sense, embrace a variety of ways to stay connected. This could mean combining e-learning with peer phone calls or showing videos of customer testimonials of others’ success.

Sales leaders should share updates and insights on initiatives, and sales enablement teams can help keep the momentum alive. Highlight specific wins using the learnings from the kickoff if you can. As they say, success breeds success.

3. Take Small Steps.

With each meeting or conversation, check in on progress and challenges with the strategy and adjust if needed. Don’t be afraid to adjust and involve the team in making the adjustments. Don’t expect people to change overnight, but celebrate the small changes they do make. The more opportunity to provide for them to practice the wanted changes, the more comfortable they will become with their clients and the more success they will have.

Give them time to adjust, but keep moving forward to new material. At the same time, provide opportunities for constructive conversations with peers so that sales reps can learn from one another. Peer groups can facilitate healthy accountability and help reps find clear paths to mastering new ways of working.

4. Embed New Steps in Daily Processes.

Sales reps need to know the specifics of how a new approach will look in everyday processes. Handing out a playbook at an event is a good start, but go beyond that to incorporate new and repeatable habits into the daily workflow.

Whether you’ve presented general industry insights or introduced new sales solutions, get those new ideas into daily tools like new collateral, the customer relationship management system and leader coaching conversations. Practice and exposure to the new way of doing things will help them adapt to the unique situations that constantly pop up in the field.

Event follow-up can come in many forms. Having a plan and adjusting it early and often will let you reap the benefits of your investment in a kickoff event. Keep your employees motivated through appropriate follow-up training and you’ll see improved productivity, enriched culture, and a more lucrative bottom line.

Want to get a glimpse into how we drive profits for companies through transforming their sales organizations?

Check out this case study to learn more.

This article was originally published in Fast Company here.

You need to adopt a growth mindset and give up some of your old beliefs.

Throughout my leadership coaching career, I’ve worked with thousands of professionals, helping them shift their outlooks and ultimately transform themselves.When you want to change something in your workplace, you need to adopt a growth mindset. It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual transitioning to a leadership position or the CEO of the company trying to overhaul its culture. You need to believe that you can acquire new abilities through learning and dedication.It’s a mindset you need to cultivate deliberately. I once coached a woman who emerged from a meeting with her boss, obviously rattled. She felt that she had messed up the meeting and infuriated her boss, but when we unpacked the situation, she recognized her own hyperbolic negative self-talk.It turns out she had failed to answer just one question. She’d interpreted an eyebrow raise from her boss to mean that he was angry. But when we distinguished the drama from the truth, she realized that her value was well-demonstrated and that she was needlessly worried about others’ perceptions of her. For her, change required shedding judgmental self-talk and embracing a more balanced worldview.Achieving a mindset change like this means overcoming the following four (common) barriers to transformation.1. Your work environment. Your work culture may trigger certain detrimental mindsets. For example, if you work in a fast-paced, high-stress, high-expectations environment, it may trigger your emotions and reinforce the feeling that you need to work harder, no matter the effects.To combat this, watch for the ways that your environment may restrain your growth. One team leader I spoke with was trying to engage an investigative mindset to uncover ways to make her team more efficient, but found that she was continually confronting crises instead of stepping back and asking questions.She recognized that she was letting her high-pressure environment block her breakthrough thinking. So she decided to use the team’s challenges as prompts for her investigative mindset, and called a 30-minute team brainstorm. Within 10 minutes, hearing her teammates’ perspectives revealed the source of the inefficiency. In that way, she used the team’s fast pace to her advantage. Understanding the culture of your workplace and how it affects you will help reveal what’s valuable and minimize those factors that hinder you.2. Your old (bad) habits. Breaking long-standing patterns takes continual, conscious effort. This requires committing to action learning, deliberately applying what you’ve learned through real-life experimentation, and consciously picking up new habits.To ensure that new mindsets and habits stick, commit to real situations where you can implement your learning. Just as you might typically set SMART goals, create specific, tangible experiments within your action learning plan.For example, don’t say you’ll experiment on Thursday. Instead, be specific. For example, resolve to activate the most clear-seeing version of yourself when you’re at a 1 p.m. meeting (which in the past tends to trigger some unproductive habits.) Create a clear accountability plan with a coach or mentor so that you’re more likely to succeed, and then reflect and review your progress after each experiment. You’ll have more success accessing your new mindsets and processes and throwing aside unhelpful old patterns if you create new neural pathways through experience.3. Your attachments to mindsets and worldviews. All of us have mindsets and worldviews—each composed of thoughts, physiology, and feelings—that form our senses of self. Some identities or mindsets are tricky to abandon, and many people find it challenging to reframe their self-perceptions.For example, I coached an Army veteran who was attached to being seen as tough. When we examined his perspective that toughness was crucial for getting results, he clung to the familiarity of that mindset.How can you break free? First, look at the costs versus the benefits of your worldview. In the veteran’s case, the benefit was accomplishing tasks, but the cost was upsetting his coworkers and stunting his long-term productivity. Next, test your assumptions against your real-life experiments with the new mindset. The veteran began with an experiment in listening before offering directions and observed the results.Finally, preserve what’s useful about that original mindset or identity. You’ll never completely shed it, but you can find ways to be more flexible and introduce choice into how you exercise your old mindset or identity.4. Your attitude toward learning. One significant barrier to experimenting, learning, and developing a growth mindset is a fixed mindset or fear of failure. That’s why it’s crucial to foster a love of learning, so you can build the resilience to dust yourself off each time you fail.This means silencing negative self-talk when you fail or preventing a lack of confidence from derailing you. Exercise self-compassion and embrace the mindset that learning is an adventure. Think about your current attitude toward learning and the healthy mindsets that you can adopt to propel you forward.Notice when you find yourself saying, “I can’t,” “It’s pointless to . . . ” or “This won’t work.” Tap into your realist perspective to clean your viewing lens. As with the client who saw her boss’s raised eyebrow as a sign he thought she was incompetent, work on separating what’s happening in your head with what’s happening in reality. Interrogate each assumption, reconnect to the feeling of competence and confidence, and ask yourself how you respond to circumstances resourcefully, or with an outside-the-box mindset.

Change won’t be instantaneous, but practice allows you to access new mindsets and skills that remove the barriers hindering your advancement, and in turn, help you reach new levels of mastery.

This article was originally published by Glassdoor for Employers here.

As COVID-19 continues to spread, business leaders are laser-focused on safety. That means postponing or canceling travel, sending employees home to work remotely, and even closing their doors when no other options remain. We’re already seeing a spike in layoffs for companies that are losing too much revenue to keep all of their employees on payroll.

Although business will eventually return to normal — or at least some new version of normal — it could take over a year. When it does, leaders will face the reality of a tougher marketplace, more demanding clients, and the need to innovate relentlessly. Likewise, employees will have survived layoffs, illness, and disruptions at work. In order to prepare for the future, forward-thinking companies should double down on their investment in employee development by taking a significant chunk of development efforts virtual now to improve morale.

Offering remote learning opportunities, particularly when employees are isolated in their homes, demonstrates a tangible commitment to employee development that won’t go unnoticed. An overwhelming 94% of workers know how vital continued learning is for their careers, but nearly half (49%) say they don’t have time to do it at work (Source: LinkedIn, “2020 Workplace Learning Report”). By implementing virtual and digital learning while COVID-19 brings normal operations to a halt, leaders can invest in employees and lay the foundation for better retention and stronger operations at the same time.

Make Virtual Normal

Even as significant portions of the workforce perform their jobs from home, virtual learning remains a largely untapped opportunity. Remote development initiatives are an investment in your workforce that can keep people aligned despite the distance between them. These opportunities can also teach learners how to lead through uncertainty and change during difficult times.

Virtual learning can be amazing (just as in-person learning can) — but in ways that are perhaps surprising. It allows people to learn how they learn best: together. Virtual sessions allow for on-point, focused facilitation that can adapt to feedback in real time. They’re also asset-light and easy to schedule, meaning you don’t need to find a physical space or worry about having uncomfortable chairs. Besides this, using virtual classroom technology and other digital tools also helps people become more proficient in tech.

To create effective virtual learning programs, follow these key steps:

1. Start at the top. To normalize virtual learning, get your company leaders on board first. You’ll benefit from broader buy-in if the CEO and the rest of the executive team actively participate in (and preferably lead) some of your virtual learning programs and alignment or change initiatives. It will also help if these individuals leave their professional personas at the door and demonstrate relatable qualities such as vulnerability and authenticity. And because much of the learning will take place in the flow of work, having leaders as teachers will help enable, engage, and align people more effectively in moments of need.

2. Add interactive elements. If sitting through a lecture is challenging in person, it’s exponentially more difficult when your team is doing remote learning on the living room sofa. To hold people’s attention, limit presentations to 30 minutes or less and add interactive elements such as simulations, exercises, and practices. Engage people and offer immediate feedback based on their decisions to keep them interested.

3. Use data to target pivotal needs. This certainly applies not just to virtual learning, but also to any learning. In challenging times, however, less can be more. Virtual and digital learning allow you to target the most crucial needs for the day. And because virtual learning sessions are generally shorter than classroom workshops, they allow for greater focus on the concepts or skills that are useful in moments of need.

