3 Leadership Skills to Help Small Business Owners Prepare for the Future with Elatia Abate

Transcription:

Jim Fitzpatrick:
So thank you so much, Elatia, for joining us on the show today.

Elatia Abate:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited about the conversation.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure, as we are as well. So talk to us about the workplace today and what we’re seeing out there.

Elatia Abate:
Well, I think bottom line, everything is changing, and the one thing that we can expect is that that change is going to continue to happen. So the first and most important thing that anybody can do is stop waiting for everything to stop or everything to go back to normal in order to then do the thing that they want to do. It’s going to be like this, so now is the time to dive in.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
I’m so glad you said that because I find myself falling into that role, where I just want to get into a cocoon and say, “I’ll wait till things normalize.” And that is the wrong approach, right?

Elatia Abate:
It is the wrong approach because not only are we seeing a lot of change, that change is going to continue to accelerate, and that acceleration is going to continue to accelerate. So the best thing that we can do in preparation for that, and this goes to your point about future proofing versus future preparing, is say all right, since we’re here, since everything is changing, how do we want to learn to dance with this change and see it for the opportunity that it really is?

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Right, right. What is the next wave of disruption look like, and how will it impact work as we know it?

Elatia Abate:
Yeah, so what we’re looking at here, I think, very tactically, practically right now with a recession looming, with the Great Resignation shifting through the marketplace right now, we’re going to see a lot of these dynamics and conversations still around is there going to be remote work? Is there going to be hybrid work? How are we going to manage a workforce? How are we going to ensure that we have inclusive workplaces and spaces in the face of all of this change? I think that’s most immediate term, and though when we start to look at some of the bigger technological shifts that are happening… A study came out 2017, 2018, saying that 85% of the jobs that are going to exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Oh my gosh. 85%, that’s incredible.

Elatia Abate:
Isn’t it amazing?

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Wow.

Elatia Abate:
And so while we hear a lot of robots are coming for us, the world is coming to an end, there’s actually a lot more opportunity on the horizon. So how might we be able to have a look at what’s here and coming and prepare ourselves to take advantage of it?

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Oh, that’s so true. And if you think about that, you look back just 10 or 20 years ago and how the world has changed so much and all of the new opportunities that have been in just the last 20 years. So I guess that number does make sense when you really think about it that way, right? Talk to us about the new career paths and job roles that will emerge as disruption continues.

Elatia Abate:
Yeah, so I think first and foremost, as a baseline, there’s a shift in how we think about our careers. So most of us have been taught to think about careers in terms of a ladder model. So we go to school, we study something, we graduate, and we say, “Okay, I’m going to do this now forever and ever and do simply more sophisticated versions of that as I climb up a ladder.” But the world has shifted and that one-track mentality doesn’t work anymore. And so if we shift over to thinking about our careers in terms of a mosaic that’s rooted in what we value, what we’re capable of doing, and how we want to bring those gifts to the marketplace, we’ll be much more nimble when things start to go oddly as we move down the track.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right.

Elatia Abate:
But when we look at what kinds of opportunities are available on the tech front, looking at things like Chief Metaverse Officer, which is a job title that already exists today, or Metaverse Community Manager, everything that exists in the physical world is coming into the virtual space. How do we have a technology that’s more inclusive, so vice presidents of belonging, equity, diversity in technology design? We need folks who are going to help us with the transition. So industry transition consultants who can say, “All right, real estate used to look like this. It’s going to look like this. This is how you get your business moving from point A to point B so you can continue to thrive.”

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right.

Elatia Abate:
And then finally, psychologically. We need chief resilience officers and their team members to help us think not only strategically, how do we make our organization thrive in the face of great disruption, but mentally, how do we make our resilience so that it’s not just a survival thing, but that it’s actually regenerative? So again, we thrive in the transition and uncertainty as opposed to struggling through it.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right. And as you know, so many small business owners don’t allocate the necessary time to that type of thinking. We can get down and keep our nose to the grindstone and keep cranking out whatever we’re doing each day. But so many of us fail to look down the road maybe five years or 10 years to see, what does that look like and what are the changes that we need to make today in our personnel, in our offerings, in our business model, to be able to adapt and win and thrive in that new way, right?

Elatia Abate:
Yeah, and so one of the things as a small business owner, of course, we’re looking at producing results this quarter, this month, this week. We want our businesses to be thriving right now. One of the key characteristics that we can all develop in terms of our leadership is this thing that I call simultaneous strategy, which encompasses both yes, producing results right now, and trends thinking at the same time. So how do we broaden our intellectual capacity or problem-solving capacity to combine both together?

