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722: Where to Start in Survival Mode, with Rebecca Homkes
00:34:43
Rebecca Homkes: Survive, Reset, Thrive Rebecca Homkes is a high-growth strategy specialist and CEO and executive advisor. She is a Lecturer at the London Business School, Faculty at Duke Corporate Executive Education,
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- [00:01]
Dave Stahoviak
Uncertainty seems to be more and more the norm. Sometimes that leads an organization into survival mode. If that's where you are right now, this episode is the roadmap for what to do next. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 722, produced by Innovate, Learning, Maximizing Human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders and I'm your host, Dave Stahoviak. Leaders aren't born, they're made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. A challenge that almost every leader faces, maybe it's you right now, is how to respond in a moment of huge change, how to survive. When sometimes context, regulations, policies have changed around you or the organization itself has changed and the environment has changed. Where do you actually begin? Today, a key conversation on the starting points for how to handle survival mode and then what to do next. I am so pleased to welcome Rebecca Hamkiss to the show. She is a high growth strategy specialist and CEO and executive advisor. She is a lecturer at the London Business School, faculty at Duke Corporate Executive education and and advisor and faculty at the Boston Consulting Group focused on AI and climate and sustainability. She is the author of Survive, Reset, Thrive, Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times. Rebecca, so pleased to have you here.
- [01:44]
Rebecca Hamkiss
Dave, it's my absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
- [01:47]
Dave Stahoviak
Volatile times indeed. You know, so much happening in the world, politically, news, wise organizations, policy. And you highlight in the very beginning of the book that you wrote the book because you've seen firsthand how much we tend to get wrong about change. What is it that leaders tend to get wrong?
- [02:10]
Rebecca Hamkiss
Thanks for asking. Dave. Is one of the first things I noticed when we think about uncertainty or change is when we speak about uncertainty, we almost always frame it in a way that it's going to be bad. And I want you to watch for this. For me. When leaders speak to each other about uncertainty, almost always asking, hey, how are you handling uncertainty? How are you going to manage uncertainty? How are we getting through uncertainty? We put this word before it that frames our brains. It's going to be bad. And when you start with that frame, it actually really impairs your decision making and how you think about setting your organization up. So if we go back to the definition of uncertainty, which is quite simply a series of future events which may or may not occur, and whether or not those events are good or bad depends on what we're trying to do and how we're set up. And if you start with that frame, you have now opened up a whole other set of opportunities that you might be thinking about when it comes to your organization. So the reframe is absolutely critical.
- [03:09]
Dave Stahoviak
You do make this point so critically in the book and in your work that uncertainty doesn't always have to have bad consequences. And you write, one of the biggest traps preventing companies from thriving is seeing survive and thrive as opposites. They oscillate wildly between the two, overspending and lacking discipline and uptimes and overcutting and slowing too dramatically in downtimes. When everyone is growing, it is easy to forget that survive mode is just part of the loop. We do forget this, don't we?
- [03:43]
Rebecca Hamkiss
We. We do. We are so trained from early days that things are binary. You know, there's a upturn or there's a downturn, there's a recession or it's frothy. Things are going well or things that aren't going. And to this binary framing, we give ourselves linear checklists to get through to get from one aspect of the spectrum to the other. And that completely loses the sight of everything. In growth is a loop. Not a lot, and it sounds theoretical, but very practically that means you're always on this loop journey and all these different pieces connect to each other and you will never stay in one place for very long. And that's actually okay, right? Because you're constantly going on this growth journey in this growth loop. So stopping to see the opposites is critical. But what's even more critical is that the market might swing, but your business model doesn't have to. Part of survive, reset, thrive is always setting your organization up to survive and thrive, regardless of the market situation you might find yourself in.
- [04:42]
Dave Stahoviak
So a big part of this is mindset, and also part of this is a bit of the, dare I say, creativity that comes out of times of survive and change and context changing. Like part of that is just the reality of utilizing a situation, bad as it may be, to actually move us forward, right?
