The Purposeful Leadership Challenge. Part 1: The power of ‘but’

One unexpected side effect of the pandemic is that it has revealed just how much we were deluding ourselves beforehand.

When the world stopped turning we began to notice an increasing number of inequalities. As if they had previously been shrouded from view. And now we could see these inequalities in high definition.

For example, we could suddenly see that the vast majority of ‘workers’ deemed most essential to our collective wellbeing — or even survival — are also disproportionately likely to be members of the ‘working poor’.

In sharp contrast, as business leaders, many of us are winners in a system that has been designed to preserve our certainty, our wealth and our safety. Often at the expense of others, including key workers.

This has been an ugly and uncomfortable truth for many of us to come to terms with and has lead to us longing to make society work in a fairer way.

And what better timing than now? Isn’t this an ideal time to make a change when we can ‘build back better’?

Yes, but…

But then, we sit back and think that maybe, once social distancing declines and we are boarding planes again and leaning on bars in pubs, maybe we’ll just go back to what things were like before.

There is a very deep-seated fear that the good that has come of this — such as closer ties with our families and the realisation that community is important — will soon be forgotten about.

‘But’ is a small word with a lot of power.

It leans heavily on the status quo — which we are familiar with, warts and all — and makes the choice of doing something different seem less sensible.

On closer examination, it can shed light on our current patterns of thinking, the assumptions we hold about how business operates today and the fears we experience about what any change might bring.

“Of course we want to consider other stakeholders. But we have to deliver our operating margin first.”

In fact, this is the reality of any change. The tension between our aspirations for change and our attachments we think we know and love about the world today.

So, to step into the possibility of something different, how might we unstick ourselves from our existing world view? Without some answers to this, how can any leader hope to adapt themselves, let alone lead a genuine business transformation?

This Readiness Indicator from Otherkind may help you understand where you are today when it comes to becoming a more purposeful business, just a little bit better.