Leadership in Chaos - Leaders Digest: 34th edition.

Hi 👋, welcome back to our 34th edition 🙌.

“I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up, and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”

Charlie Munger

Bud Cadell asked a great question recently. Does corporate culture really impact the bottom line? Intuitively, you’d think yes, of course. But the answer (like most things) is more nuanced. On one hand, a 2022 meta-analysis from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found culture had no effect on performance. And yet, when asked, 92% of executives believe improving their firm’s culture would increase its value. What gives? The issue, as Bud writes, is that company culture is widely misunderstood and weakly maintained. Research from MIT found no correlation in most cases between a company’s stated values and the experience of its employees. So culture doesn’t impact performance, because it’s rarely maintained in the real world. More often, there’s a huge gap between the words and the actions.

A thought for leaders: Culture does matter. Firms with large culture gaps see lower productivity and alignment, which fuels distrust, undermining managerial credibility and lowering morale, resulting in reduced commitment and higher turnover. So two things to think about. Firstly, is your culture strategically designed to deliver performance? Does it help to deliver your strategy as a lived experience in your org? And secondly, are you being honest about your culture? Are you focusing on “optics and off-sites” or the actual gap between the words and the actions? Are you tackling the real drivers of culture change – the systems (decision rights, information flow, meeting cadence, and incentives)? Poor leadership ignores the gap. Do you?

Team: patience.

Good things come to those who wait. As Moliere said, “Trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.” Patience has always been seen as a virtuous and valuable trait. Difficult. But valuable. It’s why this small piece by Shane Parrish caught our eye. He wrote that most people are patient with their actions, but impatient with their results. They forgive themselves with ease for missing a gym session, a work deadline, or a training session. And yet, as Shane writes, they are impatient when it comes to results. They’re impatient if the abs don’t magically appear after two weeks of exercising. Or they don’t get the promotion after 6 months. They want those immediately. When it doesn’t happen, they move to the next thing. This is destructive impatience. The people with an unfair advantage flip the equation. They’re impatient with their actions, but patient with results. This is productive patience.

A thought for leaders: This flip is interesting. Shane gives Arnold Schwarzenegger as an example. When training to become Mr Olympia, he knew it would take years. So he was patient. But every time he went to the gym, he had no patience for a missed rep. This is the right kind of productive patience, and the right kind of impatience. It ensures you stick to the long-term path (results), but you never miss a step on the way (actions). In a world of ever-increasing distraction, it’s a great reminder of the value of the right patience as a leader, for your organisation, and for the teams you manage.

Change: the changing of change.

Accelerating change is the great conversation of our time. The only constant. But it’s exhausting. This was an interesting report from McKinsey on how change is changing, and the challenges of managing accelerating change. According to McKinsey, “The average employee now experiences ten planned change programs a year, a fivefold increase from a decade ago.” That’s one a month. Imagine. And at the same time, engagement and health measures have fallen, support for change programs has dropped, and employee disconnect with leaders has grown. Marry that with this HBR article, Leaders assume employees are excited about AI. They’re wrong, which shows that: 76% of execs say that their employees are enthusiastic about AI adoption, but only 31% actually are. And 80% of execs feel well-informed about the AI strategy and tools, compared to only 30% of individuals. In the race for change, employees are getting lapped.

A thought for leaders: Reinvention is essential to growth and prosperity. But leaders must balance chaos and progress. If employees are spending all their time moving through change programs, how do you think it’ll make them feel, and how much faith will they have in leadership? We need to remember, it’s not organisations that change, it’s people. And to help them change, we need to stop overwhelming them. And start bringing them with us, in a meaningful way, they can actually process. Otherwise, you’ll be standing in the land of change, excited but alone.

Podcast: Ep 68: Confessions of a Guru – Part 1: The Say-Do Gap

This episode explores one of leadership’s most overlooked credibility killers: the distance between intention and action. In a month where we examine culture gaps, change fatigue, and alignment, this felt like an essential listen(or relisten).

You can listen to it here.

Enjoy revisiting or newly discovering it 😊

You can follow Flow Group on LinkedIn here.

Hope you enjoyed, and please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

P.S. This month’s featured artist is Michelle Blancke, whose ethereal photographs of trees, glens, and foliage invite us into a familiar yet uncanny world. She uses photography as a painter might use a brush – adjusting composition, light and framing to shift perception. Her images dissolve the boundary between real and imagined, presenting landscapes charged with energy and mystery.