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Yeah, it’s so important. And so what are some of the other ways that professionals can begin to prepare for these new careers ahead?

Elatia Abate:
Yeah, so first and foremost, you don’t want to think about future proofing. You want to think about future preparing because we cannot stop the change that’s here on the horizon. We’re not going to stop it. We’re not going to slow it down. It would be like taking a mop and going to the Pacific Ocean and trying to dry the thing up. So we don’t want to do that.

Elatia Abate:
So how can you future prepare? First and foremost, there is a leadership skill that I call regenerative resilience. So it’s how do we thrive no matter how great the disruption is and in continued and ongoing disruption. First, it’s clarity of vision. What we want to create, why that’s important to us, and then learning how to make decisions, or choosing to make decisions, that only are aligned with the things that you value the most and what you’re bringing into the world.

Elatia Abate:
The second piece of that is fearlessness, not courage. We don’t want courage in the face of all of this change because courage burns us out. Feeling the fear and doing it anyway works if you want to try parachuting but not if you’re looking at sustained uncertainty. So how do we learn how to challenge the assumptions that we have about what’s happening in the world so that we aren’t cornered in by a lack of options, and how do we learn to manage literally the chemicals that are running around in our bodies so that we don’t need to feel the fear?

Elatia Abate:
And then finally, connection. How do we leverage the networks that we have to build community that’s going to help us thrive in the face of great disruption?

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right.

Elatia Abate:
So regenerative resilience, that simultaneous strategy piece. And then there’s a third one, which I call empathetic curiosity. So it moves even beyond empathy. How can we understand what’s happening in our coworkers’ worlds, in our competition’s worlds, so that we can continue to add value in the spaces that we navigate?

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right. You know, we speak to so many different business owners here at the show and on myasbn.com, and a lot of business owners have told me that through COVID-19 and what they’ve learned about their businesses and running them better and running them more efficiently, that they really learned a lot about not only their own personal capabilities and making it through tough times, but also what their teams were able to do in order to make it through. Many of them have said, “We actually thrived through the last two years because we were able to pivot, and we were prepared and we were ready, and we had that mindset that we said, ‘Look, we’ve got to make it so that whatever happens to us in the future, we’re ready for it.'” And it really became, to your point, a mindset that they said, “We have got to pivot at the right spot and not give up and not get into a cocoon position,” as I mentioned earlier, as sometimes I find myself in, to just say, “I’m just going to wait till it goes away.” And that’s just not the right thing to do and to be able to future proof, have a future proof mindset, which is fantastic. I love that term.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
But so many of them that I’ve spoken to, yes, there were small businesses that didn’t make it through, unfortunately, but the ones that did have learned so much about what their capabilities were. And many of them have reported to us that they actually changed their business model now that things are getting back to normal, but they’re not getting back to normal. They’re doing better than they were previous to COVID even coming into their lives or coming into the marketplace.

Elatia Abate:
Yeah, well, you highlighted one of the most exciting things about all of the disruption that’s happening. So while on the surface it might feel like it’s a threat to our business or business as usual isn’t going to be able to continue, so there’s that fear, there’s that uncertainty. Hiding inside of this disruption is actually way more opportunity than there was prior to the pandemic if we can begin to spot it and look for those characteristics and be willing to let go of business as was usual in the past. And you hit on one of the things as you led into this. Curiosity, first and foremost. What if what I thought was true about the best business model is actually the opposite? What might I be able to learn or what opportunities might be present in this space that weren’t present before? So curiosity is huge when we’re looking at navigating this kind of uncertainty.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s right, that’s right. There’s no question about it. So I want to thank you so much for joining us on the show today. I know that our subscribers and small business owners that are watching us have this discussion today with you are going to get a lot out of it. So it’s really about being ready and making those moves right now for what’s coming down the pike and embrace it, because to your point earlier, you mentioned change is constant. It’s here and it’s part of our everyday lives now, especially not just in our personal lives, but also in our business lives. So any final thoughts on that?

Elatia Abate:
Curiosity, experimentation, and look for the fun inside of the challenge because it’s there.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Because it is there. There’s no question about it. Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Elatia Abate, look her up online. You’re going to like what you see as we did, and thank you so much again for joining us on the show today.

Elatia Abate:
Thanks so much for having me. It was great to be here.

Jim Fitzpatrick:
Thanks.