Why did some companies thrive during the Covid-19 pandemic while others struggled?
Keith Ferrazzi, founder of the consulting firm Ferrazzi Greenlight, surveyed more than 2,000 executives to learn how they changed their operations during the pandemic. The results show that some companies had already been cultivating a kind of extreme adaptability before the pandemic. That practice helped them come out on top.
In this episode, Ferrazzi outlines the concrete steps organizations can take to cultivate the resilience and agility to stay competitive in the post-Covid-19 world.
Key episode topics include: strategy, adaptive leadership, organizational transformation, collaboration and teams.
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HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Strategy—case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business.
Why did some companies thrive during the COVID-19 pandemic while others struggled?
Keith Ferrazzi, founder of the consulting firm Ferrazzi Greenlight, surveyed more than 2,000 executives to learn how they changed their operations during the pandemic. The results show that some companies had already been cultivating a kind of extreme adaptability before the pandemic. And that helped them come out on top.
In this episode, Ferrazzi outlines the concrete steps your company can take to cultivate the resilience and agility to stay competitive—with plenty of real-world examples.
This episode originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in February 2022. Here it is.
CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.
There’s a basic practice of driving a car that applies to business downturns and unexpected detours. And that’s driving in a curve. When you approach one, it’s best to slow down before you get to it. You don’t slam the brakes when you’re in it, that’s dangerous. And then partway through the curve, you start hitting the gas pedal and accelerate out of the curve.
Companies that do this in economic downturns can come out of them in a very different competitive position. Research shows that many of those that invest in technology and their workforces while still in the recession go from being industry laggards to leaders.
And today’s guest says that applies to the current curve ball that’s been thrown at businesses, the pandemic. He says it would be a mistake to come out of it thinking, it’s time to go back to work, back to a new normal. Rather, he makes the case that organizations and their leaders need to keep leveling up all of this nimbleness and resilience they’ve learned over the last couple of years to slingshot forward into the future.
Our guest today is Keith Ferrazzi. He’s the founder of the consulting firm, Ferrazzi Greenlight. And he’s the lead author of the book, Competing in the New World of Work: How Radical Adaptability Separates the Best from the Rest. Hey, Keith, thanks for coming on the show.
KEITH FERRAZZI: Curt, what a great introduction. Thank you so much for that. And it’s great to see you again.
CURT NICKISCH: Adaptability has always been a powerful business concept, right? But you’ve got that word radical in the title, radical adaptability. It’s almost like you’re trying to shake people a little bit by their shoulders. Do you sense some complacency out there?
KEITH FERRAZZI: Oh, absolutely. When we went into the pandemic, it’s not like we didn’t have a dearth of volatility. We’ve been dealing in volatility for decades. And we’ve been dealing with a pace of change for decades that many organizations have failed to keep up with. And all of a sudden we hit the pandemic. I love your analogy. We go into the curve. And the question is, how do we adapt to the most radical volatility we ever have?
Now, many organizations have had aspects of agility and foresight and others embedded into some parts of their business. But very few organizations were fully prepared for the level of adaptability that was going to be necessary. If you look at the process called agile, many organizations might have had isolated elements of agile going on in their software, their IT division. Maybe program, project management.
But we entered an era where we were in what I called crisis agile, up and down the organization. What have we gotten done? What do we need to do next? Where are we struggling? And that was a daily activity. I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to lose that. There was so much attentiveness to the nuance of change and stepping up and meeting it in more innovative ways than ever before. I want to hold onto that and go forward to work, not back to work.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. And why? I mean, do you have the sense that something changed during the pandemic that is here to stay?
KEITH FERRAZZI: Well, as I mentioned, I feel that the level of volatility has been there for some time, but we were able to cling by our fingertips on the ledge to old ways of working that weren’t working for us, even in the decades prior to the pandemic. In the pandemic, everything broke. And we definitely were fractured, frustrated, fearful, and we needed to change new ways of working.
Those that did thrived. The basis, Curt, of our research was that we identified 2,000 executives during the pandemic. And we worked with those 2,000 executives to ask them the question, what did you see, you and your team and your organization doing that truly allowed you to succeed, thrive, maybe just survive, but ideally succeed and thrive during the pandemic so that we could hold onto those. And we aggregated those best practices and we actually inserted them into new organizations. Measured the outcomes of those best practices until we had really created this methodology of radical adaptability, that we decided all organizations should hang on to coming out of the pandemic.
CURT NICKISCH: Now, in your book, you look at ways to make teams radically adaptable, and then also how to do the same for organizations. Let’s start with teams. You challenge team leaders to promote team resilience. I want to ask why that is because a lot of people might think, “Well, we’ve learned to be resilient.”
KEITH FERRAZZI: What we identified in the research was that resilience was thought of as an individual sport. It was, I am resilient. What we saw though were that the organizations that thrived and had better engagement scores, less reported mental stress, stronger mental resilience, these organizations recognized that resilience was actually a team sport, where the team adopted a commitment to raise each other’s energy, to identify each other’s energy.
I’ll give you another very simple nugget or a practice that came out of the chapter around resilience, which is a leader doing a monthly energy check. I just did it this morning, actually, with a client, where you just go to the chat room and you say to your team, “How is your energy these days? From a scale of zero, I’m lying in the mud puddle, all the way to a five, which is I’m skipping on rainbows with unicorns. Put your energy level in the chat room.”
Now, in this case, there were three individuals that had scores between zero and two. It was actually, it was a zero, one and a two. But it allowed us to pause and say, “Jane is everything okay? I see you put a two.” Jane’s answer was, “Well, last night was just a tough night with the kids. They were up all night.” “Got it. Hope you get some rest.”
But in one other instance with David, David actually reported that his spouse needed a kidney transplant. And the family’s been struggling with that. Now, this was an individual who was the head of HR of this company. And this was something they had discovered two weeks before, but the team didn’t know about it.
And it was such a simple and elegant safety net practice to bring into a team, but it’s more than just that. It creates bonding, empathy and relationship, which then breeds higher degree of psychological safety for risk-taking and for a challenger sense of safety in the room, et cetera. So there’s so many goodies that come from that simple, elegant little practice.
CURT NICKISCH: You also challenge leaders to get their teams to develop active foresight. And it seems like an interesting time to do that because a lot of people are kind of looking forward to the coming out of the curve and enjoying the straightaway for a while. And you’re encouraging them to look ahead and see more curves, and try to learn to see around the curves that are coming.
KEITH FERRAZZI: Yeah. Two of the most important elements to a team’s radical adaptability are agility and foresight, as you’ve suggested. Now, those two are beautiful as bookends to each other. The foresight is identifying and gaining the insights of where should we be g