- [05:05]
Rebecca Hamkiss
Absolutely. Look, and a couple things happen, and I'm seeing this very much so recently as I'm going through so many different strategies is one we speak a lot about a growth mindset. And growth mindset is absolutely critical. And then any aspect of a market shock hits your organization and that growth mindset is gone, and you go into operational planning mode and protection mode. So what is growth mindset if not setting yourself and the organization up to see opportunities regardless of the environment? And the other notion is this word change. And what really has hit me recently, Dave, is that there's a Big difference between a performance culture and a growth culture is that we pride ourselves on performance culture. But how that often translates in the organization is checklists and operational metrics and sticking to plan. But as the world around us will continue to change at even increasing degrees, which is a firm belief of mine, that it will, we want to build in this growth culture, right? This growth mindset which says change is good. When the situation changes, we might need to change what we're doing and sometimes reset more completely what we're doing, even if our operational metrics are tracking. So that's a key piece to the survive, reset, thrive loop is performance when translated to hitting metrics might not give you the breakthrough growth that you're looking for as an organization.
- [06:20]
Dave Stahoviak
I'm so glad you mentioned this, because this is one of the paragraphs that I highlighted in the book, more than any other is you point to a mistake and I'm quoting you. Studies consistently show that executives are overconfident in their ability to predict the future, more so than the population as a whole. Often they do little more than guess and then feel the need to stick to their decision in order to justify past investments and avoid being wrong. This is reinforced by organizational governance systems that reward sticking to the plan. And I that last sentence in particular is we do tend to have a lot of systems, a lot of organizations that reward sticking to the plan. And yet oftentimes these days, like the plan needs to change, we need to adapt in real time.
- [07:05]
Rebecca Hamkiss
Yeah, you said exactly the right phrase. It's not that the plan was wrong. It might have been the appropriate plan based on the information we had. But the situation has changed. We now need to adapt. And you need to look no more than the very first meet a line that tends to begin most board meetings or strategy review meetings. If you just think about the first line, we tend to open with the question are we on track to plan? Which gives a couple of pretty critical assumptions, right? That assumes there was only one track. We got it right the first time, and the situation hasn't changed. I can't think of any company in any industry where I would take any one of those three, let alone all three assumptions. So we need to be starting these review meetings with the question, has the situation changed? And these little worded switches do quite a lot to shifting our brain. Yeah, if you look at the percentage of operational systems in place in organizations, again, in organizations that pride themselves on performance cultures, most of it's about did you make a commitment and absolutely stick to it? And there's a need to stick to commitments, but there's a bigger need to embrace change when that's what the situation calls for.
- [08:15]
Dave Stahoviak
And especially at the highest level. CEO, the executive team.
- [08:18]
Rebecca Hamkiss
Especially at the highest level.
- [08:19]
Dave Stahoviak
Yeah. One of the other propositions you make in the book is that no one can predict the future. And this sort of like, sounds funny in a way because of course, duh, right. We all sort of know that. And yet it is interesting how many articles, practices, exercises I've seen over the years to help people to do a better job at predicting the future. And there's a yes. And here, yes, we can all get better at predicting and thinking about probabilities. And yet sometimes we tend to over index on kind of going back to that quote. Like, we have this overconfidence in predicting the future. And we don't really think about the realities of like, okay, we not only can be wrong, we often are.
- [09:03]
Rebecca Hamkiss
And that's okay, right? A huge yes. And. And that's okay. Yes. When you see it, everyone has the same reaction, which is the right one. It's like, well, yeah, but, you know, last week I was with a big insurance company and they're like, well, we get paid to predict the future, Rebecca. It's like, well, come on now. But we can't. Right? But the bigger thing is not that we can or we cannot. It's where do you want to build capability? And I'm suggesting we want to build capability. Not getting better at predictions, but the real sweet spot capability, Dave, is making great decisions. And even though we can't make great predictions, focus on that capability, building a leadership team that can make great decisions, even though we can't make great predictions and get better and better at setting beliefs and refining them as we're making these choices based on them.
