| This week, why adaptability is the meta-skill leaders need. Plus, what’s going on with shipping rates, and misconceptions about power and how more people can wield it. |
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| Are you adaptable? It’s clear that our volatile world is serving up change at a rapid clip. But true adaptability may not be what you think. It’s less about meeting the next challenge when it arrives, shoulders squared, laptop in hand. Rather, it’s about being prepared beforehand to meet any challenge—no matter how out of the blue—by having the right mindset. |
| A definition. Adaptability is the ability to learn flexibly and efficiently and to apply that knowledge across situations. It’s not so much a skill as a meta-skill—learning how to learn, and being conscious of when to put that learner’s mind into action. By becoming open to change now, we can influence how we react during times of uncertainty, before pressures build to the point where altering course is much more difficult, or even futile. |
| A warning. This means avoiding the adaptability paradox: when we most need to learn and change, we stick with what we know. It’s an easy trap to fall into when big, often unexpected events upend our world. But it applies even to positive situations such as receiving a promotion. The trick is to be able to continue learning even while under pressure. |
| Simple, right? Wrong. Our research shows that while adaptability is the critical success factor during periods of transformation and systemic change, it must be practiced and mastered, not just summoned. Research shows that leaders experienced anxiety and burnout symptoms at unprecedented rates during the COVID-19 pandemic as they focused on others without restoring their own energy levels. Leaders who build their adaptability help themselves by augmenting key psychological skills, from coping to personal growth. But the adaptability mindset can also act as a kind of force multiplier in their organizations, in part by showing others why it’s beneficial. |
| Start now. Leaders can begin by modeling a clear sense of purpose and showing others that it’s safe to learn—by asking questions and listening closely to the responses (especially the uncomfortable ones). They can even study their own physical “tells,” the ones that appear when they’re entering crisis mode—say, sweaty palms—and use those as reminders to think twice before rolling out the playbook that worked in the last emergency. |
| ‘Beginner’s mind.’ One enemy of the adaptive mindset is a belief that it’s your job to have all the right answers, rather than focusing on asking the right questions. It’s essentially the same trap that Zen Buddhism warns against falling into when urging practitioners to adopt what it calls the beginner’s mind, or shoshin. “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,” according to this concept. “In the expert’s mind, there are few.” An open world view isn’t a fixed personality trait or a skill available only to Zen masters; it is a learnable skill for everyone. So go forth and adapt. |
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| OFF THE CHARTS |
| B2B: Back to basics? |
| Industrial-services organizations are struggling to keep up with rising customer expectations. Our research shows that 60 percent of B2B customers want to buy online, and 62 percent prefer to reorder online, but that only 13 percent of industrial OEMs offer digital solutions of any kind, and only 10 percent offer online self-service tools for placing reorders. |
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| MORE ON MCKINSEY.COM |
| What’s going on with shipping rates | It now costs up to six times more to ship a container from China to Europe than it did at the start of 2019. Yet global demand for shipping has increased by only about 5 percent. McKinsey partners discuss this puzzling phenomenon. |
| Getting more value out of maintenance | Companies have long viewed predictive maintenance, or PdM, as a panacea, but few have been able to deploy it at scale. Overcoming this challenge requires a systematic approach to the design, development, and implementation of PdM. |
| Pulp and paper’s digital future | While many pulp and paper companies have been automated for years, they are only now starting to reap the full potential of digital technologies. |
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| What problem were you trying to solve with this book? |
| What prompted me was realizing how deeply held people’s misconceptions of power are. I’m always stunned to see how many people equate power with position and assume that power belongs to the people higher up: the directors, the CEOs, the bosses. They fail to realize that power can be much more distributed; it can reside in the nooks and pockets of an organization that have little to do with rank. |
| We tend to personalize power and think, “Power is something that I have as a trait. I have certain characteristics that make me a powerful person.” But in reality, power is always relative. It depends on what the other individual in that relationship wants and whether you can provide it. |
| These misconceptions are deep—including that power is essentially a matter of manipulation and coercion. Power can be used for good or ill but is always in action. |
| You write that power affects us in similar ways. How do we experience power? |
| Power has very predictable and recognizable effects on our psyche. On the good side, power makes us feel in control and therefore capable of taking an action, taking a risk. And that’s obviously essential because without a sense that we can actually interact with our environment and act on it and have an impact, we do nothing. Feeling powerless is paralyzing. |
| On the bad side, there are two effects that power has on us when we finally experience it. The first is to make us overconfident, which can lead to a hubristic sense of invincibility. In the business world, there have been studies of CEOs succumbing to hubris. A lovely study I really like showed that CEOs who have been in the news, have received a lot of praise in the media, and get a lot of attention end up paying huge premiums in their acquisitions. They think that they can fix that company they have just acquired because, of course, they are so cool. |
| The second negative effect of power is self-focus. We can become uninterested in others—especially if the other person is lower down in the power hierarchy—because, fundamentally, we don’t think we need them. And so we’re not particularly curious about them, and, certainly, we’re not very sensitive to their needs and wants. |
| These two issues are massive because they undermine our effectiveness as leaders. If we are convinced we’re the best and we don’t need any input, we don’t get any input. And when we don’t get any input, our decisions are not as good as they could be. |
| What can leaders do to avoid these problems? |
| It may sound a little trite, but you fight hubris with humility, and you fight self-focus with empathy. |
| On the humility side, I have encountered leaders who surround themselves with a council of folks who are high-level enough and know the leader closely enough that they’re not afraid to speak. Too often, leaders are entirely unaware of how impossible they make it for people to tell them something that they’ve done wrong. If you are a leader and you do not have a council of this sort—make it happen. |
| The other idea I really like is for an organization to ask people to evaluate leaders not only on their competence, performance, or all of the wonderful things that we already measure but also on a measure of how humble they are, with questions such as “This person takes note of others’ strengths,” or “This person shows appreciation for the contributions of others,” or “This person acknowledges when others have more knowledge or skills.” |
| I love structures that allow leaders to be reminded that they’re not fabulous all the time, that they have limitations, that they need other people. |
| — Edited by Barbara Tierney |
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| BACKTALK |
| Have feedback or other ideas? We’d love to hear from you. |
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