A very Happy New Year to you all from all of us at Greig Melville Associates Limited!
Looking back, I think that if the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that as employers, we have learned to be agile; we’ve surprised ourselves with our capacity to change our traditional thinking as leaders. We’ve embraced three important principles:
- We are fundamentally able to change, quickly and in various ways.
- Emotions are at the heart of our propensity to change.
- Change is not a project – it is constant.
Campbell Macpherson from Henley Business School firmly believes that the way forward in this post-pandemic world is to treat everyone as individuals.
Many of you, our clients, have had to be innovative and creative – we’ve all recognised that things won’t ever go back to the way they used to be. Our people have changed – their lives have changed and we, as employers and leaders, need to revisit our strategic fundamentals and lead change within our teams in order to effect change within our businesses.
Worldwide, we’ve experienced a traumatising event over the last three years – we’ve been through a collective bereavement process and finally – hopefully – we’re heading for the last point on the curve illustrated in the diagram below – integration.
How many of us up until now have glossy five-year plans on our desks or in our drawers, but now is the time to adapt our strategic thinking – not to short-termism but in being flexible and building our strategy on clear fundamentals: who our business exists to serve and why, what makes us special and what gives us the right to succeed.
Let’s show our teams that being happy and healthy are the ingredients of success, not the outcomes from success. We should focus on developing people as individuals: instil in them the confidence to use their ingenuity, wisdom, and compassion to shape a better future; give them the skills to accept uncertainty and embrace the inevitable changes that lie ahead.