- [09:49]
Dave Stahoviak
All right, I want to ask you more about that distinction in a moment. Before I do, though. One of the other mistakes you point to is the just the human psychology around anchoring that. We tend to adopt the first explanation we hear that makes sense. And it is not unusual for someone who has a lot of experience in an organization, is a senior leader, to process something that's happening. Especially when an organization's in survival mode, create a narrative around it, very well intended. And then everyone sort of adopts that narrative and it's not always true. It can be a blind spot in many cases.
- [10:28]
Rebecca Hamkiss
How I like to set this up, Dave, is just give ourselves a little bit of permission. Here is our brains were not framed to be strategic. Let's acknowledge that Is that part of being great at strategy and leading strategy is acknowledging that our brain was formed to not do that. We're formed to make decisions based on framing. And framing does a lot of great things. We would not be able to function at the speed we do as humans without framing. But that leads into these two traps you've mentioned. One is recency bias. The thing that we saw, the most recent, we assume would be the biggest impact going forward, or anchoring, because something worked at a previous company or in a previous career span, I believe it's going to work again. And we've got to fight against those in this changing situation, say, hey, I need to constantly reframe so I can make better decisions. Which goes back to this key capability that we're trying to build. How do I make great decisions, even though I can't make great predictions?
- [11:25]
Dave Stahoviak
When you see leaders who are able to notice that, either in real time or shortly thereafter, that recency bias, that anchoring trap that they may fall into, what do you find is helpful to them either on their mindset or the actions they take, or maybe a bit of both, that helps them to just nudge a little bit more toward stepping back and reconsidering.
- [11:50]
Rebecca Hamkiss
Yeah, there's all of these governance processes you can put in place. And some colleagues of mine wrote a great book on this kind of called Red Flags. But linking it back to strategy, it's really having the discipline to tease out the difference between trends, beliefs and implications is we kind of have this entrepreneurial trap as leaders where we see a trend in the market, oh, there's going to be tariffs, there's going to be a new tax policy. My competitor is making this big move, another competitor consolidated. And we go to implication, because we're seeing this, we must do this. And that's when our framings kick in, because they tell us, hey, the last time you saw the situation, this action was the appropriate one. The pause point is articulate your belief. I'm seeing this trend, but what's my stance as a leadership team? What's the belief we're taking of how this is going to move and form over the next three to six years? And because if we take that belief, what implication would we make? So there's this power move in the middle. So it's not if X do Y, it's we are seeing X and we believe Y, which means Z for us. And then once you've got your belief, you can one figure out as a leadership team, are we aligned on a belief? You'd Be surprised how often you're not. And then we can start watching and testing that belief because we're going to get feedback on whether or not that belief pans out way before we get feedback on whether our market action does. So that's a pause point. Don't jump from I'm seeing something to an implication. I'm seeing X and we believe Y, which means Z for us.
- [13:20]
Dave Stahoviak
Well, and I think this comes back to a distinction you mentioned a moment ago that I mentioned. I'd love to loop back on of the distinction between making good decisions even when we cannot make good predictions. Could you play out that distinction a bit? And what's the implications of thinking about that differently?
- [13:40]
Rebecca Hamkiss
So there's a couple different things here which goes back to the premise that we can't predict the future. Right. Though some futurists might disagree with me, but I just take the assumption that I can't is how can I build better decision making capability? Which goes into these pieces of constantly reframing, of teasing out the beliefs, knowing that I've got to make decisions on beliefs sometimes, not always waiting for facts. As a team, there's a couple of very specific practical things you can do to boost decision making capability. And that's where you should put your center of gravity. How can we better codify decision making rights? One thing, Dave, that's actually quite powerful is just sit down with your team and say, hey, what makes a great decision here? What makes a great decision? Because in a period of uncertainty, they don't always match. A great decision can lead to a bad result and a bad decision can lead to a great result because the world changes around us. So you can't judge the quality of a decision on the result that it gets. And one very powerful thing you can do is say, let's just align. And what are the four or five variables that a great decision has to have at this team? And not only are we building capability, we're actually empowering people to move a lot faster. Because as long as I'm now making decisions within this framework or these variables, I am now empowered to make decisions at speed and scale, which is this ultimate competitive advantage in a world that's changing quite quickly.
