Work Hard, Stand Still
Leadership in the age of diminishing returns
If my years at secondary school taught me anything (besides self-loathing obviously) it was that there was a straightforward correlation between effort and achievement. I was given a task, I worked hard at it, I did well at it. Simple. This same maxim seemed to apply at university and also to some of the activities that I did outside of education, like music (practice hard, get better) and running (train hard, get faster).
The first real challenge to this perspective was when, post-university, I decided to try and get a job in the arts. I scoured job listings, worked hard on my applications, but then met with rejection after rejection after rejection. When I eventually did get a job, though, my wobbling world-view clicked back into place. Despite the setbacks, I’d stuck at it, learned from the rejections, got there eventually. And for my first five or six years in the workplace, this maxim still held. I threw myself at tasks, got them done pretty fast, got given more, got good performance reviews, gained more responsibility.
As I wrote about in my very first post, it was when I got my first leadership job that I started to feel this connection wavering. Working hard was no longer enough; the skills I needed to succeed were different, more subtle. Work ethic was useful, but there was more - the ability to look long term, to read the mood music of the organisation, to think of and try out new ideas - some of which would crash and burn. The equation was more complicated than I’d thought.
Then, in my personal life, there was the experience of trying to get pregnant with my first child. It took the best part of two years, and it forced my worldview to shift. This was something I couldn’t work harder at. It was, in essence, random - what I needed was patience, something that I do not have an abundance of. I do, however, remember a profound revelation I had about eighteen months in: that this, in essence, is what life is - random shit happening and all you’re in control of is how you deal with it. There are some things - many things - whose outcomes you cannot determine by willpower alone.
Whilst I didn’t connect the dots immediately, this learning would turn out to be extremely helpful to the current scenario that many of us find ourselves in - attempting to lead organisations in the post-COVID world. When we first went back to what felt like business as usual, many of us were excited to welcome audiences into our buildings again, to make new work, to apply for grants for projects that we’d actually be able to deliver. What we found, though, was a very different world. Much higher levels of working from home have markedly changed audience behaviour patterns. Many grant funders have changed their strategies and rather than success being merely unlikely, we’re now often playing odds of only 5 or 6% of applications getting past the first round. For those working internationally, Brexit has made everything a hell of a lot harder.
I hear variations on this from almost everyone that I speak to - doctors, teachers, academics, hospitality workers, charities working in a whole range of different fields. In each case, the underlying challenge is that the link between energy, time and resource put in seems to have been decoupled from results. Many of us are throwing absolutely everything we have at keeping our organisations or our teams afloat and, in the best case scenario, just about managing to stand still.
Our prevailing culture, particularly the culture written about in leadership and management books, is that great leadership, effective teamwork and high standards equal great results, and if you’re not getting great results, then there must be something on the other side of the equation that isn’t working. Even if not articulated, many leaders live with this feeling deep inside of them; that a different (better) leader would have hit their fundraising target, managed to get that crucial grant despite the odds, sold out that show, grown that project. A certain degree of self-examination of this kind is incredibly useful (probably essential) in helping you and your organisation to improve - no one is perfect and reflecting on what could have been done differently when things didn’t go the way you wanted them to invariably leads you to think up some tweaks or adjustments that you can implement next time. But right now, it can feel like we are measuring ourselves against an impossible standard - we can be working smartly, strategically, collaboratively and quickly and still not see the results that we want.
This experience can be one of the most challenging for a leader because it has the potential to lead to a sense of futility - there is nothing more demotivating than feeling like all of our efforts are making no impact on our circumstances. However, the opportunity lies in changing our frame of reference. We are operating in an environment where the vast majority of organisations in the vast majority of sectors are feeling some kind of pain. This is not a climate that is conducive to much flourishing. So let’s firmly put in the bin the idea of ‘do more with less’ - we’ve done that, and, guess what, we’ve hit a ceiling. What this is actually about is survival. We cannot control our external circumstances - we have to accept that we are operating in a resource-poor, constrained, contracting and unpredictable environment. So, much like a character in a video game, our job now is to bob and weave and duck and fight and take cover to make it to the other side in one piece. This doesn’t mean lowering our standards - it means measuring ourselves against different yardsticks.
The more years you live on this earth, the more you realise just how many things you don’t know and just how unpredictable life can be, on both an individual, societal and global level. Who can say where the country and the world are going to be in ten years time, or even five years time? Not me. Wherever your organisation is at right now, you are in the middle of a story that doesn’t yet have an ending - maybe you’re in the glorious beginning phase when everything is new and exciting, or maybe, as for me and many others, you’re in the difficult middle period, where everything is hard and sometimes you feel you’re not going to make it. None of us know where we are heading, so all we can do is keep going, and try to make choices that we’ll feel proud of, no matter what the outcome.