Complacency or Reinvention: You Make the Call
Last week I spoke to a group of women at the 10th annual Women in Leadership Conference at Rice University in Houston. The event was sponsored by the Jones School of Business chapter of the National Association of Woman MBAs (NAWMBA). The conference theme was “Where to Next? Reinvent Your Career”. Having been a university professor for 15 years, I initially thought that I was an odd choice to serve as a speaker on reinventing one’s career. Professors, after all, tend to be a stable lot and I did not necessarily see myself as an exception in that regard.
But in the process of preparing my remarks I realized that I have in fact made numerous transitions in my career and have reinvented myself on more than one occasion, all the while staying firmly rooted in the same profession. For starters, I have changed employers four times in 15 years. All moves I initiated and all were motivated by a desire to challenge and develop myself through new experiences and opportunities that accompanied each transition. Each move became more complicated and more consequential than the ones they preceded, and with that came an element of fear: Fear of failure; fear of making decisions that would adversely affect my family; fear of leaving behind friends and colleagues and sense of comfort and familiarity for people and an organization that I knew less well; and fear of not living up to expectations.
It is precisely this fear that keeps many people from not embracing opportunities to change, or to experiment, grow and explore. That same fear could have easily paralyzed me and prevented me from leaving one university where I had experienced tremendous success, and a lifestyle that I particularly enjoyed. So why didn’t it?
I realize now that what I fear more than change is complacency – becoming too comfortable with status quo and in the end leaving potential on the table. For me the fear of complacency supplants the fear of failure. New opportunities inevitably pose new challenges, and with challenge comes risk. At that point, we have two choices. We can choose to either remain complacent, which is a tempting option when one is successful. Or we can choose to assume the risk that comes with reinvention.
The choice is as applicable to organizations and the executives that lead them as it is to an individual. And, like individuals, firms are just as susceptible to the fear of failure that comes with change. Yet it is precisely when complacency sets in that executives can become wooed into believing that there is no need for change and that the success that their firm is currently experiencing will endure. Enter Toyota (manufacturing challenge leading to massive product recalls), Kodak (nearly bankrupt at one point when their once pioneering film technology had given way to digital technology), and IBM (who waited too late to take seriously the threat of the personal computer). In each of these cases, the firms had spent decades at the top of their game. They were industry leaders to whom the competition was clamoring to catch up. But in the midst of their success they became complacent, and oblivious to the possibility that their products would one day become obsolete. More nimble, innovative, and hungry firms were better tuned to the pulse of the consumer and industry trends, and capitalized on their desire to innovate. Sure, IBM and Kodak eventually survived (as will Toyota), but at a tremendous cost to both their bottom line and their reputation. Change in response to a crisis (e.g., potential bankruptcy) is more difficult to pursue than change that is proactively initiated.
As I have said before, crisis leadership is not only about effectively responding to a situation, it is also about looking ahead, anticipating the future, and developing a vision and a plan for realizing that future. In other words, crisis leadership is about moving away from complacency and toward reinvention. Leadership is scary but my counsel has always been to allow that fear to motivate rather than debilitate. When you are of the mindset that failure is not an option, success becomes the only other alternative. So as with most things in life, leaders are faced with a tradeoff. Do you stay comfortable in the status quo and risk competitive threats down the road, or do you risk stepping out of the existing comfort zone to initiate change— to reinvent—not knowing what may lie ahead? You make the call!