- [14:59]
Dave Stahoviak
It's interesting how much of leadership, especially at the top levels, is about being able to make decisions, being able to make quick decisions in some cases, and yet how often either individual leaders or leadership teams don't necessarily have a stated framework for what's the process we use to make decisions. And it's really kind of the Outlier. When I see an organization or a team that's really taken the time to.
- [15:28]
Rebecca Hamkiss
Think that through, and that's why there's so very few of these true high performance, breakthrough growth organizations. You know, if you can, if you take the premise we're facing a world of uncertainty, then the ultimate competitive advantage, Dave, is something I call aligned speed. Right, aligned speed. Because if you think about it, alignment without speed is just frankly too slow to matter. Right. And speed without alignment is chaos. So we need them both. But alignment takes work. And most leaders don't prioritize the work that it takes to build alignment and build speed, yet do these things together and making good, quick decisions aligned with strategy. What's going to give you this key, key power in the environment, which is this aligned speed.
- [16:09]
Dave Stahoviak
One of the other directives that you have for us is to stop planning and start preparing. Yes, I think people will hear that and think, well, planning like that's so important, it's so valuable. So many of us plan in organizations. Tell me about the difference between those and why, especially in a moment of survival, the emphasis more on preparation.
- [16:32]
Rebecca Hamkiss
Yeah, we're not throwing planning away. So let's start there. Right. We still have many parts in the organization where planning is critical. You're doing an ERP implementation. Let's build a plan. You know, if we're doing some other operational aspects, build a plan. But when we're trying to lead growth initiatives, especially in new markets or new situations, or we're in survival mode in a changing environment, then planning is not always the best course of action. And I'm actually going as far as to wonder and actually suggest we shouldn't call them strategic plans. There's something about the word strategic plan, and that word plan just frames my brain. Everything in this must get done. And I don't take that notion with a strategy. Strategy is the living, breathing documents. And so we need to make this shift from planning to preparing. There's a couple big differences. You know, one is we're making decisions based on beliefs, not always waiting for facts. Now, that's not. Not making decisions based on data. We're not throwing data away. But in an evolving environment, historical data might not give me a good enough indicator of future trends. You know, I'm optimizing or leading to directions, which means I might not have a very firm fixed destination. And also I need to acknowledge that variables are going to emerge as I learn rather than having all of my metrics fixed for the first time. And it's fundamentally about optimizing for robustness, not always waiting for efficiency. And those are the couple. The big difference, again, thinking about making decisions based on beliefs, heading for a direction, not a destination. Acknowledge your variables are emerging, which I often say milestones, not metrics, have key milestones that you're going through in preparation mode. Even if you can't set these very precise metrics.
- [18:10]
Dave Stahoviak
When you see a team that is in that place of thinking about the preparation that you just described, what is it they do to frame the conversation? They're about to have to be able to focus a bit more there versus just writing out the plan.
- [18:27]
Rebecca Hamkiss
A couple big differences and one of the biggest ones is they start the conversation with their beliefs. How is the situation evolving? What are the key trends we need to watch for and what are our beliefs? The temptation in any environment, whether you're in survive mode or any other mode, is when you get to keen together. The first question is, well, what are our aspirations? Where do we want to be at the end of the year, at the end of three years? And that's not the first question. The first question is the beliefs. Those beliefs give you the foundation on which to make choices about how to win and where to play and critically then what to do. So starting with beliefs, not what we want to do or the goals we want to achieve, I see so many of these agendas and that's question one. I just think, well, I know you're not going to get that answer right and you're going to lose a lot of the conversation. Because once we've set that aspiration, the conversation turns to, well, how are we going to get there? Which then again frames us away from this environment that's changing around us. So it seems simple, but it's actually quite powerful in practice. It's changing that agenda. And starting with your beliefs, what does.
- [19:33]
Dave Stahoviak
A belief sound like for someone who's never really heard that articulated? Well, in a leadership meeting, when you hear an example of that, what does it sound like?
