“Opportunity favours the bold – this is a lesson that I learned early on, and have used to guide the Virgin story. If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!” – Sir Richard Branson
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Certain topics I just love to write about or discuss with high Intellectual Horsepower (IHP) leaders. Today’s blog is one of those topics. In my leadership book, I discuss “The Leadership Challenge Mountain”. Most problems or opportunities are similar to short mountains with small inclines. Thus, most leaders are able to climb these smaller, challenge mountains while making reasonable decisions. With these smaller mountains, most decisions are dichotomous (this or that).
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When we encounter jugular decisions requiring us to traverse steep inclines with long, twisting timeframes coupled with insufficient information at the beginning of the journey and ambiguous, unknown outcomes … we often stall on our way up the rugged mountain! What does stalling look like? It usually takes one of two forms: We either don’t make a decision (i.e. stop / retreat) or we make a “this one or that one”, suboptimal decision, just to get the decision process done.
In a perfect world, wouldn’t it be great to “have your cake and eat it too”? Maybe we can! Key leadership competencies needed to optimize these types of outcomes include: Vision of a Future Possible Self, Conflict Resilience and our great allies Decision Making Qualities (DMQ) and Execution-Excellence (Ex-Ex) with Integrity.
Vision of a Future Possible Self – When we lack the necessary clarity in this competency, our decisions typically center on the now or short term and we’ll “worry about the rest later”. Often, in this scenario, the now (which starts off great) turns out to only be okay or good over next year or two and the future then becomes our new challenge.
Conflict Resilience – The stress, complexity, etc. can overwhelm us into making dichotomous (which are relatively simple) decisions. If your inner circle is focused on “either / or” decision making, you just may have the wrong people in your inner circle. Elevate your leadership talents to attract people who can weather the storms of ambiguity, postpone dichotomous decision making and find beauty in “gray, more chaotic solutions”.
DMQ – I write extensively about DMQ (please see the multiple components that make up DMQ in previous blog posts) in my leadership book, blogs, etc. The first decision a leader needs to make: “What is my DMQ”; both, under stress and not under stress? If you overrate yourself, you’ll be disappointed while suffering from the DMQ Circular Loop Syndrome, which usually plays out over time.
It’s important to differentiate poor DMQ from good DMQ with bad outcomes. In business, a decision may have an 85% probability for success and yet, fail. Personally, we know the divorce rate for second marriages is even higher than the rate for first marriages. Based on research, basically it’s because similar (although not identical) DMQ used to select the first partner, is used to select the second partner. It usually starts off great, but more often than not (60%+), it doesn’t end well.
Ex-Ex with Integrity – If we don’t create an Infrastructure for Success to enable us to execute consistently well, we’ll seldom experience great outcomes. This is true professionally, personally and in our communities.
So; how do we eat our cake and have it too? We:
- Toss out the traditional, old scripts and rewrite new ones aligned with being awesome in every facet of life.
- Use these new scripts to redefine the perceived single opportunity into multiple opportunities (not black or white, but many grays).
- Make decisions that enable our top priority today (which may change later) to be realized without foregoing other opportunities.
Thus; we’ve achieved our top priority (cake) while baking other cakes so we can eat them later.
I get significant pushback on this topic from a wide array of leaders and people. However, once you embrace this complex, somewhat chaotic gray model, your life positively changes when you only engage with others who have adopted this multi-faceted approach to opportunities. Unfortunately, if only one of the two or more parties have adopted this thinking, decisions revert back to basic, non-optimized, control-oriented and simplified dichotomous decision making.
Our teams use this multi-faceted, paradox opportunity approach to help companies make larger donations to social causes while simultaneously increasing their Net Income. Yes … you read this accurately. It’s actually quite simple to implement, especially since our veteran teams are doing 98% of the work and have saved companies $1B+ over the years!
- Your company gives more money to social causes.
- Your company simultaneously increases your Net Income.
- Our teams do 98% of the work and we do so, on a financially risk-free basis to your company.
Who changes the world? I believe it’s almost exclusively the Top-7%. They are the only ones with the Talent Portfolios and social consciences needed to actually implement significant positive social impact.
If you believe you’re one of these executives, we’d love to explore possible opportunities.
Get Making A Difference! ~ JR