Tests or assessments can reveal where your people excel and where they need more practice. As people are working more remotely, collecting this data now is more critical than ever. It’s a means to improve and personalize the journey for people and make your virtual initiatives more effective.

4. Preserve a human touch. Virtual development can feel decidedly disconnected, particularly for first-time practitioners. The good news? It doesn’t have to. Lean on coaches and subject matter experts to lead virtual learning sessions, and offer virtual office hours that empower your team to go the extra mile and seek more information. Create portals with social features or, even better, use team collaboration tools such as Slack that allow people to ask questions, share content, and interact with one another instantly from any location.

5. Reimagine the experience. Implementing a virtual learning program doesn’t mean simply taking an analog program and digitizing it. Reimagine virtual experiences using design thinking, and employ digital experiences and tools when design and outcomes call for it.

Just consider exercises normally done with flip charts and sticky notes by teams in physical classrooms. These exercises can easily be done with common tools we use on our computers every day in ways that make team readouts even easier in the virtual classroom. Or, you could use digital crowdsourcing tools to instantly aggregate all teams’ work and make it better by allowing peers to rate that work and comment to identify agreed outcomes or better solutions to problems. By reimagining the experience, you won’t just have an effective session — you’ll also come away with an incredible amount of information that informs future successes.

Virtual learning and development initiatives can help busy employees better themselves whenever and wherever it’s convenient. This motivates them when morale would otherwise sink, particularly during stressful times when they’re working remotely and away from colleagues. Development opportunities are always important, but this pandemic should spur companies to implement these initiatives now while face-to-face learning is impractical. Those that do will reap the benefits long after we’ve emerged from this crisis situation.

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This article was originally published in Sales & Marketing Management here.

It’s not enough to prepare for a sales call with general industry knowledge. Sellers need business acumen: a customer-specific grasp of business objectives and the metrics a customer uses to measure success.

Sellers need these insights in order to be agile in conversation and adjust their talking points as needed to address the motivations of different executives. That’s how they can position themselves — and the companies they work for — as true partners in success.

As it stands, only 20% of salespeople are prepared to offer any real value during a sales call. For sales leaders, it’s essential to develop their teams’ business acumen so that sellers are equipped to develop ongoing relationships with customers.

Customer-Centric Sales

Business acumen brings credibility. A seller who can range around in a conversation, listening for cues to shift to different business priorities and genuinely landing on the executive’s radar, will be invited back for further meetings.

This savvy also allows sellers to engage around the entire sales cycle and open up opportunities throughout. When sellers can see things from a customer’s perspective, they become trusted advisors.

Sales leaders can build their teams’ business acumen by facilitating the following steps:

1. Gather deep industry knowledge.

It’s not enough to have company-specific information; sellers need a working knowledge of their customers’ industries as well. It goes beyond “show me you know me” to being able to demonstrate exactly how a product or service will benefit a business — or, more to the point, the person seated across the table or fielding the call.

Sellers need to gather in-depth information about prospects and customers. Hit up social channels, read their 10-Ks, and keep up with industry press to know what’s going on right now: What are prospects’ recent struggles? Successes? Competitors? Customers they serve? What are the personas and demographics? All this information can provide context, allowing the seller to speak directly to prospects’ pain points and develop custom solutions for their businesses.

2. Develop the skills to secure a meeting.

Of all the skills to master as salespeople, getting introductions tops the list. In fact, 70% of customers value “connected processes” — contextualized engagements. Think of it as a seamless hand-off between a person in the seller’s network and a decision maker at a company.

Introductions entail more than the introduction itself. They also involve a strong point of view and the right questions to ask so that the customer executives open up about their businesses. It’s all about being relevant and bringing value to the conversation.

‍Related Post: 4 Ways to Help Your Salesforce Excel

3. Understand customers’ metrics.

Many salespeople enter the room with some understanding of a customer’s business challenges. Not as many come in with knowledge around the financials, initiatives, and KPIs used to measure success. Knowing how an executive will measure success lets a seller speak to those points specifically.

The seller must focus on the customer by offering assistance, following up regularly, and even helping to strategize next steps. The goal here is to ensure that the customers adopt the company’s products or services and see its business value. After all, their success will encourage additional purchases and a stream of revenue over time.

‍Related Post: How to Lead High Value Meetings with Senior Executives

4. Pair the offer with the value proposition.

Sellers need to have an offer that’s helpful or valuable. They need to know the products or services that will address the customer’s business challenges.

These discussions should carry over into training and enablement. One way to prepare sellers is through simulations, which let customer-facing teams immerse themselves in a customer’s challenges. Being on the inside of a business allows sellers to become more intuitive and develop custom solutions for current customers. And practice, whether with a seller’s manager or a professional coach, helps sellers to develop confidence in a safe environment.

‍Business acumen opens up the playing field for sellers, whether that’s through a new opportunity, greater customer success, or increased influence with a different executive within the customer’s business. Conversational agility and opportunity will give sellers the consultative skills that foster successful relationships.

Originally published in CEOWORLD Magazine.

Most Millennials might not have been working during the last recession, but they’ve grown up feeling its effects.

Now, they’re standing on the edge of another huge economic slump — only this time, they’re shouldering a lot more responsibility.The COVID-19 crisis is impacting every industry, and it will transform the way we work for months — maybe even years. Your Millennial employees are likely feeling uneasy and looking to leaders to help them ride out the storm. Will you be there for them?

Why Millennial Workers Are on Edge

Due to the last economic downturn, this generation is already living in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous situation (often abbreviated as VUCA). A recession will certainly amplify all of those elements.We’re talking about a generation that has already found itself in tough times financially compared to its parent’s generation. Many Millennials are probably doing well enough on their own; they have a decent job, pay the bills, and live somewhere comfortably. But they’re surviving paycheck to paycheck and are unable to put much toward savings. Plus, most Millennials have less than $5,000 in backup funds — so if their income stops flowing, they won’t make it far.Financial struggles aren’t the only burden Millennials have to bear during the COVID-19 crisis. Their physical well-being is at risk, too. Although the disease appears to impact older people most severely, it can certainly be serious among young people as well. This is especially true considering Millennials have seen increased rates of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and even some cancers.Reactions to crises are also likely to be more intense with this generation considering that mental health conditions are more prevalent among it. Existing anxiety disorders and depression can worsen at this time, as can general feelings of loneliness and social isolation.All of these factors — exacerbated by the extraordinary new stresses of life in a pandemic — could leave your Millennial employees vulnerable to increased anxiety and uncertainty.

How to Help Your Millennial Employees Develop Resilience

You can’t fix your Millennial employees’ financial health, give them better immune systems, or cure their mental illnesses. But you can offer them at least one helpful skill: resilience. This is crucial for not just getting through times of crisis, but also being at our best when it’s most needed.Here are just a few starting points for caring employers to start cultivating a culture of resilience that will help their Millennial cohorts survive and thrive in this new climate.1. Balance emotion and reason. Anxiety can soar when emotions exceed reasoning. Balancing emotional empathy with a rational discussion about problems and solutions will be key to reassuring and empowering Millennial employees. Leaders who put people first and lead with purpose will help employees find the right balance. Don’t ignore your employees’ emotions — showing empathy and care can help individuals and teams increase performance.2. Help employees overcome triggers and negative self-talk. Another way to help employees gain better resilience is to help them compare emotions to truth. We teach employees a method called ETC (or emotion, truth, choice) to do this.First, recognize what you’re feeling: What am I feeling, and what is my self-talk like at this moment? Then, assess the reality of the situation: What is the truth at this moment? After that, evaluate the answers to those two questions to make the best choice: What are my options, and which decision is best? This process helps us get out of reactive patterns and gives us the capacity to choose our response.3. Start future-storming. Tomorrow will be different than today. And smart people will struggle to see the future for themselves because of practical, present-day biases that anchor them to the present. We’ve moved from what was merely a VUCA environment to a time where disruptions come with unprecedented speed and impact: In other words, what seemed unthinkable three weeks back is now normal.All of this means it’s time to future-storm. Today, set time aside to unpack the trends buffeting and accelerating our world, consider how they interact with each other, and reveal the possible scenarios in the future that might matter to your business. These processes can be liberating, and they help us lift our gaze and see opportunity when situations feel grim. Doing this activity as a team should make you all feel more equipped to face the challenges ahead and identify opportunities that might not be obvious.4. Create a playbook. You can tell your employees that you’re dedicated to helping them ride out the storm, and that might provide them momentary comfort. But to keep them feeling confident amid uncertainty, give them a list of actions you’re going to try and resources you’re going to provide. Set these moves out now so you don’t scramble to build a resilience playbook once another crisis strikes.

Your Millennial employees might look like they’ve got it together, but they’re going to be some of the most vulnerable workers in our society over the coming months. You can’t fix everything for them, but you can give them a gift that keeps on giving. Help your younger workers to grow more resilient with you, and you’ll keep them thriving now and into the future.

There is a famous quote by Verna Myers, a leading diversity and inclusion expert that says, “Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance.”

We’d go one step further. If diversity is being invited to the party, and inclusion means being asked to dance, then belonging is being asked for input into the playlist for the dance music and feeling free to ask anyone you want to dance with you. And even more importantly, that next step to belonging is not just a nice thing to have, it’s where you start to get real benefit when it comes to team and business performance.

