As parts of the world emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, how can we use this reset moment to create new opportunity and reinvent business? Hamish Forsyth, CEO and Co-Founder of OneLeap, met with Andrew Fox, Global Head of Leadership Development at Mars, to learn how an organisation of 130,000 met these challenges head-on.  

The following is the summary of that discussion, scroll to the bottom for Andrew’s five tips for leaders coming through the pandemic. You can also watch the highlights here.

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE CHOCOLATE

Let’s rewind to a pre-pandemic world. Mars is a family business, built on a culture of sharing stories and knowledge generation-to-generation, and face-to-face. Come March 2020, the tradition of travel and first-hand learning quickly came to a halt. Hybrid working became an “adaptation that stuck” as Mars’ previously high-touch culture shifted dramatically. How could Mars maintain the family entrepreneurial spirit and personal touch in this new environment?

It wasn’t only ways of working that had to change. Employees and leaders alike experienced a global wake-up call, including a more vocal and proactive interest in sustainability, the environment, and our human purpose: What do I stand for, and what does the company I work stand for?

 “A big part of the answer was having a really clear purpose, of the why we're doing it. So, even if you don't know how, what or when sometimes, the why can give you that energy and that lift to keep you going during the darker moments.”

Mars has a new sense of shared purpose and connection, even at distance, which is an incredibly powerful emotion for leaders to tap into as we emerge from the pandemic. It’s a chance for companies to realign around a North Star, providing guidance to navigate through complexity and ambiguity.

LEADING FROM A DISTANCE

Mars invests a huge amount in training for leadership. The pandemic accelerated the demand for certain new or nascent capabilities around remote leadership, including storytelling, empathy, and building human connection at a distance.

“If you want to build a movement, you need to appeal to the hearts as well… We want to make sense of things, and stories helps us make sense of stuff that otherwise would just be disparate dots on a page.”

Was it better to wait and give some content in-person, than meddle with it for the sake of ticking a box? It was decided that 12-inch screens were not the best medium for all training, but would work for some.

The Mars team started with a re-evaluation of what their programmes were trying to achieve – what was the content, and what was its purpose? Evaluating training needs through that lens at the same time as a practicality lens enabled decisions to be made around adapting some development opportunities to meet new virtual requirements, and holding others back later, for in-person delivery.

Amid disruption, human nature led employees to scurry around, trying to find the next big competence they needed. White papers were created by expert consultancies touting the leader of the future. But what the leadership development team realised was that what Mars really needed were not solely new competencies, but more resilient capacity.

“Maybe it's less about competence and more about capacity.”

How could they build capacity in their leaders to deal with this level of unpredictable, global disruption? How could they dial up peoples’ cognitive skills and sense-making skills to underpin their competence? And most importantly, how could they revive skills that were previously overlooked, but more critical than ever in a remote working world, such as empathy?

Before the pandemic hit, Mars had been working on a programme for their most senior leaders, seeking to create a common language and mindset across the business. They chose to focus on VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) conditions.

With hindsight, this had been the perfect programme to develop ahead of 2020. The first pilot ran in January 2020, and by March global lockdown had hit, pushing the course to continue virtually.

“It wasn't cheap, but they found the time, they found the resource and they loved the fact we connected people from all different segments. We created a glue that brought this very large organization together in a way they'd never been to before.”

The experience stuck, offering a new and exciting approach to leadership training. How could teams develop psychological safety and develop their ability to balance risk? How could they exponentially increase experimentation, and build an environment where it’s ok to fail? It all came back to enhancing the capacities of employees and leaders at Mars.

THE TALE OF THE SIX OCULAR MANTIS SHRIMP

Applying this analogy to business, we understand that although the six ocular mantis shrimp was unquestionably better resourced in the eyesight department, it failed to leverage this ability to use that eyesight.

Perhaps sometimes in business we are so busy looking for the next thing, that we fail to adequately leverage our own existing strengths?

At OneLeap, we work with large companies to explore strengths-based entrepreneurship, and the ability to build this capacity in large organisations. Finding ‘unmined gold’ within big businesses and leveraging it correctly can present powerful opportunities. (Look at Amazon developing AWS from its own server baseline). This principle does not only apply to corporate opportunities, but also team development. How might you build teams with complementary skillsets to discover future strengths?

BOLD WAYS OF WORKING: KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM MARS

1. The pandemic has disrupted the old order of society, challenging our capabilities and capacity to deal with uncertainty. It also presents a once in a lifetime opportunity to challenge the status quo. Now is your golden opportunity to shake things up.

2. Necessity is the mother of all invention. Don’t ever lose that sense of responsibility to enable experimentation. This is your chance, don’t waste it.

3. Invest in people’s sense-making skills and empathy as the underpinner of capacity.

4. COVID-19 forced us to go online and consume more content to learn. Keep that habit alive – keep “bringing the outside in” to challenge your perspective.

5. When the time is right, take the opportunity to immerse yourself in new educational experiences and cultures. Explore the future of your sector beyond your 12-inch screen. The future may already be happening elsewhere.

Follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter, or subscribe for email updates, to be notified when we publish further updates from our Reset interview series.

Discover how your business can leverage the Reset Moment with the OneLeap Reset Sprint.

Other Articles and Insights from the oneleap team.

Subscribe to the Oneleap Blog.

Add your email to receive regular, quarterly updates from the OneLeap Team.

By clicking subscribe, you consent to allow OneLeap to store and process the personal information submitted to provide content requested. OneLeap will only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us.

We will respect your privacy and you can unsubscribe at any time.