When and how does a leader become aware that their own awareness is paramount to their company’s ability to change when necessary? Can self-awareness be systematized into the fabric of a company?
Transcript:
Steve Rice: When I think about the changes that companies have to go through, I think of that idea of “the way we’ve always done things” – which John sort of spoke to with the “hair on fire” company – they’re used to a certain way of doing things. I put that in the same box as The Sunken Cost Fallacy. It’s sort of a Sunken Activity Fallacy: “That’s how we’ve always done things.”
That’s what keeps you from making a realization that it’s time to stop doing things that way. So as a really functional, feet-on-the-ground kind of mechanism, I think it’s important to have that conversation, “What do we actually need to stop doing, that we’re doing right now, that is not really being helpful?” (We need to do this as humans, too.) And, “What should we start doing?”
As a leader, if you’re happy with the moment when you’re running a business where everyone is running around, and that’s really exciting to you – at some point, the ‘hair on fire’ is going to catch the rest of your body on fire, and you’re going to get burned out (to extend the metaphor…) So, to me, having that self awareness to at least check in and say, “Should we really still be running around like our hair is on fire? Or should we do it in a different way?”
That takes a lot of self awareness, I think, to get beyond that next moment.