Being invited or being asked to dance assumes a one-way power relationship. The person has to be invited by someone else. The person has to be asked to dance by someone else.  You may be included, but someone else has the decision rights on whether that will happen. There is no assumption of a two-way, reciprocal relationship. You have to wait to be asked. You have to wait your turn.

On the other hand, belonging, at least the way we define it at Bates, assumes a two-way or reciprocal relationship. You don’t have to wait for someone to ask you to dance. You can determine who you dance with. You have as much a right to influence the playlist as anyone else – even if your music choices might be different than anyone else’s. You are not only accepted for who you are, you are expected to be who you are.

There are significant differences between being included and feeling like you belong, and those differences matter.

At BTS, we have done a great deal of research on belonging. In fact, it is one of our 15 facets in our team assessment, the LTPI™. Two of the items in the Belonging facet are:

• Team members actively solicit and respect each other's ideas and views.
• The team ensures everyone has the opportunity to participate.

For us, belonging isn’t just “having a seat at the table” (another metaphor for inclusion). Too often a seat at the table also means to “sit in or stay in your place.” Belonging is about having a legitimate, respected voice at the table. It is about team members having mutual accountability to make sure everyone’s views are heard and debated. The “table” is a place for everyone to actively exchange and debate ideas, not just a place to sit. And it is everyone’s responsibility to make sure everyone feels like they belong.

‍Getting Belonging Right

‍Unfortunately, there are numerous misperceptions about belonging, misperceptions that can make the difference in creating a high performing environment. For example, one recent article states that people feel they belong, “When sitting at the table, you see and hear people like you.” No!  If you look around the table and everyone is “like you”, you are probably in a highly homogenous group. It is easy to feel like you belong if everyone is the same.

What teams and organizations need to work on is making everyone feel like they belong when they are part of diverse teams. Research has shown that diverse teams are more innovative and productive precisely because of the different points of view people bring to the table. To innovate you need to encourage the expression of differences. If you look around and everyone is like you, chances are everyone will have the same point of view, making it more difficult to come up with innovative ideas.

To feel you belong does not mean you fit in because you are just like everyone else. It means you fit in because your uniqueness is part of what makes the team more effective as a whole. At Bates, we firmly believe that a high performing team sets free the genius of its members to create the extraordinary together. In fact, that is our definition of a high performing team.

As a leader, you must set free the unique gifts everyone can contribute. That is when everyone feels they belong.

‍What Leaders Can Do

‍The main thing is to make belonging a regular topic to discuss as a team.

For example, if you use Slack or some other instant messaging platform, periodically send out a brief 2 or 3 item survey asking people how they feel about issues such as:

• Your ideas being respected in team discussion
• Your ideas being solicited in team discussions
• Being comfortable being their authentic self

No need for long answers. Maybe their answers are limited to J, K, or L. Keep it simple and easy to respond. The goal is to then use the responses as a basis for a discussion.

Is there a variation in answers? If so, what does this mean? If not, what is the team doing right they need to keep on doing?

Remember, the goal is to make sure all team members feel they belong, and not just that they are included. You want to support people in expressing their different points of view. You want team members to get up and dance and not wait to be asked.

As the on-going coronavirus crisis has shifted our interactions to video meetings, leaders we work with have become increasingly aware that how we appear on screen can have a significant impact on our presence. The BBC interview video that went viral a couple of years ago vividly, humorously, and memorably illustrated the consequences of not managing your surroundings when you’re on camera.So how can we improve the way we show up on video? Here are five guidelines to quickly upgrade your presence on video. To help remember them, think about being aware of your “FIELD of vision” on video.

Frame

Most people tend to sit too far from the camera which makes it difficult for people to see your expression. Adjust your camera so that your head and shoulders fill most of the frame. At the top of the frame, it should appear that there’s about an inch of space above your head, and the bottom of the frame should be below your shoulders at your armpits. A good model is television news anchors.Also, consider what’s in the background. It’s fine to have a couple personal items in view but eliminate anything in the background that could be distracting. You want others on the video call to pay attention to you, not to the knickknacks behind you. Avoid eliminating everything from view. You can also try using a neutral virtual background but be aware that parts of your image may flicker as the system works to hide what’s behind you.

Images

To help you make appropriate eye contact with other meeting participants, position their images near your camera so that when you look at them, you will also appear to look into the camera lens. Also, many video platforms allow you to “stop self-view,” which will remove your image from your display while still allowing others to see you. Since we naturally are drawn to look at ourselves, removing this distraction will help you maintain appropriate eye contact. And, appropriate eye contact doesn’t mean you have to stare fixedly at the camera the entire time. We don’t maintain eye contact that way in person. Be aware that to look at others on the call, you must look at the camera, not at their image.

Elevation

One of the easiest improvements comes from raising the camera to eye-level by putting your laptop on a stand or a couple of books. A low camera angle aimed up at your face will draw attention to your nose and chin rather than your eyes. Position the camera so you are looking straight ahead, not down at the table.

Light

If your face is unevenly lit, the shadows will distract others. A light source in front of you such as from a window or a lamp will be the most flattering. One option we recommend is to mount a “ring light” around the camera of your laptop or other device. These are very inexpensive and easy to install and are being used by professionals including television commentators to illuminate themselves on camera.Also be aware of lighting behind you. If there’s a strong light source such as a window or ceiling fixture behind you, your face will become a silhouette as the camera tries to compensate for the brightness. On the other hand, if the background is completely black, such as in a basement office, that is also distracting because you’ll appear to be floating in a void.

Distance

This is the flip side of sitting too far from the camera. People sometimes forget the camera and lean in to scrutinize something on the screen, such as small text on a slide. Others on the call will see your forehead looming into view, an image that is unflattering, conveys inexperience, and undercuts your credibility. If something is difficult to read, ask the presenter to increase the image size.Following this handful of guidelines will greatly improve perceptions of your leadership presence in video meetings which are likely to be a large part of our work lives for the foreseeable future.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN and SAN FRANCISCO, CA – BTS GROUP AB (publ), a world-leading strategy implementation firm, was recently included in RBC Capital Markets Newsletter. Recognized for its innovative response to the COVID-19 crisis, BTS was featured in the Newsletter's key innovation update. BTS has continued to provide value for its clients throughout the crisis by shifting to fully virtual and digital delivery solutions, allowing clients to experience the deeply contextual, high-impact solutions they expect while staying safe at home.The excerpt below is taken directly from RBC Capital Markets newsletter and describes the scope of BTS' work and shift amidst the crisis.

"Key Innovation Update: BTS

Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, BTS, a leading global professional services firm focused on the people side of strategy, has shifted to fully virtual delivery solutions to provide clients with the world-class learning programs remotely. To support clients during this challenging time:

• BTS has created a resource center called Readiness, Execution, and Development (R.E.D.) Virtual to help clients navigate how to keep their business moving forward safely. These tools help clients to protect their people and powerful alignment off sites, practice the plan, strengthen their leadership culture, stay close and adapt with their customers, turn downtime into upskill time, and make the most of their current situation
• BTS is also offering a free employee-screening tool for emergency, relief, and essential businesses that are hiring in large quantities as a result of COVID-19. BTS is offering two tests, one for front-line contributors and another for supervisors, which leverages BTS’ 30+ years of employment screening expertise to provide free selection services for organizations in need
• BTS’ virtual offerings span from culture-shifting change and transformation programs to coaching, assessments for selection and development, and digital business simulations and application tools enabling leadership development, business acumen, innovation, and sales training

To learn more about R.E.D. Virtual, click here. For more on BTS’ free employee-screening tool, click here."

To read the full newsletter, subscribe to RBC Capital Markets Newsletter here.

About RBC Capital Markets

RBC Capital Markets is part of a leading provider of financial services, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). Operating since 1869, RBC is one of the largest banks in the world and the fifth largest in North America, as measured by market capitalization. With a strong capital base and consistent financial performance, RBC is among a small group of highly rated global banks.

Based on unmet need and inbound physician inquiries, your team has decided to launch a new biopharmaceutical right now - during a pandemic. With a different molecule or indication, you may have made a different decision. But given your current circumstances, you have decided to move forward with launch.So, what’s next? How do you do it? What is different from a typical launch provided the current environment and projections over the next three to twelve months?To be successful, you’ll need to create a flexible launch plan that is adaptable to changing market scenarios. As part of the plan, you’ll need to redefine your customer segmentation, which includes public health and economic factors; create new marketing resources that reflect an entirely virtual customer and patient journey; rapidly upskill your field team on virtual engagement skills; and run virtual launch meetings that effectively drive outcomes despite constraints.

A Launch Plan that Adjusts to Market and Public Health Triggers

While you’ve decided to move ahead with the launch, your execution plan should anticipate new developments in the healthcare ecosystem and remain agile to respond to those scenarios. First, you’ll need to identify these scenarios and the appropriate responses. To do this, war game various economic and public health conditions with your cross-functional team to determine how to move forward within different possible operating environments.Data from past launches will likely hold little insight into your upcoming launch, and there will be a paucity of reliable data for some time. As a result, your war gaming models will likely need to rely on “what-if” analyses grounded in the shared expertise of your team. General economic forecasts and the epidemiological model of your choice can provide a firm starting place but should include outlier scenarios to provoke your launch team’s best thinking.Based on this scenario planning, you can then identify alternative launch plans that can be implemented based on external triggers. This gives your team the flexibility to operate under ongoing uncertainty and alignment on what to do in each scenario.

