The average CEO tenure is five years. Using that time to do what matters most will shape the rest of your life. Discover the difference between free spirits and seagulls – and learn how free spirit CEOs create missions that matter.
“One late summer afternoon, I am sitting on top of a mountain in northern Sweden. The ocean below me is calm and stretches toward an open horizon. There is no other human being in sight and barely a sound can be heard. Only a solitary seagull is gliding on the wind. Like so many times before, I find it mesmerizing to follow a seagull as it hovers in the air and lingers over the landscape… As the seagull stretches its wings and turns toward an adjacent mountain, I try to imagine how the wind may feel and how the landscape may appear for the seagull.” – Martin Hägglund, This Life
An old mentor of mine once teased me by saying that missions are for the birds. That mentor shaped my career but, nonetheless, I take missions seriously. My career has been a 20-year journey to prove that missions are absolutely not for the birds. They shape what matters; they dictate what an organisation values. When society itself is transforming, steering an organisation’s sense of mission is the CEO’s most important responsibility. That’s why my business is called Missions That Matter.
Missions go to the heart of human freedom. All animals have a measure of freedom but, as far as we know, humans are the only animals with what philosopher Martin Hägglund calls ‘spiritual freedom’: the freedom to question which values and norms to obey and which ends to pursue. Non-human animals, such as seagulls, have only ‘natural freedom’. Yes, seagulls decide when to take off from a cliff ledge, how long to glide for and when to dive after a fish, but all these choices are made within a framework of acceptable possibilities, a framework that is given to them.
Most CEOs, confident masters of today’s world, consider what they should do but within the norms, goals and values of the current industry and business community. They are seagull CEOs.
Virtuoso and especially history-making CEOs are free spirits who ask not just “what should we do?” but “should we do what we supposedly should do?” They question the basic style of their world and the rules of the game. They don’t just modify what has worked before. They look for another path.
The precariousness of life
In the TV series Mrs America, Alice Macray (pictured in the car) says to the über-conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly: “I like not having to ask him [my husband] for pin money. It’s empowering.” Alice, Phyllis’s trusty lieutenant, has just stepped out from her shadow by taking a job. “You used to feel empowered by me,” says Phyllis. “I used to feel scared,” replies Alice. Her reply marks the beginning of the end for Phyllis’s world.
And for many this year, the world has changed forever. 9.3m jobs have been furloughed in the UK and 47% of UK employees are working from home. In the US, unemployment rates have hit 13%. Almost all of us are now experiencing the precariousness of the ‘free-market-free-agent’ life that CEOs have been inspired to create over the last 40 years. As more people feel the downside of that precariousness, the values and whole style of freedom itself will come into question.
The seagull CEO will address the precariousness of their business by repeating moves that they have seen and executed many times before. At best, they will do enough to survive but they will also entrench that precariousness of life for others. For an example, look at how Tim Wetherspoon handled the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. By contrast, the free spirit CEO seizes the opportunity to create a new masterpiece of a business.
We can see how this works if we look at the world of agency staffing. Here is an industry where many buyers and agencies view workers as little more than liabilities. Agency workers are promoted as a cash saving. Temps often sign complex online T&Cs without reading them. Holiday pay and other benefits are treated as options rather than entitlements. And the seagull CEOs of this agency staffing world entrench these practices.
Yet one free spirit CEO of an employment agency that I worked with turned this world upside down. She refused to work with organisations who viewed people as costs. For her, the people were everything and it was no longer about saving money but investing in talent. With my help, she created a mission that mattered.
So how do you design the mission that matters to you? How do you create your masterpiece? Here are two pre-requisites and three key steps in brief.
First, the pre-requisites:
1 Gather your virtuosos. Unlike seagulls, free spirit CEOs do not get lost amidst strategy analysts, big data and rational strategising. Instead, they are constantly alive to the particularities of their situation and the ways that wider values are transforming. Make sure that you, or key members of your senior team, are hands-on virtuosos with practical insights into your organisation’s work and a historical perspective of how that work has changed over the years. So-called “vertical development” assessments of leadership capacity and capability can help identify your virtuosos. Be especially wary of relying on external management consultants who can only develop an abstract and detached sense of your organisation’s history and uniqueness.
2 Put your mind in the right place. Learn to think. The technological revolution has dazzled and captivated us to such an extent that many now believe that the only way of thinking is calculative thinking – being logical, solving problems. It’s not. There is a much more powerful form of thinking – a radical open-mindedness that interrupts blind submission to the world we are familiar with. To think outside the box you must establish the right mood of composure twinned with courage to think again. Being a free-spirit CEO will require it.
Now, the steps:
1 Identify the big threat coming from the future. This is the threat that could mean not just the death of your products, processes and technologies but the existential death of the whole style of your familiar business world. Use scenarios to see what is coming, face up to that death and accept it. Seagulls don’t see the big threat.
2 Be a time traveller. Explore the ways in which the style of your industry has changed over history. The free-spirited agency CEO I mentioned earlier looked back through the evolution of her own sector since the Second World War as well as her and her team’s own personal histories to see how radically different her industry had been in the past – and could be again in the future. Hear what calls you from the past as a response to the big threat coming towards you from the future.
3 Take your stand. Define a mission that builds on what calls you from the past and addresses the big threat. Mobilise with fierce sacrifices and daring moves that will change the world. Ensure those moves cut off any way back and demonstrate to your people that you are committed wholeheartedly to a new future. Leave the seagulls to do what they will do – and embrace your free spirit.
As an experienced strategic mentor to CEOs, I can enable you to discover and realise the mission that matters to you. Contact me through LinkedIn or visit Missions That Matter.
© 2020 Missions That Matter