‘I think fast, I talk fast, and I need you guys to act fast if you want to get out of this.’ – Winston Wolf, Pulp Fiction.
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary teams, and potentially, extraordinary leadership. That can be confusing when you have an established culture, but we all know that in times of rapid change we don’t have long to make decisions. The better a team functions and the better clarity of purpose it has, the more likely it will be successful.
In our 40th celebratory year at Impact, we didn’t anticipate that we would be supporting the whole world through such an extraordinary time. But we are, as our clients look to us to help them:
- Lead rapid change
- Deal with massive levels of uncertainty and ambiguity
- Develop extraordinary teams
No one on the planet is having an easy time right now. As my colleague in Australia said to me today, on the back of five months of devastating fires and now coronavirus: ‘This is when we find out who the great organisations are: when the going is tough.’
In a world where dispersed teams, virtual leadership and constant agility are the new norm, effective collaboration is crucial. At the heart of all organisational performance is the ability for people to work effectively with others. Now more than ever, team must have:
- An engaging unified purpose that is clear, agreed and transparent
- Full awareness of the wider stakeholder map, building relationships and effective communication flow for external alignment
- High-quality conversations – central to effective meetings, team agility and peer learning
- A high-performance mindset with defined expectations
- Agreed approach to working together understood by all
- The ability to maintain effective relationships including having difficult conversations and working to strengths and weaknesses
- A focus on desired outcomes whilst remaining agile
- And, crucially, effective leadership…
Effective leadership, which may come from different people at different times, is critical to the current situation, in which it is highly likely that key players will become unavailable due to a combination of travel bans, illness and whatever comes next!
Impact would like to help you by bringing our 40 years of experience to the table. We hadn’t realised this would be our mission for our special anniversary year, but our purpose is to help organisations like yours be successful.
We know it’s hard; we know there is no one right answer; we know there’s lots to be done; but we know that we can help you.
Andy Dickson – Impact global coronavirus task force leader and senior consultant