Reprioritize Regions, Accounts and Customers Based on Economic and Public Health Factors

Given your launch plan, your sales team will need to re-segment their customer base to include factors beyond the appropriate patient population, coverage and prescriber affinity. New factors to include will be Covid-19 cases within a territory, cases within an account, the effect of the pandemic on physician load (depending on specialty they may be experiencing a surge or lack of patients), unemployment claims within territory (coverage changes will reduce new patient starts and adherence), and virtual access to prescribers.This reprioritization could lead to a wholly different initial focus for your field organization, potentially away from academic institutions and toward community-based clinics. Physicians and patients alike may be quickly moving to lower-risk treatment locations.

Redesign Marketing for Entirely Virtual Customer and Patient Journeys

The status quo approach to designing physical core sales aids and leave behinds needs to be completely replaced by digital assets and messaging. The first step is rapidly translating existing assets to virtual and gaining approval for electronic dissemination. However, your marketers will also need to rethink their approach and create “digital first” assets to support your field team.On the consumer and patient side, they will have limited access to their clinicians and thus will turn to online resources and education more than ever before. Your patient-facing teams will need to meet that upswell of demand with new and engaging resources that move them along their patient journey.KOL and Speaker Bureau engagement will also need to become digital, providing opportunities to engage during live sessions, connect with peers, and share insights firsthand—potentially allowing for real world data capture.

Rapidly Build Your Field Team Members’ Virtual Engagement Capability

Field team members, from salespeople to account management, medical affairs, patient advocacy, and field reimbursement, are highly skilled in face to face interactions. Given the nature of their roles, their technical proficiency often lags behind that of home office employees. They will need to be rapidly upskilled on first the basics of using virtual communications platforms like Zoom, Veeva Engage, and Google Meet, as well as the key differences between physical and virtual interactions.Next, they will need to begin building the capabilities to change provider behavior using communication platforms and the new interactive tools being created by marketing. Optimal use of these tools will allow for the capture of real time data, providing insights to help marketing be more agile.This upskilling can happen mostly asynchronously, through peer collaboration and with coaching from your existing field training team. Successful field adoption will be a factor of execution tools that are easy to digest, readily on-demand, and emphasize practice and outcomes.

Virtual Launch Meetings that Drive Impact

The best face to face launch meetings convey best practices and ideas to the field team, allow for opportunities for deep practice, and create a sense of purpose and teamwork on behalf of patients. The best virtual launch meetings can do this too—but with new constraints and opportunities. With much of your field team responsible for caregiving demands at home, there is no need for launch meetings to be six hours a day for four days in a row. In fact, for many people, that is impossible while children are out of school.With diminishing returns and screen fatigue, it’s important to experiment with the structure, duration, and modality of these virtual gatherings. Maintain enthusiasm throughout the meeting by keeping days shorter. Prioritize personal application time and small work groups.Beyond the agenda, new virtual platforms allow for peer best practice sharing, foster interaction through polling and live Q&A, and replicate the practice sessions that keep the commercial team engaged and energized.Create a wraparound experience by sending branded swag ahead of time and providing meal delivery during the event. Set aside time for carefully designed virtual networking to encourage new connections and organic relationship building. Done well, virtual launch meetings can educate, upskill and motivate your team in different but equally effective way as the face to face meetings of the past.

Launch and Learn Fast

Thousands of people’s efforts and expertise go into launching a pharmaceutical product, and it’s hard to get it right during the best of times. During the Covid-19 era, you’ll be prepared to succeed by creating a flexible launch plan that shifts based on market and public health conditions; reprioritizes regions, accounts and customers based on new economic and pandemic related factors; encourages your marketing team to innovate on their digital approach; gets the field ready to engage virtually; and drives results through a wholly new approach to virtual launch meetings.These are some things you can plan and predict. Once you begin to engage customers, your initial meetings will be fact finding missions that should inform your approach as fast as possible. Expect to be wrong about the future fairly often. It’s always an honor to serve patients, and during this ongoing public health crisis, this is truer than ever, and the stakes are even higher. Stay humble, be prepared to be wrong, and get ready to learn fast.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for everyone, but as advisors to organizations undergoing tremendous change, professional services firms are being uniquely impacted by the crisis. Through managing existing relationships and projects, consultants have a front row seat watching their clients’ businesses transform - priorities are constantly shifting, decision making teams are changing and new business models are emerging. At the same time, the firm’s own business models are under pressure to evolve. Working in this new reality isn’t easy, and leaders need to take action to help their consultants thrive.

There are five major challenges consultants need to overcome – here’s how you as a leader can help.

Challenge 1: Confusion and uncertainty

Consultants are feeling unsure of how to deal with clients and projects, how they can keep adding value, how long the crisis will last, and what the long-term impact will be on their clients. They are also uncertain about the firm’s future. Will the principles of the past still hold as the services, delivery mechanisms, and success measures are all shifting? This confusion and uncertainty will reduce consultants’ productivity by clouding their thinking and slowing decision making.

‍Leader’s call to action: Plan for the business whilst focusing on the team

One of the first things you need to do as a leader is come up with a business plan that has clear indicators of success – this will give each person on your team a sense of control, focus, and empowerment. Make sure the indicators are adapted to the current environment, and that it is obvious to the entire team how they can achieve results. Each person’s priorities and actions should be fully transparent. In addition, highlight the team’s collective power as a driving force. Make sure to focus on team success (using team objectives) so that your people shift their perspective from the individual to the team. Having a destination and clear measures of success creates a more positive environment, a stronger team, and provides a counter voice to negative self-talk.

Challenge 2: Magnification

One effect of the crisis is heightened emotions that are more sensitive to triggers. As emails from colleagues, leaders or clients come in or changes in ways of working are established, it is as if everything is happening under a magnifying glass. The implications of the smallest change given the circumstances can feel huge for a consultant. Moments of crisis also increase the tendency to read more into the negative aspects of any situation. As such, consultants will develop a mindset of always preparing for the worst, which impacts their overall wellbeing, productivity and teamwork.

‍Leader’s call to action: Constantly provide perspective

Assuming your team will view all changes in a negative light, help them look at the situations and events through a more objective lens and challenge their reactions. Doing so in a calm and objective manner will also demonstrate that things are under control. In addition, authentically focusing on the positive aspects of the change or some uplifting news will help balance out the negative thoughts and maintain productivity.

Challenge 3: Lower confidence

As client demand for current projects decreases and new projects aren’t being funded, consultants will start to doubt their abilities. They will feel uncertain about the value they bring to clients and the firm. They will question their judgement, actions and ultimately if they are fit for the job. These doubts reduce confidence, which will impact consultants’ work and potentially create a negative spiral where these concerns become reality.

‍Leader’s call to action: Double down on recognition

When consultants start having doubts as to their performance and worth, leaders need to show empathy and provide recognition. Great leaders demonstrate an understanding of the situation and reward the right behaviors and actions. While the bottom line is likely not to be as expected, you should make sure to reward smaller successes along the way. Research shows that focusing on gaps often feeds negative spiraling while rewarding progress helps everyone to stay the path.

Challenge 4: Frustration and lack of patience

Whilst traditional work slows down and client responses are delayed, paradoxically the number of internal meetings increases. This dramatically changes the way work gets done and exponentially increases the need for proactive relationship management as well as investing time to upskill and learn the new ways of working. While the amount of work is way higher, the outcomes are not comparable. This effort to results ratio can fuel consultants’ feelings of frustration. Consultants will start to look at this paradox and convince themselves that this is a sign of errant strategy or actions. They will lose patience and therefore decrease the discretionary effort they put into their work.

‍Leader’s call to action: Provide Reassurance and wisdom

‍Leaders need to help their people to understand that patience is a key success factor amidst change. While day-to-day frustrations are possible, perhaps even likely, your people will need to be reminded that dealing with frustration can be part of the job and that the particular frustrating aspects of today’s circumstances will not exist in the future. Leaders also need to be honest about their mistakes and any changes to the plan. It is critical for leaders to role model the behaviors they want their consultants to emulate and demonstrate that they themselves are patient and are listening whilst ready to take decisive action when necessary.

Challenge 5: Exhaustion

In a crisis, consultants are under high amounts of stress and often lose sleep. They lose their ability to refresh and recharge the mind and body. Ultimately, exhaustion clouds their thinking and weakens their immune systems – something that is critical to avoid during these times.

‍Leader’s call to action: Energize by providing inspiration

‍Leaders need to provide their consultants with inspiration. Celebrating achievements, developing the right culture, and role modeling self-care are the best ways to boost the team’s energy. In moments of crisis it is too tempting for leaders to work themselves to exhaustion. While done with the best intentions, you are demonstrating to consultants that this is the expected behavior, which will ultimately result in reduced productivity. To keep consultants inspired and engaged, model the behavior you want them to embody in your daily actions, rather than organizing lots of all-hands meetings that fill up people’s calendars.

Maintaining a completely positive mindset through crisis is impossible, however, leaders in professional service firms must focus on helping their teams decrease the moments of negativity, lower confidence and frustration. Doing so requires a strong focus on empathy and paving a vision for the success forward. As stated by Napoleon, “A leader is a dealer in hope.”

