The Better Way To Win: Leading In A Time of Crisis

There has rarely been a time where business leaders are universally managing in crisis. Remote working, the Great Resignation, economic challenges, cost challenges, supply chain issues, and the impact of technological advancements, such as AI create managerial challenges perhaps as never before. And yet, ever-increasing expectations and investor demands must still be met.

The widely accepted belief that a leader’s job is to hit targets and manage their numbers is magnifying the crisis. Paradoxically, it’s this myopic obsession with financial performance that will ultimately damage profitability and end up creating an even greater crisis. Instead, now is the exact time to view the leader’s role in an entirely different light, which is that leader’s are primarily responsible for creating and sustaining an eco-system that encourages and supports over-performance by every individual in the organization, producing results that exceed expectations consistently.

The key insight is that leaders should stop managing the outputs and instead focus on the inputs, the core of which is the corporate culture. The barrier to this being widely accepted is that culture is widely misunderstood and that it is often seen as a softer science with a vague ROI, rather than the powerful engine from which all results are generated. It’s often quoted that one manages what they measure, yet cultural measures are often vague and general in nature.

I discovered this firsthand when faced with a crisis as an executive at one of the UK’s largest banks and discovered the recipe for a powerful transformation from a dysfunctional culture to one of the highest performing banks in the world. Here is what happened.

One Friday evening, as I was preparing to head home after a long day in my new job as an executive at Barclays in London, the phone rang. It was a producer at the BBC who told us that we would be on national TV on Sunday. They had embedded three reporters on our staff in branches and call centers and had video recorded training, meetings, and interviews with their fellow “colleagues” revealing a toxic culture where customer well-being had taken a back seat to hitting financial targets. The show was called Whistleblower, and it gave a clear message that our new management team was not facing just poor management behaviors, but we had a toxic culture that had to be addressed holistically....and in record time.

What resulted was a cultural overhaul for 30,000 employees that became one of the most dramatic turnarounds in UK banking history.

Come on the journey with me and see:

• How the myopic focus on profitability ironically damages profitability
• How to spot the early signs of cultural degradation before crisis strikes
• How the P&L of People and Leadership are the twin keys to unlocking stellar financial performance
• How to structure the creation of an intentional culture serving a common purpose

You will learn how to sustain an intentional culture by streamlining communications to end virtue signaling and connect with your organization on an entirely new, and deeper level. More relevant today than ever before, read along and see that there is, indeed, A Better Way To Win!