Manila, 12 May 2021 — Will you press the reset button?

Story

It happened in 2020. The World Economic Forum spotted how the Covid-19 pandemic triggered several fundamental changes in how the world works. They called it The Great Reset. Last week, I watched the CNBC Debate on how that Great Reset is shaping the economies in Asia. What I heard is how a bank president, a bank group chairman, and a leading finance minister were all advocating for more investment in people. 

What does that mean? As the Great Reset unfolds, a wave of new insights is coming to the surface, including for more investments in education and health, overcoming the digital divide, stakeholder economies, ESG metrics, and harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution for the public good. You might say that the emerging new normal shows signs that the world has indeed changed forever.

Of course, much depends on how the Great Reset gets implemented. And that’s where all of us come into the picture. How do these new trends inspire leadership in the workplace? What needs to change and what contribution will we make together with colleagues, clients, and partners? The way I see it is that the story of the unfolding of the Great Reset will depend a lot on what you and I will do in our workplaces.

Challenge

If you’re reading this, chances are that you are a leader who is passionate about influencing change in the world, especially in your workplace. Committed to making positive change happen in the context of more sustainability and inclusivity in the way our world works, including locally. If the Great Reset is a wave that’s rising now, how can you ride it? How can you accelerate and scale up the changes you would like to see from your advocacies?

What struck and inspired me most in the CNBC Debate was something shared by Sri Mulyani Indrawati, the finance minister of Indonesia. She told us how she and her colleagues in government were working hard not to waste the opportunity of this crisis caused by the pandemic. How their focus was on investing in the necessary changes to make the economy and society work better. And she went into specifics about those changes. That’s what leaders do. They take on challenges as an opportunity to influence positive changes.

So what can you do where you are? What’s coming up in the conversations you have with your colleagues? Because leadership is not about doing it all yourself. It’s about investing more in people and smarter processes. To usher in such changes, to work smarter and more collaboratively, to achieve more with the same resources, we all have a chance to press the reset button. To not waste the opportunity of this crisis.

Question

The question for this week is this. How are you going to invest more in people around you in pursuit of your passion to make the world more inclusive and sustainable? Let me offer three suggestions to get started. First, to see beyond your projects, data, finances, and contracts and ask yourself who the people are to make those work? To invest more in people, you need to see them first and focus on them.

Second, who are the leaders, present and emerging, who can help you make more change happen? Can you see ‘the leader’ in your colleagues, clients, suppliers, consultants, contractors, and partners? Seeing the leader in them means that you learn to focus on how they can partner with you to bring about positive change. 

Third is that you can see and identify with ‘the leader’ inside yourself. That means that you can look beyond your current role — such as expert, team leader, manager, director, or even executive — to bring out the leader in you into your role. Following minister Sri Mulyani’s example, we can see that the pandemic crisis is an opportunity to invest in people, including ourselves, to make positive changes happen. Let’s press the Reset Button.