Remember the 1980s computer game with the animated frog whose mission was to cross several lanes of fast moving cars?
Success meant doing something like hopping forward twice then quickly to the right, jumping back a space, sashaying slowly to the left, and then scurrying forward two more spaces. If you happened to not push the buttons quickly enough or leapt left when you should have rushed right, your frog was crushed and sent back to the beginning to start again.
And if you had to start over too many times, it was Game Over.
The good news is that, with practice and a good plan, it was possible to scramble across all those obstacles successfully. The bad news? Your reward was you got to do it all over again on another level. This time it’s harder with even more opportunities to get crushed, drown, or die.
Welcome to the Frogger Economy!
And this time, the game is real.
The economic landscape is changing so rapidly that the primary objective for this Game of Life has become survival. Prosperity won’t even be a stretch goal for some industries. Right now, most people aren’t focused on making it rich. They’re concentrating on keeping their job in companies that need to keep the lights on in the coming weeks or months.
Many organizations are caught in a life and death struggle to stick around long enough for the game to change back to something less scary.
The problem is most of us don’t realize that we’re playing Frogger.
And if we do, we don’t know the new rules of the game.
Some will be like a deer in headlights, frozen and awaiting oncoming destruction. If we take a moment to follow just a few steps, we can avoid that pitfall.
How do you navigate the Frogger Economy?
1. Keep your cool. Even amidst the danger there exists endless opportunity. Tightrope walkers don’t look down. They certainly don’t count the jagged rocks below or calculate how long they’ll be laying unconscious before their bloody corpse quits breathing. No, they face forward. They focus on their desired destination. Glory comes to those who cross the chasm with their sense of humor intact.
I speak for Vistage and TEC frequently. Over the past 22 years, I’ve conducted more than 800 workshops for CEO and Key executive groups throughout the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. While some are focusing more on teleworking with the global health threat looming, these groups are still seeing good attendance. Why? Because in uncertain times, learning new strategies, supporting each other and sharing insight is more valuable than ever.
We’re all just trying to scramble hop our way across this Frogger landscape.
And it’s not only business leaders that are stressed.
2. Rally your troops. Don’t toil in obscurity. Don’t fret in isolation. If you go down and your business goes down, so do the people that work with you. Let them share the sense of urgency and understand what is at stake. As Marcus Buckingham says, the best leaders “rally their people toward a more optimistic future.”
Picture yourself in a boat. The comfortable, lazy river you had been floating on is now caught in the rapids. There’s a waterfall ahead, closing fast. The only option is to row like your life depends on it, because it does. You’re not alone in your boat. You have a team. Hand them an oar. Let them help you row to safety.
You may be the leader but you certainly don’t have to go it alone. Harness the good ideas and energy of your whole team to significantly increase your chances of survival. Facilitate open communication throughout your organization and provide platforms for your employees to share their ideas with you. Goals may need to be altered or changed. Capture and track those goals! Don’t let the chaos scatter the troops.
3. Pivot. The needs of the customer have changed overnight. Some things have become vital or at least scarce. Just look online at the photos of the toilet paper and milk aisles. Suddenly going out to a big concert or a crowded restaurant isn’t just unappealing. It’s unsafe.
What can you do now to pivot quickly into this new business environment? What do your customers/prospects want? What have they been asking? How can you get it to them efficiently and safely? With the big R-Word (Recession) being floated around, what will your customers be able to afford? Is it possible to scale things so that you can sell less to more people?
Those of us at Catalytic Coaching Inc are hopping right along with you. With travel being impeded by health concerns, we’re developing online learning opportunities to offer our now homebound clients. This pivot will keep alive our mission of purging the world of performance evaluations.
And who knows, maybe these new approaches we’re all forced to take will end up being even better than what we had before.
4. Keep Hopping! Move! Take your best shot and go! This is no time for slow decisions. Take a look around, assess the dangers, and haul froggy tail. No move is a move and a bad one.
Whether you like this new game or not is irrelevant. You can curse the skies and damn your luck, but that won’t increase your likelihood of making it safely to the other side.
One day we’ll look at all this drama in the rear view mirror and say “Wow! That was intense!” Hopefully we’ll be doing that with a feeling of happy nostalgia. We’ll be regaling our grandkids about how we survived one of the most challenging times in our modern history and we didn’t even get squished, like that hyperactive animated game frog.
Garold (Gary) Markle is the creator of Catalytic Coaching and author of Catalytic Coaching: The End of the Performance Review. He brings real world experience from 17 years in HR leadership in major corporations coupled with 20 years of teaching small and mid-sized organizations how to cultivate their leadership and ditch their detrimental performance reviews for a proven Coaching process.
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