- [19:42]
Rebecca Hamkiss
So let's separate again. So a trend is something that I'm seeing. So I might be seeing supply chain shocks, I might be seeing consumers making a push more towards brand to live up to their sustainability standards, might be seeing a trend on slowing inflation. Then my belief would be, do I believe? Do we believe as a team supply chain shocks will normalize and this is temporary. Do we believe that supply chain partners will get increasingly fragmented and difficult and we need to fundamentally relook at how we approach supply chain? Do we believe geopolitical tensions could likely shut down some trading partners and therefore we need to start vetting new suppliers. More of the near homing our near friends rather than farther away is really teasing out the belief. So these are not religious dogmas, right? But just think a stance and I often like to simplify it, Dave, like this a trend is something I can see. So think of your eyeballs, you're seeing this. Your belief is almost like you're writing yourself a memo to the future. Think I'm saying, hey, 2027 Rebecca, 2025 Rebecca, solve this trend evolving in this way. So trends I'm seeing belief. I'm writing myself a memo in the future. Then once you're aligned on that belief, then I can start making choices. And you kind of want this Goldilocks zone of your belief. You want them clear enough that you can test them, but not so precise you're trying to predict. So I might have a belief that I believe over the strategy cycle. Let's take oil. The midterm floor of the oil price will be around $80 a barrel. That's a good belief. I'm saying roughly over the next two to three years, this is where we should price the floor versus me saying I believe oil will be 92 dol dollars February 1st. Now I'm getting in prediction territory, which I don't need to do right. To start making my strategy.
- [21:26]
Dave Stahoviak
And you could change your mind. Like part of the when I think about the word belief is like, okay, I have a belief in something, but I also am open to like changing my mind if the facts change, if the environment changes. I'm not locked into this quarter's numbers. Right.
- [21:39]
Rebecca Hamkiss
And even cooler than that, I'm going to get feedback on my belief way before I get feedback on whether or not my strategic priority is tracking. Right. This is the power and this is how we build that agility is I've set my beliefs, I've made choices based on those, but I'm parallel pathing. I'm actively testing my beliefs as I'm executing. And as those beliefs get affirmed, I resource that priority more. As the beliefs are unproven, I might pause. And when the beliefs are proven wrong, I might deprioritize that priority, if not change it completely or pause it until I learn more. Beliefs not only give us the power to change, which fundamentally we should change strategies as we're executing, but beliefs also build agility because now I know what I'm testing and watching and I can bring that feedback into my execution.
- [22:27]
Dave Stahoviak
Well, speaking of beliefs, one of the other directives you have for us is periods of uncertainty are a great time to grow. And I think about that statement and the word that you've chosen not only for the model, but the title of the book of Survive. Like when we get in survive mode, oftentimes we are just thinking about that almost entirely, like what do we do to save the organization, to save market share, whatever, right? And it is so hard to see that as an opportunity. And yet it gets back to that both and we were talking about earlier of it's a huge opportunity to think about this potentially as a growth zone for us.
- [23:05]
Rebecca Hamkiss
It's a massive opportunity. And I'm not saying that because I wrote a book about it. I'm saying because empirically it's true. It's incredibly true. Is periods of uncertainty are a great time to grow for hundreds of reasons. But let me give you the most powerful one. Periods of uncertainty are a great time to grow because they're a great time to learn. In periods of uncertainty, customers are much more clear on what they need. Consumers are much more honest and show you what they're willing to trade off from. Partners are much more honest and clear about what they need and what they don't. New talent is much more critical and clear about what they need from an employee, employer. You know, in frothy markets are very clear markets, we don't have that honesty and that leaning into learning. Periods of uncertainty are a great time to grow because they are the absolute best time to learn. These critical learning loops are shortened and accelerated in organizations that lean in and say, I'm not going to quote unquote waste for this to pass. Right. I'm going to lean into this uncertainty. Learn faster than others. And Dave, I'll give you the four words that make the biggest difference. Learn faster, grow faster. Organizations that learn faster are organizations that grow faster.
- [24:13]
Dave Stahoviak
I had never really thought about that distinction that when you're in that survival mode, like people have a tendency just to be more honest and upfront about all kinds of things. And how interesting. Like as an opportunity. Thinking of that, like back to that. How do you utilize this as a time to grow? You don't get that a lot of the time. And what an opportunity that is to.
