Leaning into The New Zero™
I decided the inaugural post for this newsletter should be an introduction and overview of the topics I advise on, write and speak about: C-Suite leadership and The New Zero™. By Damon D'Amore
[For a deeper dive and more details into who I am, what I do, what this newlsetter is about and who it is for check out the ABOUT PAGE linked here.]
In the spring of 2020, the world was deep in crisis-mode when a Fortune 500 C-Suite client asked me to develop and implement a crisis-leadership program for her that would provide an immediate roadmap to regaining control of her confidence and clarity and the brand’s narrative.
Also, the program would need to be non-business unit specific, meaning that if it worked other C-Suite leaders in wholly different and unique pillars of the organization would be able to implement it immediately and without friction. (i.e. a crisis leadership plan for a Chief Marketing Officer would also be easily implemented for other executive roles such as a Chief Financial Officer or Chief Data Officer.)
The initial stress and culture-shock of businesses pausing operations and of first-ever lockdowns was compounded with a wave of uncertainty as the “Two weeks to slow the curve and go back to business as usual” came and went. Leaders had little to no information to share with customers or employees.
Lacking confidence in their ability to provide answers for key stakeholders quickly led to either a pause in communications punctuated with a “You’ll know when we know” message or, for some leaders their confidence dive manifested as decision paralysis. There was an immediate need to solve these issues and harness the adaptability to weather the current and future storms of uncertainty.
The New Zero™ program I developed emerged as a system to fulfill these needs and to address additional issues this executive was experiencing and prepared to potentially address any upcoming challenges she was witnessing other executives experiencing, both her corporate peers internally and other leaders in her broader network.
Conducting a survey of my own current and former C-suite clients at the time, all of these leaders expressed needs that fell into three distinct categories.
Psychological and Emotional Performance
The first category being a blend of psychological and emotional performance.
Most leaders in the C-Suite were experiencing their very first crisis in real-time and consequently never had their resiliency either developed or truly tested. There is a difference between resilience and grit, which is more of a tactical skill and implementation. Resilience is a hybrid of one’s mindset and worldview resulting in an unshakable confidence in their ability to weather any storm.
Grit is a tool. Resilience is a lifestyle.
Resilience, in my working definition, is one’s ability to wake up every morning knowing that things are going to go horribly wrong, but they and their stakeholders will not only survive but thrive - not based on some concocted fantasy and delusional self-talk but on the facts and data in their own lives and careers that justify their actions and confidence.
Other areas leaders were seeking help and advice in this category included finding some modicum of emotional relief in the chaos to clear their mind in order to calmly assess their situations and contemplate options. For those leaders with teams looking to them for guidance and answers, finding the space for emotional relief also meant showing their team that they were in control of their emotions and projecting calm.
This would by default inspire confidence in those team members who were still operating with little to no information, thereby giving leaders a time buffer to figure out and clearly communicate their situations and expectations to stakeholders.
Ultimately the result of emotional relief was motivation for the leader who now felt in control of themselves and, while they couldn’t control the outside events, they could control their emotional reaction and subsequent actions taken in response to those events. Also, their teams would be motivated to stay emotionally invested in their work during the crisis seeing they had a leader at the helm who seemed to ‘keep it together’ while others around them appeared lost at sea.
Rounding out the emotional and psychological portion of leaders’ needs were a trio of skills and abilities necessary to secure to lead forward once these leaders achieved emotional relief and the ability to calmly and critically assess and think without distraction. Listed in order of necessity to obtain, each of these three skills built on the next on the road back to functional leadership.
First was the need to overcome scarcity mindsets. Talent retention and preventing employees from quitting out of panic, concerns customers would abandon their brand, worries over supply chain and logistics and not being able to serve their customers if demand stayed strong, all these anxieties were rooted in scarcity.
Second was finding the capacity to switch from leading in a reactive to a proactive mindset. This was critical to instill confidence in both internal and external stakeholders that leaders and brands were no longer reacting to events and obstacles at whim as they arose but had a plan and were executing it to lean forward into the crisis and beyond.
The final skill for leaders was embodying a new level of confidence in the decisions they were making. Those who were able to gain control of their emotional states and manifest those positive feelings into actionable leadership were thriving by mid-2020.
Confidence was necessary to reinforce their decisions in the lonely hours of leadership, determining actions and reactions to threats that were coming at their business, and projecting that confidence when delegating execution instructions to their teams to ensure the highest degree of engagement and enthusiasm.
Storytelling For Stakeholders
The second category leaders were seeking immediate tools and resources for communications and more specifically, storytelling for stakeholders. Events were transpiring in business, culture and society faster than anyone had experienced in the past, all having major implications for businesses and individuals’ personal lives.
Brands and individual leaders associated with them were trying to keep up with public sentiment, appearing empathetic to their customers and at worst were losing the communications battle with customers and critics dictating terms of engagement on social media instead of curated press releases.
For some leaders’ priority one was to regain control of their brand or personal narratives associated with their company. For others it was to instill confidence in the consumer and investor markets by communicating a clear and consistent message across all communication channels.
Brands who executed this flawlessly were rewarded with brief but necessary periods of respite from critics and used that time to gain emotional relief and plan without distraction.
Navigating Ambiguity
The final category was a combination of actionable advice for crisis leadership and healthy transformation beyond the immediate crisis, optimistic that things would eventually get better, but nothing would be the same, the tools and resources to lead effectively and successfully in environments where it is necessary to navigate extreme ambiguity. This included proactive leadership techniques.
