Leaders who avoid disasters with the complexity of their company
Every disaster is an opportunity you must seize
“There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.” -Brene Brown
With the inability to solve ongoing projects due to not having enough time and encountering obstacles at every turn, how can you, as a leader, help reduce these difficulties? Whether managing or leading people or making sure complex and complicated situations don’t interfere with the day-to-day operations of your business, you need to constantly monitor your business on a daily basis.
Leaders must show more composure than ever in the workplace. Knowing the difference between complex and complicated impacts your business differently. Most people use these words interchangeably. If you are a leader and you treat a complex problem as if it were a complicated problem, you are setting yourself and your company for failure.
Learn from failure
“Learn to listen. Opportunity could be knocking on your door very softly.” -Anonymous
Too many leaders fail in change management efforts because they either fail to comply fully or when they begin to fail, they give up. Don’t give up, as failing is part of the learning curve. Trying to experiment with rules, processes, and procedures that work best takes some time to see what works and what doesn’t. This is done with everything you do to put the right things in place.
Preventing
-Demosthenes
Look carefully at what you have in place. Some are self-imposed that you and your employees implement. Some are assumptions and beliefs. You need to separate them before you start to see what works and what you can remove or change. Updating your processes and procedures allows you to work better.
Start allowing your employees to “break the rules” by brainstorming ideas for breakthrough breakthroughs. This means that they cannot get rid of the specific regulations that are required.
Move beyond the same old approaches = the same old results
“Some people don’t like change, but you have to accept change if the alternative is a disaster.” -Elon Musk
Breaking out of the traditional ways you’ve been doing business sometimes happens when a crisis strikes. The problem for many organizations is that it has been working in the same way for years: the same rules, processes and procedures and they have not changed with the times. Well, you think that what is happening is a fad and that everything will go back to the way it was before. Sorry, in today’s business world, creativity, innovation and technology are the way to go. In addition to this, using simplification to get things done is the extra your business needs to be productive.
Change your mindset
“Imagine your brain forming new connections as you meet the challenge and learn. Keep going.”
? Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
In today’s business world, your mindset must change for what you need right now. Yesterday’s mindset was for yesterday when business changed in the blink of an eye. As for your business, you need to change more often than before. Rather than having a product to work with, today’s economic cycles are faster and require your business to have at least 2-3 more ideas generated in the pipeline ready for the next cycle before the current one begins.
You must use your creative thinking to generate more important ideas, since your competition is already doing it. Don’t be left behind thinking that everyone wants your product or service and that a slow period will eventually keep people coming back for more of the same. The world has been changing and it is getting faster with new products and services. You need to think this way too.
Start taking risks
“Spend eighty percent of your time focusing on the opportunities of tomorrow rather than the problems of yesterday.” -Brian Tracy
In addition to asking thought-provoking questions, you and your employees need to see what is possible from the complexity in front of you. Yes, you need to take some time to see what you have and try out small changes that will have a bigger impact on what you currently do.
Taking a risk requires leaders and employees to go both inside and outside the box looking for other ways to come up with ideas and how to do things more efficiently.
Leadership is not rocket science, and actually some people think it is especially so when it comes to avoiding the problems, challenges, and difficulties that complexity brings. As the saying goes “Don’t take your eyes off the ball”, this is what many do to let complexity creep into the workplace. You need to work hard for the simplification to work. It’s better than the alternative: bankruptcy and disappearance.