Becoming a Leader of All Altitudes: How to Navigate Uncertainty
By: John Volturo
In the early 1990s, the US Army War College coined “VUCA” as a new acronym in an attempt to capture and conceptualize the paradigm shift the world experienced as a result of the Cold War. VUCA incorporates the key elements of that shift: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
Today’s business leaders have adapted that acronym to reflect the modern paradigm shift in business, “D-VUCAD”, which addresses diversity and disruption.
So how do we navigate it — not just as business leaders but as individuals?
Three Levels of Leadership Altitude
Leadership altitude is what we’ll call the roadmap toward navigating D-VUCAD. Imagine you’re on a plane. When your flight begins to ascend, you notice individual people, houses and then whole regions. When your flight descends, you notice it in reverse, whole regions and cities, then houses and streets.
The celebrated CEO advisor Ram Charan found airplanes to be a fitting analogy for leadership and named three altitudes that successful leaders consistently navigate:
The 50,000-foot perspective is the big-picture vision and analysis leaders use to evaluate the external environment, the state of their business and its future.
The 50-foot perspective is the tactical altitude where leaders can communicate, plan and execute activities with their teams.
The 5-foot level — also known as the “self-level” - is developed through deep self-knowledge.
A successful leader is comfortable traveling from the self-level up to 50,000 feet and back down again. By naming and organizing these altitudes, we can become full-resolution leaders just as comfortable making top-level decisions as we are in aligning people in teams or evaluating ourselves.
The key insight? Leaders cannot get stuck at one altitude without incurring a massive opportunity cost or flying blind.
Brave leaders soar to new heights
Of course, there’s no one “best” altitude. A leader who gets lost in the 50,000-foot perspective cannot see their team or themselves. Meanwhile, a leader at the 5-foot level can’t see beyond themselves to the bigger picture. Each altitude has its benefits and pitfalls, and it’s up to great leaders to navigate between them.
For instance, imagine the 50,000-foot leader who’s filled with ideas, jumping from vision to vision, yet completely in the dark about their personal biases, physical constraints and what their team can reasonably achieve. The result may be an impossible vision or a possible vision that isn’t fully realized because the leader left the team guessing about its boots-on-the-ground execution.
Spending time at 50 feet could enable leaders to connect their visions to actionable plans and communicate with the team. But this isn’t ideal; this resistance to change locks them into their old competencies and business-as-usual approaches. Sometimes risk is necessary to break us into innovation.
The same goes for the 5-foot perspective, where leaders understand themselves — their blindspots, strengths, motivators and drainers. While a serviceable leader can run a good business navigating between 50 and 50,000 feet, the most successful leaders understand their true selves with the higher and lower altitudes. While challenging, this self-knowledge can revolutionize their visions and their on-the-ground executions.
It’s clear that we must become leaders of all altitudes. The old tricks won’t work — the business world has undergone a D-VUCAD paradigm shift, and we all need to learn how to fly again.
Navigating uncertainty means we need more discipline, information and perspectives. More than that, we need a plan, a useful heuristic that we can recall in the heat of the moment. Consider this to help fly your teams to unprecedented heights.
Are you ready to unlock your leadership potential by becoming a leader of all altitudes? Evolution’s coaching and consulting services are designed to help you become a better leader and drive lasting success. Reach out to our team at HERE to learn more about our bespoke offerings on Executive Coaching.