Consequently, the need arose for actionable strategic and scenario planning based on real-life crisis tested methods and models - nothing purely academic would be satisfactory.
Ultimately the end goal was the ability to confidently begin allocating resources for their business growth post-crisis, having the necessary resources to weather the current storm but leaning into their roles and allotting resources for new, high-growth projects and forward-leaning strategies in whatever form those may be post-crisis:
Entering new markets
Pivoting or delivering completely new products and services to retain customers with new needs or capture new business opportunities resulting directly from the crisis
Defending and capturing market share while competitors were stuck in responsive/reactive mode and these leaders found the time, energy and resources to begin to lean into the future.
A World of Willing and Reluctant Heros
In developing the New Zero™ program for multiple clients I rapidly began to realize the systems and processes that made up the program and its major pillars formed the foundation for a narrative structure that was much more broadly impactful than just being highly effective in the specific area of corporate communications.
This structure was valuable to a larger group of business leaders, with core elements relevant to corporate executives and founders down to small business owners aspiring to grow into a corporate or institutionally funded organization.
While the narrative framework in the Storytelling for Stakeholders pillar of the New Zero™ program is exceptionally detailed and references a combination of the wide range of traditional and proprietary storytelling structures, the most widely known is Joseph Campbell’s time-tested Hero’s Journey format.
One of the requirements of the Hero’s Journey and other transformational narratives is the mandate that the protagonist (individual or brand in our use case) must lean into an unknown future and, at some point, must willingly accept the call to adventure.
While some protagonists or ‘heroes’ for our circumstances are willing and excited to go on a transformational journey, others are hesitant, what we call ‘reluctant heroes,’ and it takes nudging from their stakeholders or even an ultimatum staring them down (business will collapse, team members and customers will flee, investors or market sentiment won’t just go from positive to neutral but loudly negative, etc.).
In the world and environment of The New Zero™ and since March 2020 all leaders were forced onto their unknown journey, willing and reluctant ones alike. By June 2020 it was clear that for survival there was no other option but to opt in to their path in a fog of ambiguity.
In the modern global business ecosystem, refusal of the growth journey is NOT an option - you will be IN IT because it’s the new culture/situation everyone is in. Unless you opt out of business altogether you need to be in the game. Depending on whether you embrace the adventure and complete your journey or if you are stuck in one part of your narrative map, you WILL suffer either way.
There are too many variables in the world of The New Zero™ not to suffer challenges and obstacles along the way.
However, if you overcome and realize your unique treasure in doing so, better and even unexpected outcomes will be yours both professionally and personally in terms of your self-actualization journey - delivering your stakeholders to their 2.0 existence and yourself to your individual 2.0 identity.
What is a Zero Point?
People say don’t hate the player, hate the game. Don’t hate the game - love the game and embrace the rules because you’re f@cking in it!” - Guy Ritchie
While at its core a Zero Point is a specific moment in the timeline of the life of a business or individual, it is also narrative term as it represents a point in the continuum of those narratives, how they are communicated to external stakeholders and also contribute to the internal shaping and maturing of a leader’s or brand’s core identity, worldview and value system.
The Zero Point determines by what means and in what manner the leader or brand will communicate with the world.
In addition to thousands of hours coaching and advising leaders since the start of the crisis in March 2020 I have interviewed more than 100 top business leaders on their experiences with respect to these topics in my upcoming book. These include public company Fortune 500 C-Suite executives and directors, private company C-Suite executives and directors, private equity and venture capital investors, large corporate advisers and consultants and also growth-stage founders and entrepreneurs who were scaling as the crisis hit.
The combined struggles, achievements and failures these leaders experienced have made clear the common fundamental skill sets of current and future leaders need to change to operate successfully in the new business environment - The New Zero™.
Foremost is the need for leaders to nurture and increase the capacity for controlling their own mindset, emotional and psychological wellbeing and ability to ground and reset at will to sustain prolonged forward-leaning activity in crisis environments and protracted times of operating in the fog of ambiguity.
As a leader you need to develop the capability to remove yourself from the frontline perspective of the day-to-day tactical chaos which is where most of your time and energy is spent in responsive mode, putting out fires instead of leaning forward into work that will lead to forward progress.
We all need the ability to rise to a strategic, global perspective to create a reliable map of the current territory. Only then can we develop a reliable map of the future.
With a clear and realistic strategic perspective comes the ability to set realistic and actionable goals, goals which you can confidently communicate to your stakeholders. Their engagement and advocacy will allow you to implement growth strategies once your survival has been secured in the crisis.
Leaders need a solid foundation to build on and fall back on when obstacles arise. With the dawn of the new business environment and culture you need to develop new and personalized systems for performance for yourself and your organization. Even within the same industries it is common for different organizations to have different specialized needs.
If you devote the time and resources to developing customized solutions your teams will more effectively, efficiently and successfully execute the growth strategies you worked so hard to develop while balancing tactical and strategic obligations. Additionally, these systems will allow you to measure progress for faster review, execution, iterations or pivots in fast-moving environments - all of which must be executed with high degrees of confidence.
Finally, as leaders we must all recognize and agree on the need for new methods and channels to communicate and control our personal and professional narratives in a world where advocacy, engagement and stakeholder loyalty are constantly tested and evaluated more than ever in the history of business.