- [24:35]
Rebecca Hamkiss
Not only build your organization's learning capability, but to lean and learn from the market. Absolutely.
- [24:40]
Dave Stahoviak
I think one of the things that's helpful a lot of times is thinking like, okay, what okay, I'm going to try to stop making as clear predictions, but what can I do to substitute that instead? And you have Two really critical questions that are helpful instead of trying to make predictions, the two questions, what could break us and what could make us. What's so significant about those two?
- [25:01]
Rebecca Hamkiss
Yes, well, one, again, we're going to go back from predicting the future, but if you have conversations with leaders about possible future scenarios, which again could be anything from changing regulation to changing administrations to tariff supply chain, et cetera, they almost always go into what we need to protect, what we need to hold onto. This protectionist mindset is very real. And so I change the question from what could happen because I can't answer that, because that's prediction territory, to what could make us or what could break us. And I call these kickers and killers. And the powerful thing is, and you can just even use something like tariffs as an example, what would really break us? What level of tariffs and where would actually break the business model? And one, you realize you have much fewer kickers, sorry, much fewer killers than you thought. But the kickers is a much more powerful part of this, Dave, and I'll tell you why. Because when I'm with a team and I say, okay, give me 10 killers, based on these couple of trends, they can usually rattle off 10 or 15 within a few minutes. But then if we say give me 10 or 15 kickers, like big outsize opportunities, it takes an hour, if not more. And it's just so startling to me time and time to say, wow, we really have not trained ourselves or worked to build our capability about identifying opportunities from uncertainty. We are so geared into the governance, risk management, protectionist mode. And it's so powerful. And one of the reasons it's powerful is that when you actually start brainstorming these kickers, half of them are just quick wins, things we could start doing right now. We've just never given ourselves a time to put some of these things on the table. So it's one of my favorite conversations. And I'll repeat, when things are changing, don't spend any more time saying what could happen, just as a team, say what could make us and what could break us, but promise me you'll spend three times longer on the what could make us, because that's where it needs the time.
- [26:57]
Dave Stahoviak
And it gets right back to that statement. Periods of uncertainty are a great time to grow.
- [27:01]
Rebecca Hamkiss
Absolute best time to grow.
- [27:02]
Dave Stahoviak
Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting, like thinking about this model that you've developed through your work and research. And as you talk about in the book, part of this was inspired by the pandemic, of course, the huge survival mode that everyone went into literally overnight, right? And thinking through and starting to frame like, okay, what did organizations do well, through that. You've been working on this now for four or five years. The book Coming Together, the model. Speaking of beliefs, I'm curious. As you've worked with teams, helped organizations to not only survive but thrive, what, if anything, have you changed your mind on?
- [27:43]
Rebecca Hamkiss
A couple of things. One, less of a change of mind and more realize the power is that middle word of the reset, right, Is that we tend to flip between the two. Don't just survive, thrive. If you want to thrive, you've got to survive. But what's become absolutely clear to me, not just the last five since the pandemic, but the last 15 or so because that's so many other big global events, from wars to breasts, et cetera, is the reset is the power move. You can go through all the survival steps well, but if you're not prepared to really reset, challenge all the fundamental assumptions and change, thrive is not there. That's been a big one. And the second is growth is a capability. It doesn't just happen. I didn't used to know it sounds like all you used to think, but I just kind of assumed when I started, hey, if you go through these pieces, you do this right, you'll get into this thrive mode. Wow. Dave, is growth the capability and you've got to actively commit as a leadership team. I'm actually not going to do what I need to do as an organization to build growth. I need to invest in building the capability of my leadership team that they can lead growth. And that's a pretty heavy lift too, that a lot of executives aren't either prepared to make or don't realize that they need to make. We have this notion, just give it to smart people and they'll get it done. That's not happening out there. So you've really got to invest in this capability. And that has become clearer and clearer to me over these past couple of years. Almost kind of just like getting hit by that brick wall, you know, it's like, wow, okay. Organizations who aren't willing to do this, they will not get in and let alone stay in this thrive mode.
