The Manhattan hotel conference room was filled with recent graduates seeking guidance from seasoned veterans on how to launch their careers. All females. The C-level executives on the dais gave insightful advice and congratulated the graduates on reaching this point—an advanced degree. The final speaker, the Chief Legal Officer of a major food company, stood to give her remarks. She looked at the salon full of eager faces, and she paused, set aside her notes, took off her glasses, and, in a Lorraine Bracco tone of voice, said,
You young women amaze me. You have your next ten years planned out already. You’re far ahead of where my generation was. But I want to let you in on the secret of my generation, which I am sure my peers on this panel will echo. It’s the unexpected twists and turns in life that yield the greatest opportunities. I’d have never become who I am today if I had not jumped off the path to take a turn that no one would have predicted.
Successful leaders have a knack for sensing when a fork in the road will lead to transformative growth, as opposed to serving as a mere distraction. Former Girl Scouts CEO Frances Hesselbein—whom BusinessWeek called America’s “Best Manager,” and Peter Drucker said was “the best leader I’ve ever met”—called them “defining moments.” Andy Grove, the legendary co-founder of Intel, coined the term strategic inflection points to address these extraordinary shifts, distinguishing them from garden-variety change. He summarized this principle at Intel’s 1998 annual meeting: “We react to changes every day, but we don't necessarily tear the business up into pieces and put them back together for all of these changes.”
Grove said these inflection points alter how we think and act because they are ten times more impactful than the normal change businesses or industries encounter. But how do we identify and marshal the power of these opportunities in our own careers? Based on having had the honor to work with, learn from, and assist many extraordinary men and women for 35 years, I have witnessed and identified five behaviors shared by “change-agile” leaders, so dubbed by Edith Onderick-Harvey, managing partner of NextBridge Consulting (in a 2018 Harvard Business Review article), to define those who fully recognize the significance of such key moments.
Open to new ideas—daily. Change-agile leaders become adept at transformative change by first embracing day-to-day changes. These leaders actively invite their team members to provide new ideas and feedback that will help them refine, adapt, and enhance their work product and operations. While they may not adopt every idea, their antennae are always set to receive mode, they check their egos at the door, and they make it clear that thinking of new ways to achieve goals is fully respected and encouraged. By cultivating an innovative and entrepreneurial mindset among their team members, these leaders are more likely to leapfrog to new heights when the “big change” opportunities present themselves.
Attentive, and responsive, to the bigger picture. When the global pandemic hit, the restaurants that created outdoor patios with makeshift walls and portable heaters, stores that launched curbside delivery, new “to go” products, and expanded online shopping options, and airlines that kept their staff employed by shifting passenger jets to cargo carriers were among the businesses which thrived. They were attentive to the big picture change and agile enough to adapt quickly. In my own area of immigration and mobility options for major companies, we shifted our focus from routine visa filings to extraordinary travel exemptions, which made us an especially valuable (at times essential) partner to the senior executive corps of companies providing critical infrastructure during the pandemic.
Humble enough to face and surmount brutal realities. Vietnam War hero Admiral James Stockdale’s unflinching response to a horrible, dehumanizing experience is the basis of one of leadership expert Jim Collins’ most famous insights:
Productive change begins when you confront the brutal facts. Every good-to-great company embraced what we came to call the “Stockdale Paradox”: you must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the more brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
For an enterprise to stay healthy and relevant, the leaders have to face when what used to work well no longer does, and not feel threatened by that reality or protective of their previous approaches. Instead, the change-agile leader will confront this and creatively and thoughtfully reengineer and redirect. The brutal reality can spur leaders to develop the next level offering, and keep refreshing the enterprise.
Able to see the upside of the downside. No career is immune to failure. We make mistakes, we miss something, we get outbid, outpaced, and outplayed. These are tough moments when our tendency is to focus on what we could have done differently. But in fact, these temporary failures often expose the brutal realities we may otherwise miss. Failure both liberates us and pushes us; we have to think of new, imaginative ways to achieve success because past methods will no longer get the job done. The example of how supply chains reengineered their operations during the early days of COVID-19 epitomizes this concept; their resiliency is augmented and they are more prepared than ever before for the vulnerabilities of our changing world.
Having been born in Quito, Ecuador and having had to live by his wits since he joined the Ecuadorian military as an adolescent, my father the diplomat used to tell me that the secret to success is to find the opportunity in every challenge. “When life throws you a problem, look under it, look around it, look inside it, Liz, and you’ll find something marvelous.” His advice has never failed me, and I’ve learned to use failure to identify novel and amplified opportunities.
Know when to grab the next swing. Transformational change requires your most thoughtful and creative thinking, with input from your full team. You can’t just blink and hope it all works out; you have to critically assess the need for change and evaluate the options for a new course. But once you’ve conducted your analysis and tested your theories with wise counselors, you have to act. That change moment is what Grove called the “valley of death.”
The best metaphor I’ve ever heard for this is of the trapeze artist. The trapeze artist can’t hold on to the last swing, can’t hesitate, or she’ll fall into the abyss. She has to have the confidence to let go of the last swing, and grab the new one. That’s the secret the change-agile leaders understand; they know when to grab the next swing.
We begin a New Year, 2023, in an era of complete change. We’re seeing developments that were unimaginable at the turn of the century—a global pandemic, a land war in Europe, and nationalistic and racial polarization in every region of the world. But we’re also seeing magnificent perseverance and inventiveness in reaction to all these trends. It’s a time to consider how these changes impact our enterprises, and how to make sure that we identify the strategic inflection points; that we grab that next swing and soar!
Elizabeth “Liz” Espín Stern is managing partner of the Washington DC office of Mayer Brown (the world’s 23rd largest law firm), a former member of its Partnership Board, and spearheads its market-leading Global People Solution™ approach to optimizing every organization’s most vital asset: its human resources. Recipient of the “Immigration Trailblazer Award” (2018) and “Crisis Leadership Trailblazer Award” from National Law Journal, she was ranked by Financial Times as one of the world’s “Top 10 Most Innovative Legal Practitioners” (2020). Liz lives in Fairfax, Virginia.