How Pre-Flection Gives Leaders Clarity Before the Meeting Starts

Most leaders I speak to at the start of a year know what they want to achieve. What they struggle with is building a plan that holds up when the ground shifts beneath them.

Work conversations right now are dominated by getting clear and setting goals. The leaders I am talking to feel like this year risks being more of the same unless they think about it differently. So I wanted to share something that has been coming up repeatedly in those conversations.

How do you get clear for yourself so you can provide clarity to your team? And what happens to that clarity when things change?

Many businesses have forgotten what a pre-COVID tempo looked like, and many more paused over Christmas before sprinting straight back into it. Even with distribution plans in place, the vaccine rollout takes time. New strains are emerging with varying susceptibility to existing vaccines. The picture is not settled.

My counsel in these situations is to take a pause and plan out three scenarios.

1. The good – the vaccine works and your business returns to normal soon.
2. The likely – the first six months are hard, so you pace yourself carefully and act with more deliberate strategy.
3. The bad – a new wave puts you into another round of lockdowns and your business is disrupted again.

Take the strategic priorities you have set for the year and overlay those three scenarios, plotting out what you will do if each one comes to pass. Some questions worth sitting with:

• Are there activities that will happen regardless of which scenario unfolds?
• Are there things that should be initiated now to manage a potential shift – safeguards, pivot plans?
• What will you be comfortable achieving, or not achieving, in each scenario?
• Are there priorities you would let go of if one scenario moves to another?
• How will your team be affected by each scenario, and how do you plan to lead through that?

Taking reflection time before the pressure arrives – pre-flection – helps you feel clearer and gives your team something solid to work from. Having a plan across the three scenarios also lets you see what is common and what differs, so that when a decision is needed, you are making it from a position of prior thought rather than in the heat of the moment.

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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