During this strange period of isolation, both leaders and individual contributors alike have experienced significant challenges affecting the way they work and connect with their teams.

While terms like “remote employees” and “virtual teams” were commonplace before the crisis, COVID-19’s impact on the workplace has expanded their meaning exponentially. This new reality has accelerated three major trends for individual contributors and three additional trends for leaders that will substantially impact the future of work as the world moves out of the crisis.

Three trends amplified by COVID: For individual contributors

1. Technological proficiency is requisite for success.‍

While the ability to comfortably navigate new technology has long been a core requirement in the workplace, COVID has made this skill imperative. Workers must now fully embrace new hardware and software tools as the primary conduit for connection, communication, collaboration, productivity and value creation. Anyone still dragging their feet and using workarounds to camouflage a lack of proficiency with new technology will struggle even after organizations return to a physical workplace.

2. “Adapt or die” is the critical mindset to embrace.

For years, leaders have been talking about being “agile” – agile projects, agile leadership, agile strategy, the list goes on. Now that agility has been called into question, and people who can thrive in this way of thinking and working will be highly valued. This divide is already apparent. Those rapidly adapting and prototyping new ideas are seeing success, while those that are waiting or hoping for things to simply “go back to the way they were” are getting left behind. To be successful in today’s environment and into the future, individual contributors must be able to shift quickly to new roles, projects, teams, or wherever the business needs them most.

3. Personal lives and work lives have never been more intertwined.

Many people have had to adapt to a new working environment – home. It is now commonplace to see people’s children (who have also been challenged to adapt) on video conferences, or hear dogs barking on conference calls. Spouses and partners have had to learn how to juggle parenting responsibilities while making time for video calls. In a post COVID environment, more workers will continue to work from home, enjoying the reduced commute and travel times they experienced during the crisis. Corporations will encourage this, as the productivity gains and cost savings will entice them to limit office investment and support funding workers’ home offices. As offices reopen, the ability to manage work life-personal life integration will continue to be a necessary skill.

Overall, success for both leaders and individual contributors during this time depends on their ability to embrace new technologies, willingness to adapt to change, and ability to smoothly integrate personal life and work life.

Three trends amplified by COVID: For leaders

Beyond these skills, leaders within large organizations also need to be aware of the following:

1. Empathy is now more important than ever.

Empathy, defined as the core ability to understand the feelings of others, has become fundamental during this challenging time. Leaders must understand their peoples’ personal context – their health, the safety of their family and friends, and their current mental state – before engaging them with work expectations. The immediacy of this skill will subside eventually, but moving forward, leaders will be expected to continue to consistently lead with empathy. The prolonged and persistent impact of COVID on everyone’s families, fortunes and work routines will demand that leaders demonstrate an authentic concern for their people’s well-being as well as their productivity. At the same time, leaders are still responsible for delivering business results through their people and teams. Thus…

2. Providing effective feedback is fundamental for success.

While crucial before the crisis, without the everyday, informal communication that occurs in the physical workplace, the quality and the frequency of feedback has become even more important. In the current remote environment, people are experiencing fewer social interactions than ever before. This isolation tends to breed anxiety, which can lead to feelings of insecurity. As such, employees will need more feedback on their work – both congratulatory and constructive – to build and maintain their confidence and sense of purpose. Over time, individual contributors will become accustomed to more frequent, meaningful communication, and once the crisis is over, leaders who fail to deliver this will lose the engagement and trust of their teams.

3. Quality communication is key.

Today’s leaders need to be excellent communicators, regardless of the medium. COVID has challenged leaders to be more adept at using technology like Zoom and Slack, but mastering the art of communication is omnipresent. Experts agree that technology, social media, the increased volume of data and data sources have diminished peoples’ attention spans. So now, as leaders are being challenged to share complex concepts through virtual methods, the ability to articulate clearly and concisely in a compelling way that influences others has become table stakes. The need for effective communication through spoken and written word was already important before COVID, but the crisis has augmented this requirement substantially.

In essence, leaders that currently excel – those who demonstrate empathy while still holding people accountable for performance, and communicate complex ideas in a clear and compelling way – will continue to do so in the post-COVID workplace. If you’re a leader struggling to lead your team during this challenging time, consider shifting your approach to embrace these behaviors; they will allow you to engender the highest levels of trust, attract and retain the best talent, and deliver results more consistently, today and in the future.

High value skills in a post-COVID 19 world

For individual contributors

• Proactive adoption of technology
• Adaptation to Change
• Successful Integration of Work and Personal Life

For leaders

• Demonstration of Empathy
• Higher Quality and Volume of Feedback
• Ability to Communicate Complex Ideas Clearly

We created the BTS Sales Index to give a simple and easy-to-understand predictive monthly metric that gives enterprise leaders the right vantage point by which to view their critical business decisions.

BTS Sales Index May 2020 Update

-4.3

BTS Sales Index May 2020:

108.8 (-3.8%)

April 2020* in the Economy

• Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 decreased from $3.519 trillion in March to $3.384 in April, declining by $135 billion
• The US economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April, the largest decline by far since tracking began in 1939
• The unemployment rate jumped more than 10 percent in one month to 14.7 percent, also setting an unprecedented high since the Department of Labor started recording the data 72 years ago
• These job numbers do not include independent contractors, such as Lyft drivers, so the 14.7 percent unemployment rate most likely undercuts the number of jobless Americans
• With air travel down 95 percent year over year, oil and gas companies are cutting up to 30 percent of capital spending globally
• The now 23.1 million people unemployed are largely due to local governments placing restrictions on what businesses could be open, with about 60% of the economy remaining under stay-at-home orders

*the May update is reflective of April 2020 data

Why

Line of business and sales leaders tasked with making strategic decisions don’t have a good measure of confidence when deciding to ramp up production or invest in customer relationships. Quarterly GDP numbers and the S&P 500 paint two different pictures of economic performance, the former too slow to incorporate new data and the latter too likely to overreact to investor sentiment.

We created the BTS Sales Index to give a simple and easy-to-understand predictive monthly metric that gives enterprise leaders the right vantage point by which to view their critical business decisions.

What

The BTS Sales Index represents the aggregate total revenue of the 1,000 largest publically traded companies in the US in one simple to understand number.

How

As mentioned above, the BTS Sales Index is comprised of the total revenue of the largest 1,000 publically traded companies incorporated in the US. Every month, we collect the total revenue reported by these companies and run the data through our custom-built indexing tool. The index uses the total revenue of the BTS 1,000 companies at the end of the second quarter of 2013 as its baseline because the economy showed signs of stable recovery. Unemployment was back to normal rates, housing prices remained steady, and stock prices were back to record levels.

Obviously, we are living through an extraordinary and unprecedented situation in the world today—both personally and professionally.Collectively, we are all doing our best to reimagine how we live as well as how we work. Given that the crisis has created an unimaginable level of uncertainty as well as anxiety across the globe, leaders need to be doing a good deal of soul searching about what matters most now.To that end, I’ve given much thought over the last week about what executive presence needs to look like from leaders in the face of this crisis.Over the past five years, I’ve worked with thousands of leaders on executive presence, coaching 400 or 500 of them individually after they received feedback from their manager, peers, direct reports and others on executive presence. Based on my work with these leaders and my understanding of the science behind executive presence and influence, here are the facets that leaders most need to demonstrate now—and how to make them actionable.1. ComposureThis quality reflects how much the leader is perceived as steady in a time of crisis. Basically, emotions are contagious—for better and worse!What to do now. Be “real” about the crisis—don’t downplay the reality or magnitude of it. Allow some time to check in with people about how they’re feeling today about the crisis. But then you want to make sure everyone is generating light rather than heat. Get everyone to focus on how to make course corrections: What can be done to address today’s concerns while anticipating tomorrow’s downstream consequences?2. InteractivityThe quantity and quality of two-way communication between the leader and others will be important than ever during this crisis.What to do now. You can create a greater sense of calm by ensuring that there is predictability about how and when you exchange ideas and concerns with your team. Consider announcing a more frequent cadence of meetings for the immediate future. As the news and outlook changes several times a week, make sure people aren’t left to wonder what’s happening and why. Staying in touch regularly also means that you’ll keep your finger on the pulse of what others wants and need right now.3. ResonanceWhile meeting more regularly is a great step, this crisis also means that you need to be able to dig deeply into understanding everyone’s hopes, fears, and needs.What to do now. Make a point of asking questions that surface what others are thinking, feeling, and planning to do. Failing to do so will make you run the risk of appearing “tone deaf” during a crisis. Take it a step further and pick up on the nonverbal behavior of others, as people often will show what they’re feeling before they’re willing or able to say what’s in their head or heart. If you notice body language that seems troubled or uncertain, hit the pause button and ask questions to find out what’s really going on. That‘s why video is such an advantage over a simple phone call when working remotely. More than ever, people need to know that their leaders care about how they’re doing.4. AuthenticityIn addition to being a good listener and focusing on others during a time of crisis, you need to balance that by being candid, transparent, and genuine about what you yourself share.What to do now. In the face of so much uncertainty right now, you may be tempted to “wait and see” and go silent. But if you do, the risk is that people will fill that void with their own assumptions—and those often can turn negative. This leads to more churn, distraction, and disengagement. Even when you don’t have all the answers, you need to be talking to people—sharing at least the process of what will happen even if you don’t yet have the content.5. VisionAuthenticity is strongly linked to Vision. In both cases, people need to understand the why behind the what—the intent behind the content.What to do now. With Vision, you need make that “why” come alive by telling the story of the road ahead and why everyone should feel a sense of mission and purpose about that. If you’re not sure about what that vision of the future should be, the first step may be to go on a “vision listening tour” in order to “crowdsource” ideas. Another idea would be to create a short-term vision: What do we need to focus on for the next few weeks at least? Providing clarity about what everyone’s doing and why will help keep people energized through difficult times.All 15 facets of executive presence can be valuable in a time of crisis. But for now, focus on these five qualities. If you have a strength in one of these facets, now is the time to leverage it. If one of these qualities is more difficult for you, get help from a trusted advisor, mentor, or coach to make sure it’s not a derailer during this challenging time.Above all, remember that this crisis represents not only a challenge but unique opportunity for you and your organization. By displaying these qualities, you can position your organization to find its way through a dark moment in history and move toward a brighter dawn.For more resources on leading through these unprecedented times, click here.

