Urgency - John Castagna, Leadership Teams Network
Have you ever heard of the Stockdale Paradox? The name refers to Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest-ranked American prisoner of war in Vietnam, and eventual recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Because of his rank, other prisoners looked to him for leadership through their ordeal. (One of those was named McCain.)
Through repeated torture Stockdale devised tapping codes to help everyone communicate and support one another. He continually urged paradoxical thinking: always recognize brutal reality (“You are not going home for Christmas,” he’d say) but never, ever lose faith in the win in the end.
“This is a very important lesson,” he has said. “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
The Stockdale Paradox is useful because it helps explain how seeming opposites can be possible, and even thrive in an organization. Some are helpful positives, like the admiral’s, and some aren’t. Although your organization may live and die by numbers every day, week and month, it’s possible that there could be too little embedded and useful sense of long-term organizational urgency in your culture. This is true for most organizations.
We need to grow and to change into something better than we were yesterday. With the right people in place, insinuating a constant sense of urgency to find new ways to be whatever it is we will be 20 years from now, we can do that. Some may pine for the way it was, but great organizations constantly reinvent themselves.
Listen to John Kotter, Dean Emeritus at Harvard Business School, in A Sense of Urgency. “A lot of companies,” Kotter says, “simply have never felt a sense of urgency. They didn’t grow up on it, and if it’s not in their history, their culture, or their DNA, they struggle.”
“I recently got called in to a large company to do some advisory work,” says Kotter, “where it was simply impossible to say that things were going well. Every performance metric — revenues, earnings, and so on — was heading down. But the level of complacency was incredibly high. Everyone agreed that the company had big problems, but those problems were always someone else’s responsibility. Too many people were thinking, “Yeah, we have problems, but I’m doing my job. The problem is she isn’t doing her job.” Given that state of mind, where’s the urgency to try new and better things in hopes of taking advantage of the opportunities and hazards the company is facing right now?”
Part of the problem is that people confuse busy-ness and productivity. “(They say) ‘Urgency, are you kidding? People are running around like crazy, working as hard as they can.” But what they’re really saying is that … they’re running from meeting to meeting, doing all kinds of useless stuff. It’s all activity, not productivity, and they look at it and think it’s urgency.” But they’re wrong and they justify complacency and organizational stagnation.
That should never happen where you are, but it sometimes might. Let’s honor the people we serve by building something new and better. Temper where you think you are by taking a page from Stockdale, start with a lesson or two from Kotter’s book and take it from there.
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