Leaders today have just gone through a gruelling two-plus-year fight of normal business challenges that was coupled with an unprecedented worldwide COVID pandemic. As many would say, “you cannot make this up.” As we come out of the COVID pandemic, many leaders and their teams are just now coming to grips with a number of factors.
The leadership team along with the entire team are exhausted. Not just tired they are exhausted, (physically and mentally), from the grind of surviving in a chaotic business environment as well as the evolution of an in-person to either a virtual or a hybrid workforce. Add to this, the digitization of operations. The new work environment will be very different from what we knew before COVID. The fight to deliver products and or services has never been more competitive. The workforce is also evolving to the ‘great resignation’ to name just one factor. How does an exhausted leadership and workforce cope and work through this new environment? Let’s just make things interesting by adding a global political and economic scenario with the Ukrainian invasion by Russia.
In military terms, these conditions resemble Attrition warfare. A military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel. The word attrition comes from the Latin root atterere, meaning “to rub against,” similar to the “grinding down” of the opponent’s forces in attrition warfare. The conditions that each of us faces in our respective workplaces will find some similarity to this. So how do we cope and more importantly win?
Leaders need to provide an example and encourage the team to persevere more today than ever before. When a team finds itself fighting a battle of attrition, they need to adjust to the circumstance. This is not the time for business as usual. These unique conditions require more communication and adjustments. Teams should be smaller to deal with the flood of new conditions. This will preserve their energy over the long term until a new routine is established. Leaders need to ask themselves ‘are we responding to change’ or ‘are we ahead of change’? If leaders and organizations are responding, they are losing. Reacting, once good enough, is not a winning strategy today. Anticipating is the new mantra to survive. And leaders must communicate clearly what their intentions are. They need to monitor their fatigue, encourage them and change processes in order to save them for the marathon that we all find ourselves in. Leaders and companies that do this will survive.
This is not about winning. Rather, we need to figure out how to evolve and survive in a world that seems to have lost its way. Adjusting to the new realities is what leadership is about. Those leaders who can anticipate and adjust their procedures to preserve their most valuable asset, their people, will survive. We are in a battle of attrition. Leaders need to communicate what’s different and how the team will address this challenge. Leaders need to listen to their people about what’s new and implement what makes sense. Leaders need to instill a sense of purpose to inspire their people in a crisis. Leaders should see the opportunity with the ‘big inspiration’ to evolve. survive Leaders need to watch their people more closely for fatigue (physically and mentally.) Most of all, leaders need to retain them. If there ever was a time when purposeful leadership was needed, it is today as we fight this prolonged battle of attrition.