The word “crisis” originates from the Greek krisis, which translates, literally, as “decision.”

Even in the best of times, decision by committee rarely works. Teams endlessly debate and swirl when trying to find an outcome agreeable to everyone. During a crisis – it can not only make a tough situation even tougher, but it can hit your company’s bottom line.

Take the example of the president of a health insurer who described the challenge to us this way. He and his leadership team are finding that the timeframe they have to make critical decisions has shortened significantly. In addition to moving thousands of employees to remote work environments – leading to risks of server overload – there have been real-time, completely new decisions to be made on telehealth coverage, COVID19 claims processes, getting front-line doctors paid more quickly, assessing complicated patient cases and responding to difficult questions from clients and partners. In this environment, his leaders are working long hours and trying to do the right thing, but there has been overlap and confusion as multiple people have tried to tackle the same decisions. They are struggling to streamline the decision-making process so that they can get the right things done faster.

They, like many organizations, have defined familiar ways of making decisions and getting things done. But right now, executives trying to lead their companies through COVID19 are telling us that the biggest barrier they are running into is actually sticking to those carefully thought-out processes. There’s no clear roadmap for a global pandemic crisis. Emotions and stress levels are high, the flow of information has leaders drinking out of a fire hose, and everyone has an “expert” opinion on what the company should do.

Unless leaders decisively move things forward, you put a lot at risk:

• Losing the confidence of your leadership team, employees, and stakeholders
• Wasting valuable time that could be spent solving other problems
• Delaying manufacturing and distribution decisions that can impact company liquidity
• Pivoting the business too slowly toward innovation and growth opportunities

Company performance is largely driven by how effective leaders are at making decisions, and how nimbly they can act on them. Research done by Bain & Company found that the greatest determinant of a company’s performance is the ability of that leadership team to efficiently make critical decisions when you take into consideration the following attributes of a decision: quality (did the decision end up being the right one), speed (faster or slower than competitors), outcome (what action was taken) and effort (what resources went into making the decision).

So how can you continue to drive company performance while helping your organization adapt to the current crisis—all without losing sight of some of the fundamentals that made you successful in the first place? Here’s our list of five key steps to staying on track.

1. Decide who’s deciding.
   In a crisis, the evolving landscape may require a change in who makes the decisions and how the decisions get made. Depending on circumstances, one of four decision-making styles may be a better fit.In the midst of a crisis when leaders feel a strong need to act, many will choose to take a Command approach. This involves making a decision with little or no input from those around the table. These types of decisions result in compliance, but don’t generate much commitment. For instance, in a life-or-death situation, a leader may not have time to consult with others, or the plan of action may be clear and just needs to get started.
   
   To generate more commitment, leaders can take a Consult approach and ask for input while still maintaining ultimate decision-making authority. Getting input from others does not mean giving up decision rights. A leader may have a couple of options in mind and solicit feedback before deciding, or they may want to get additional options on the table before making the call.
   
   Leaders may want to gain even greater buy-in from those affected by sharing decision making through a Collaborate approach. The pain associated with group decision making comes from doing it poorly. When the process is well structured and the leader sets a time limit, collaborative decisions can be just as efficient as getting group feedback before the leader decides. Particularly when many people share ownership around the plan execution, this approach can help put it into action.
   
   Finally, leaders don’t have to make every decision. When taking a Constrain approach, the leader sets boundaries on decision options and leaves the deciding to others. As an example, the leader may ask the IT team to source a new platform for remote meetings within a stipulated budget and time frame, but they maintain the freedom to choose the vendor.‍
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2. Look beyond the numbers.
   It’s important to leverage data and information that is easily accessible. But during times of crisis, there can be too much intel, and not enough time to analyze it. That can leave you with analysis paralysis, and can get in the way of being quick, and being decisive. On the other hand, you don’t want to act without any basis of judgment at all—you want to take advantage of past experience and leverage your own intuition. Seasoned crisis leaders leverage what we define in the Bates ExPI^TM as Practical Wisdom – the ability to distill the most relevant information needed and anticipate the likely consequence of a decision – something that comes with having lived through catastrophe before. For instance, a leader may draw on lessons from the Great Recession around how they maintained key customer relationships as they assess options for how to reorient their priorities now.
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3. Make room for others.
   Even if you’re serving as the ultimate decision maker, it’s important you remember that you don’t know it all. Creating an environment where ideas and opinions can be raised and appreciated creates a sense of trust and belonging. COVID19 is not a crisis event. It is a crisis cycle which will likely ebb and flow in waves as the situation unfolds over time, and you need to manage engagement and productivity over the long-term. Make sure you set up a way to gather feedback and be open to reevaluating your plans and decisions as time allows.‍
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4. Check your bias at the door.
   It’s human nature for unconscious bias to sneak into our decisions. We may rely too heavily on information that validates the direction we already want to go, something known as “confirmation bias.” Or we may look for affirmation from a peer group that unconsciously practices group think and is less inclined to be open to alternative views. One good way to tackle this is to have a designated “devil’s advocate” on the crisis management team; someone whose job is to ask questions, probe for dissenting views, and generally validate that the leader has considered other perspectives.‍
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5. Communicate, communicate, communicate.
   Often, the biggest team breakdowns during a crisis are the result of misunderstandings or mismanaged expectations. If an executive team thinks they have a different role in the decision-making process or expects problems to be solved within a set timeframe – they may be frustrated, disappointed, or even hostile towards the leader when things don’t go as planned. A leader with good interpersonal skills and a clear, defined communication strategy will help keep the team aligned and focused on a common goal – serving employees, stakeholders, and the business.

A crisis can derail even the most stable and grounded leader. We hear every day from executives who feel they are spinning their wheels, overwhelmed with the pressure of looming decisions and personally emotional about the impact COVID19 is having on their companies, their families, our global community. It’s a heavy burden to carry. But this is a time to double-down on your confidence, to lead decisively, to connect with your stakeholders, to demonstrate empathy, and to focus the firm on the future – one decision at a time.

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How we think and feel personally about what is happening directly affects how we show up every day.

In challenging times like these, when the sky seems to be falling, we cannot throw in the towel and give up. It’s the very moment we are called upon to double down on what’s most important and take radical action to reconnect with resilience, kindness and courage.

Human beings are hardwired to resist uncertainty, and therefore we experience greater stress when outcomes are uncertain. Plus our new normal in working in isolation adds a new vulnerability because it compounds feelings of not knowing what is going to happen next which impacts emotional well-being.

We can boost resilience by discovering the ways that will give us the necessary oxygen so we can be present to those we love and we can lead well in our personal and professional lives. Neuroscience studies all show that sleep, nutrition, and exercise are all key wellness components that enrich how we feel. Sleep in particular resets our brain and our body’s health each day. Mindset matters as well. The narrative we are tell ourselves about a given situation has a direct correlation to our emotional and physical well-being. If we are reacting, how we respond from that mental state greatly affects those around us.

Examining those narrative stories helps shift from reactivity to resilience. Ask, “What am I feeling? What story am I telling myself? Is it true? What are the facts? What can I control? What is out of my control? What can I choose that will empower me now?” Take a pause, and breathe deeply. Deep breaths slow the heartbeat, stabilize blood pressure and lower stress. Take time to reflect on our choices and commit to the action that reconnects us to our personal power and resilience.

Most of us are busy and juggling a lot already. Then add a crisis and it’s easy to forget about our own needs. Taking care of ourselves helps us be more creative and resilient. And that is a radical act.

Resilience boosters that help you stay calm and present:

1. Play:

Play is an excellent mood booster. It promotes brain functionality, releases endorphins and improves abilities to plan, organize, relate, and regulate emotions. So goof-off and laugh.

2. Focus on gratitude:

Research says a daily gratitude practice is healthy for the mind and body. It reduces stress, helps you sleep better and gives a well-being boost.

3. Create a routine:

A routine brings a feeling of order and gives a sense of control. Set a few manageable goals as less is more. Choose a schedule tailored to your needs that works for you and your family. If you have kids in the house, plan quality time to build stronger bonds. It makes them feel more secure.