- [29:20]
Dave Stahoviak
Rebecca Hamkus is the author of Survive Reset, Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile times. Rebecca, thank you so much for your work.
- [29:29]
Rebecca Hamkiss
No, thank you so much for having me. Love the conversation.
- [29:38]
Dave Stahoviak
If this conversation was helpful to you, three relationships related episodes, I'd recommend One of them is episode 499, the Way to Make Better Decisions. Annie Duke was my guest on that episode and we talked about the habit that a lot of us tend to do in decision making and in analyzing our decisions that she calls resulting. Resulting is the fallacy that if we got a good result, it means we made a good decision. She reminds us and cautions us that just because you had a good result doesn't mean you made a good decision. And the opposite's true too. Just because it was a bad outcome or bad result doesn't mean you made a bad decision. In that conversation we talk about how to actually make better decisions more broadly so that you do by and large have better results over time. Episode 499 for that also recommended episode 644 help your team embrace growth mindset. Eduardo Briseno was my guest on that episode. We talked about the importance of staying in a learning mode as an organization. Yes, we do need to perform. In fact, most of the time we should probably be there. We also need to be in learning mode at least part of the time. He talks in that conversation about how do we actually make that shift, how much time to spend there, ways to do that tactically, so much more. Episode 644 for that. And then finally, I recommend episode 701, how to handle high pressure situations. Dan Dworkus was my guest on that episode. I referenced this episode recently as well too. Emergency Room Doctor. Wonderful training and lessons for not only physicians, but all of us in tough situations, high stress, life and death. How to actually handle those situations and to stay emotionally sound so your emotions, the moment doesn't freeze you down, doesn't take over. So many wonderful reminders from him in that conversation that of course come right back into the survival mode conversation we had today. That's episode 701. All of those episodes you can find on the Coaching for Leadership. And if you have not set up your free membership, I'm inviting you to do so today. Go over to coaching4leaders.com set up your free membership. When you do, you're going to get access to a whole suite of resources inside the free membership, including the ability to search episodes by topic and as one of our members reminded me recently, also my own personal library. If you already have your free membership set up and say you're looking for a resource on decision making. As we talked a bit about today, go ahead and log in at coaching4leaders.com, go over to the sidebar. You'll see there's an icon that says Dave's Library. If you click on that, as I'm doing right now and you'll come up to a page with a whole page full of hashtags organized by topic. I'm clicking on the one right now that says decision making to see what's in here in the library. And I have data based in here. An article from Seth Godin, an episode from my friend Tom Henschel at the look of Sound of Leadership podcast. There's a resource here from Patrick Lencioni, a little bit more from Annie Duke. There's an article from Harvard Business Review and New York Times in here, a few more HBR articles. A lot of resources just on this topic. I have databased thousands of articles, podcasts, YouTube videos over the years that I think are going to be helpful to you. Anytime I find something, I put it in this database and it's all freely accessible for you. All you need to do is just set up your free membership@coaching4leaders.com Click on Dave's Library. You're going to find a ton more that you're looking for right now. And one of the other things that comes up in conversations about survival mode is inevitably accountability, holding people accountable for results. You often hear that when organizations are in a time of struggle that we need to have the results and have accountability. Yes, of course. Accountability is an important principle that all of us as leaders need to bring into our work regularly. The key question though, is the how and the timing. And in a recent journal entry I talked about a time when accountability should come last, particularly when we're thinking about organizational change. I explored that in detail, not just the principle of accountability, but more importantly, when is accountability right and what is the time that it comes last? If you'd like to receive those journal entries from me every single week, it is part of Coaching for Leaders Plus. To find out more, go over to Coaching 4 Leaders Plus. Receiving my weekly journal entries right here in boxes. One of the major benefits of Coaching for Leaders Plus. I hope you'll check it out if it'd be helpful to you. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest Next this Monday I'm glad to welcome Melody Wilding to the show. We are going to be having a conversation on how to create more visibility for your work. Join me for that conversation with Melody. Have a great week and see you back on Monday.