Optimism & Development going into 2023! And, Crowds are Good
Reasons to be optimistic about a weird year from our recent Business Drivers event
At our recent Business Drivers event in Minneapolis, we gathered some completely unscientific, anecdotal inputs from our attendees. A good strategist can find ideas in any data, so I’m going to share a couple observations and try not to draw any major conclusions.
Observation #1: It was so good to have humans in a room together, talking about hard things. It was a great reminder of how much signal can get lost in the conversion from real time, real life to digital/zoom.
Observation #2: My concerns about folks feeling overly worried about 2023 might have been misplaced.
What’s Making Digital Leaders Optimistic?
Our group was a diverse mix of digital product leaders and marketers, but they were all in leadership positions. Some led functional groups, some led agency teams, some led companies. They brought up many reasons to be optimistic and some surprised me a bit:
Change as an opportunity - The folks in our audience were energized by change: changing work organizational models, different approaches to talent sourcing (global talent) and even some of the cultural things (i.e. changing assumptions about power at work). Now, a lot of the comments were coming from leaders who were actually leading the change, but the focus on the upside was heartening
Media landscape dynamics - A couple folks were excited about the growth/marketing opportunities that are getting surfaced as brands move beyond a heavy reliance on PPC. The rise of TikTok, the increasing prominence of short, ephemeral videos/Reels, and algorithmically driven placements didn’t seem to phase folks as much as we anticipated.
Digital transformation - A handful of people I spoke with hinted that their company leaders were finally understanding the importance of the cultural change inside their org’s “digital” transformation. These “middle” leaders saw a more enlightened senior leadership class: Seeking genuine consumer empathy, putting the experience first, etc.
Leaders Are Investing In Themselves
We also asked our attendees to share some thoughts about how they’re investing their time in 2023. Our working assumption was pretty straightforward: After a couple hard years of remote/hybrid work (while orgs were under real pressure for growth), leaders like our attendees would be thinking carefully about how to focus their personal and professional development.
Not too surprisingly, our attendees were seeking a healthier balance between work and “not work”. There were some great approaches to managing time differently and a number of references to 4-day work weeks or other time shifts. Some will do their remote work far away from home to feed the travel bug. And, we heard about a new approach to PTO: Micro-dosing, where someone might take focused, dedicated days of PTO on a regular cadence instead of a full one or two weeks off once during the year.
Other leaders are seeking tools and practices to be more mindful about their approach to the work / life balance. A handful of conversations included references to “better mindfulness practice”, meditation and seeking “presence.”
Maybe 2023 Will be Just Another Year?
We set up the conversation for this event with the proposal that 2023 might be a really tricky year for those of us leading “growth” functions: Marketing teams, innovation teams, digital product teams. Concerns about economic downturn, ongoing political tension, culture changes and war in Europe have us thinking through ways to evolve our leadership styles. But, based on the conversations among our audience, our attendees seem ready to take on the year, no matter how weird it might be.
We shouldn’t have been surprised, in hindsight. This group of leaders isn’t new to dealing with the change and churn for years. The potentially confusing operating landscape of 2023 is just one more year of it. They will lead, like they have for years, with a focus on growth and balance and taking care of their teams.