4. Virtual connection:

Reach out to people you care about. Stay close to loved ones. Call up old friends. The more we stay connected the better we will feel.

5. Keep your mind and body active:

Listen to guided meditations, play music, dance, start a new hobby, build something, or create fun workouts. Invite someone to join you.

6. Limit news consumption:

It’s important to stay up to date but limit the amount of time as news negatively impacts your well-being. It’s okay to unplug.

7. Seek support when you need it:

If you are feeling overwhelmed, reach out to someone you trust. Teleservices are also available for therapy and coaching.

8. Healthy Habits:

Eating right can boost your energy and help you sleep. Take steps to create the right conditions for you to sleep well. Sleep is the ultimate rejuvenator.

And to those who are leading teams, you’ve got double duty. Be kind, be compassionate, practice self-care, and stay-informed. We don’t know what new moments are causing our people stress so it's important not to assume what is hard for them.

Three great questions to ask: How are you doing? What do you need? What could we be doing better? Then listen, deeply.

This disruption is real and the end unknown. Let's be curious and grant each other grace to be wherever we are and make it okay to feel whatever we feel in the midst of these chaotic times.

If you ask sellers what their customers are telling them now, they’ll probably respond, “They want lower prices.” And yes, in a recessionary environment, customers will seek to cut costs wherever they can. But, unless your value proposition is to be the low-cost provider, selling on price is a bad strategy at any stage of the economic cycle.

So, what’s a good strategy?

Until now, the most successful B2B sellers have been those that understood their customers’ businesses the best. Salespeople with strong business acumen create value by linking their offerings to the result their customer is trying to achieve. Strong sellers show how their offerings will accelerate the achievement of initiatives to grow market share, enter new markets, launch new products, optimize manufacturing production or service delivery, and, of course, lower overall costs.

However, times have changed.

There are 5 rules you need to know to be successful in today’s environment.

• Get smart. Dynamic Business Acumen, which describes a seller’s understanding of what is changing in their customer’s business, is critical for success. As a seller, you need to know the top strategic priorities of your customer’s CEO today. And it’s not a time to make assumptions. How do you do this? Talk to everyone you know inside the customer company. For publicly held companies, read everything the CEO is saying.
• Cash (flow) is king. It’s easy to think the most important priority is cutting costs. That’s only partially true. Right now, almost every company is trying to increase cash flow. As a seller, you need to think about how your offerings reduce inventory holdings or increase the speed of collecting receivables and demonstrate this to the client. How? Your marketing team should provide sellers with messaging that explains how your offerings can improve customer cash flow.
• Go virtual. Another CEO priority is recreating relationships with customers through more virtual interactions. Can your offerings help your customer reach more of its customers? CEOs are trying to hold onto as many employees as possible, but that means they must find new ways for those employees to create value for customers. How? Think about how your offerings enable employees to do new things quickly.
• Play the long game. Right now, every day seems to bring new challenges. Yet, CEOs continue to keep one eye on the long term. That means that salespeople can also help companies position for the future. How? Look closely at what is the CEO saying about the longer term. Are there new markets to serve? New offerings to create? New ways of manufacturing and distributing their products? Find the area where your company can help.
• Divide and conquer. In every downturn, customers segment into three categories. Some of your best customers will buy more because their new plans require it. Others, because their industries are being hit hard, will stop buying. The third group sits in the middle. What does this mean? Now more than ever, your salespeople need to segment customers and focus sales time on the customers that are buying more, while giving time secondarily to those continuing to purchase at some level. Furthermore, sellers need to reduce the time they spend with industries that are contracting. All of this means that qualifying opportunities is critical. How can you implement segmentation? Sales managers can play a big role in ensuring that sellers are prioritizing their sales activity correctly.

Don’t get caught in the pricing vise. Find new ways to add value to your customers’ operations and strategic priorities. Solve for more than you have in the past by thinking about the customer’s entire business, not just the person or business process you sell into.

Over virtual coffee several weeks ago, a team member asked the group “What’s the one phrase, expression, or statement you find yourself saying often?” The responses varied from “the new normal” to “unprecedented times” to “leading in uncertainty.” In that moment, their statements were very true. People had only recently started social distancing and working virtually.

Although much of the initial shock from the crisis has dissipated, the sentiments described by my colleagues persist: things will never be the same, everything has been turned upside down, and nothing is certain anymore. While these feelings are very real, there is a lurking danger that these statements are becoming a limiting set of beliefs.

There is a deluge of ‘expert’ papers, advice, and whitepapers in the marketplace trying to make sense of how to react to the current situation, but it’s challenging to know what advice is of value. Much of what is being advised converges around a few key ideas, but surprisingly enough, most of these ideas don’t actually seem to be new at all.

‍Much of this so-called sage advice was as relevant six months ago as it is today, and some was just as relevant six years ago. What has changed is that we are now standing on the fabled ‘burning platform’ forcing us to act. Actions that were important but not urgent are now both.

The trick here is that if a problem moves around the urgent and important spectrum, your response to it also needs to change. So, as a people strategy leader, how do you navigate these uncertain times?

Engaging the organization in a learning strategy

For many businesses, your previous strategy probably still applies today. What will have changed is the risk mitigation, contingencies and how and when you execute your strategy. Prior to this crisis, you probably had more time to conduct the intellectual preparation and planning of your people strategy. You would engage and involve stakeholders to get agreement across the board with the key players. You would aim to get sign off for the ‘biggest play’ possible, impacting those who mattered the most or the greatest number of employees. This isn’t how the sign off process is working now or will likely work in the coming months or even years.

People strategy execution has had to evolve to become faster and more adaptive. This means more permission to act on what you believe is best and making smaller, planned people strategy bets and lots of them. The COVID-19 crisis has become the burning platform enabling strategic implementation of people strategies that needed a radical shift even prior to the current situation.

Take for example a mining and industrial organization that has been planning to introduce a single global coaching provider, top to bottom and worldwide for their business, since 2017. The organization wanted high quality, scale, excellent cost management and a clear strategic alignment of coaching to their leadership expectations and organizational values. Despite this good intention, there had never been a strategic need to prioritize this initiative above some of the ‘fix the basics’ activities. The COVID-19 crisis reframed this idea into a priority. A strong, uniform coaching strategy would drive resourcing leaders in a fast, agile manner, developing them as better leaders in a crisis and deploying support for their resilience in this crisis. Acting in the moment of need, the organization implemented this initiative. As a result, the company’s strategy has been hugely strengthened by having a strong Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) case. It prevents absenteeism and encourages more productivity and engagement worldwide.

Developing an organization-wide learning strategy isn’t new but contextualizing it and using disruption to navigate uncertainty has strengthened its positioning as a valuable priority.

Learning initiatives and core learning

In recent years, most organizations have shifted towards including initiative-focused learning in their strategies. This means that in addition to the more traditional planned and repeated core learning, organizations are including a more focused learning component that revolves around the business’ context and overall strategy. This approach remains effective, but in 2020 there is a need to shift further towards the initiative focus. These initiatives need to center around adaptability, virtual and digital capability, leading effectively in uncertainty, resilience, and team effectiveness.

The techniques and technology for previous initiative-based learning haven’t changed, but the current business context means that more people in your learning teams need to be able to execute on them.

Modalities of learning

There is currently an outsized focus on changing modalities of learning, but in reality, only one modality has changed – face to face is now off the table and will remain so for the foreseeable future. This is not an excuse to pause, but rather a challenge to reframe. Learning strategies outside the classroom has been done successfully for a long time, as have those old 70/20/10 plans that were intended to be the backbone of learning design for the last 20 years. The biggest mistake we can make is to pause learning activity in the hope that “face to face will return…eventually”.

It’s unclear what will happen, but in the meantime, there are plenty of resources and learning to draw on to ensure that the advancement of people’s growth isn’t held back. The real question is how to make it safe for people to continue to grow and deliver fantastic learning virtually.

Shifting learning modalities has been one of the more common strategic themes in recent times. Now in the wake of this crisis, there is the opportunity to leverage digital and virtual solutions, making learning more modularized - smaller, easier to consume, a journey over time that paces alongside the person, their role and the natural flow of their work.

Focus on wellbeing and mental health

As a result of COVID-19, more open source support is available to assist those with less developed strategies, but the methods for deployment have not changed dramatically. Many of the solutions being used in this space are already digital and virtual, as most of the technological innovation already occurred in the last decade. Utilize what you have and remember that the best resources may just be the human elements – making space for peer to peer learning, reflection time and creating armistice time in diaries to prevent the endless virtual meetings. These are the simple fixes and if consulted, most employees can give you lots of ideas about what they want and need in this space.

The continuous theme for the wellbeing and mental health of employees is ongoing and the only change is that now our strategies and preparation work are being tested for their efficacy.

Differentiated Talent Proposition

In a moment of crisis, you are continuing to differentiate talent, but so far it is more focused around the ’moments of need’. You deploy people faster and more deliberately. For example, key people stepping up to play steering and guiding roles in the crisis, as well as or instead of their ‘day job.’ To do this effectively, you must draw on your experiences from short term assignments, secondments, project and agile methodology. Often, you just need to do it faster. Down the track as the economic impact of the crisis is better understood, re-evaluating roles and talent will be inevitable, but restructures are one of the few certainties in your people strategies.

People have always been at the heart of an organization’s success. COVID-19 and its associated restrictions and lockdown requirements have only highlighted this and the importance of strategically deploying your talent to reach its maximum potential.

Looking Around and Ahead

Despite the many changes unfolding and at record speed, there is still consistency and simplicity out there too. Look for it. Focus your attention on short and long term and look for where you can find consistency across the narrative for the next 12 – 18 months, even in this inevitable uncertainty.

You may not think that organizations are hiring or adding headcount amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but some are—and they’re doing so in droves. At a time when much of the US is under shelter-in-place orders, organizations that keep us safe, fed, and supplied have seen surges in customer demand and, in turn, the need to hire. To keep up with this unprecedented demand, these organizations find themselves trying to screen and onboard people in as little as 24 hours with minimal or no face-to-face interaction. And guess what: there are lots and lots of candidates vying for these jobs.

Selecting and onboarding large influxes of candidates can drain what are already very limited resources, especially when processes are manual and are not virtual. At times like the present organizations simply want to get dependable people in the door who are willing and able to perform any number of tasks assigned to them from one day to the next.So, why not simply truncate the hiring process by eliminating pre-employment screening to get people onboard faster? Organizations need to add headcount, and there are plenty of candidates to fill these positions. If an employee does not work out, an organization can simply move on to the next candidate. Where’s the problem? Eliminating pre-employment screening is not the answer; instead, it creates a whole new set of problems.The wrong selection (i.e., hiring) decision can lead to massive consequences on overall organizational success. Consider the cost of a poor hire for your team or organization. What are the time and training consequences? While each case depends on the role, the cost of a bad hire can be upwards of three times the individual’s salary. Regardless of the specific dollar amount and human resource costs, negative outcomes result directly from poor selection decisions, most of which can be prevented with proper pre-employment screening and assessments.Sub-par performance and results. When individuals are placed into jobs that require knowledge and skills that they lack, their performance will suffer. Even if the organization takes the time—which costs money—to train and onboard these individuals, how can the organization be certain that the training will “stick,” or that the individuals have the underlying capacity to learn the requisite knowledge and skills? Obviously, an organization is not going to place someone into a highly technical role if the individual does not have the proper background and training, but the learning curve—again, time and money—for any job will be shorter for some people than it will be for others. Properly screening candidates for the requisite knowledge, skill, abilities, motivation, drive, dependability, etc. required to be successful can reduce the risk of sub-par performance in spades.Cancer to the team. We all know what it’s like to work with someone who is unable or unwilling to carry his/her weight on the team or has a poor attitude. These individuals can single-handedly lower the morale of the entire team at lightning speed. Screening candidates’ skills, abilities, attitudes, and behavioral tendencies can drastically reduce the likelihood of hiring caustic employees.Liability to the organization. The liability of a bad hire on an organization can take on many forms. We’ve already talked about the performance implications of hiring people who lack important job skills and the impact of hiring the wrong people on team morale. These certainly present liabilities to the organization. But what about the risk of hiring reckless employees to work in environments where following safety protocols is a must? Or putting people who lack customer service skills in front of customers? Or asking people who have poor attention to detail to work in a warehouse picking parts or filling orders? Each of these situations has the potential to result in negative outcomes for the organization, including reputational risk and even safety risk. All of these liabilities can be reduced by screening candidates for the requisite knowledge, skill, and/or abilities required to perform the job.Regardless of whether an organization is filling 5 or 500 openings, or whether the organization has 10 or 10,000 candidates, proper pre-employment screening and assessment is a must. It is well worth the extra 20-25 minutes that it takes candidates to complete most pre-employment assessments. Selecting the wrong person for the job benefits no one and is a disservice to everyone involved. Instead, now more than ever, we recommend putting automated systems in place to screen candidates and help refine candidate pools to those most likely to be successful—ultimately adding the greatest value to your team and organization.

We created the BTS Sales Index to give a simple and easy-to-understand predictive monthly metric that gives enterprise leaders the right vantage point by which to view their critical business decisions.

BTS Sales Index April 2020 Update

-0.1

BTS Sales Index April 2020:

113.2 (-0.1%)

March 2020* in the Economy

• Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 decreased from $3.521 trillion in February to $3.518 in March, declining by $3 billion
• Nonfarm payroll employment fell by 701,000, the first decline in payroll growth since September 2010
• The unemployment rate rose to 4.4 percent; the last time the unemployment increased 0.9 month over month was January 1975
• March hiring was lowing than February across all industries, with three dropping more than 20 percent
• With the coronavirus pandemic still causing widespread shutdowns, be on the lookout for further impacts to the economy

*the April update is reflective of March 2020 data

Why

Line of business and sales leaders tasked with making strategic decisions don’t have a good measure of confidence when deciding to ramp up production or invest in customer relationships. Quarterly GDP numbers and the S&P 500 paint two different pictures of economic performance, the former too slow to incorporate new data and the latter too likely to overreact to investor sentiment.We created the BTS Sales Index to give a simple and easy-to-understand predictive monthly metric that gives enterprise leaders the right vantage point by which to view their critical business decisions.

What

The BTS Sales Index represents the aggregate total revenue of the 1,000 largest publically traded companies in the US in one simple to understand number.

How

As mentioned above, the BTS Sales Index is comprised of the total revenue of the largest 1,000 publically traded companies incorporated in the US. Every month, we collect the total revenue reported by these companies and run the data through our custom-built indexing tool. The index uses the total revenue of the BTS 1,000 companies at the end of the second quarter of 2013 as its baseline because the economy showed signs of stable recovery. Unemployment was back to normal rates, housing prices remained steady, and stock prices were back to record levels.

Authenticity is a quality that the best leaders have learned to value and demonstrate.

Sharing life stories and using real human language can help executives connect with their employees, their clients, their Board members, any stakeholder – in a way that feels personal and real. Even more importantly, as our research has shown, authenticity is not just a “nice to have” for today’s leaders: it is a business imperative. We uncovered that authenticity is one of the five leadership qualities that statistically differentiate leaders of high-growth companies. Further, our research on Millennials shows that for this influential and critical cohort, authenticity is the most important quality for leaders to have. If you want to lead and inspire the workforce of the future, authentic leadership must pave the way.

But what happens when a leader blurs the line between authenticity and oversharing?

I remember a particularly precarious time during which a large financial institution I worked for was rumored to be on the chopping block. Stories were swirling in the media about potential buyers, and employees were rattled. They needed reassurance, and they needed a steady hand with leadership. As I coached the CEO on an upcoming call with employees, we talked through what information he was able to share and what his audience needed to hear.

We agreed that there were limitations due to legal and regulatory circumstances, but that he could be upbeat and positive, commit to future updates, and help settle the organization until the path forward was clear.

Imagine my surprise when he kicked off the call and went down a totally different path… one that included speculation about possible company spin-offs, and a relatively negative slant on prospective buyers. The end result was a lot of shaken employees, unsure about their future employment.

When I asked the leader why he had gone forward with that approach, his comment was “I wanted to be transparent. I didn’t want to be scripted. I felt they deserved to hear what was happening in my own thoughts. I needed to be true to myself.”

While his decision came from a place of good intent, we had what HBR refers to as the “authenticity paradox.” A genuine desire to be candid can often be seen as “freewheeling,” the last thing a team needs during times of change. Rather, leaders need to find a way to balance authority with approachability.

Here are 4 ways a leader can do that:

• Prepare, prepare, prepare. In times of peak stress or time constraints, it’s tempting to skip over really thoughtful preparation. In this case, the leader felt that “preparation” translated to being scripted, and that didn’t feel true to his leadership style. It’s important to write down key messages in language that you’d actually use – phrases and words, not full sentences. And then practice, practice, practice until it doesn’t just feel natural – but it IS natural.
• Think about your audience agenda. You’re likely speaking to a broad base of stakeholders, some who are new to change, and some who have lived through it too many times to be rattled. While it’s important to consider your entire audience, particularly think about folks who will likely be most impacted by the potential change – emotionally or professionally. Those who might not have experience and context to settle their nerves… and put yourself in their shoes. Speak to them directly.
• Share your own experience. If you’re in a position where you’re leading such a conversation, it’s likely not your first rodeo. Perhaps you sat in their shoes in the early stages of your own career. Think about what that situation was, how it made you feel, what you needed to hear, and then share it. Personalizing your comments with your own experience expresses empathy and understanding – which will likely have more impact than glazing over details you don’t have.
• Appreciate your multiple “selves.” For most of us, there are different dimensions to how we present ourselves based on circumstances. Who you are at home may be different than who you are at work. This doesn’t mean you aren’t authentic at work, it just means you need to bring a different type of authenticity into that environment. Embrace this and be open to continually redefining who your “true self” is as a leader. As one leadership specialist shares, “As leaders, we do not just need a clear sense of who we are (our essential selves) – we must also be willing to change our leadership identity (our constructed selves) each time we move on to bigger and better things.”

Today’s business climate is one of disruption and turmoil. It is critical for senior leaders to be able to stabilize, focus, and inspire the troops in order to deliver on business strategy and create sustainable growth. Your ability to do this effectively rests on your capacity to tap into the power of your authentic self, while balancing your charter to help the enterprise stay the course. Take the time to be mindful about how you communicate and share, and you’ll show up as that authentic, inspiring leader you want to be.