9 August 2023
Don’t worry: this is not about revealing the strategic management secrets of a discounter. I am not familiar enough with LIDL for that and have no special insights into the way it is run. In my world (and hopefully soon in yours too), this catchy acronym stands for a principle that always guides my actions. In all projects, especially the difficult ones that make you really proud when they succeed, L.I.D.L. in German stands for:
LÄCHELN IN DER LAGE (ENGLISH: SMILE AND ACCEPT THE SITUATION)
Of course, it’s the things that go wrong, that don’t turn out the way we intended. The more responsibility we have and the further up the career ladder we climb, the more often things fail to go as planned and turn out wrong. Why should that be?
Clearly because more responsibility always entails more unpredictable complexity. It’s VUCA time! This trendy acronym (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) has now become a buzzword in almost every boardroom. Unfortunately, however, there are still difficulties in interpreting the phenomenon.
Image: AdobeStock Peter
It’s not the VUCA events that get us down, but rather our emotional reactions to them: despair, anger, fear, guilt and all the darker, uglier aspects of being in charge. It’s clear that we have to overcome these feelings, but how do we do that?
We’re talking about those situations in which we feel like crying and still manage to feign a good mood and smile. Keep calm and carry on! Whether privately or professionally, I take my hat off to anyone who manages to do this. If you’ve had to take a lot of criticism today, perhaps even justifiably so (it happens sometimes), you’re going to feel small and will need to lick your wounds before you can learn and grow from the criticism.
When you get home in the evening after such a day, it’s LIDL time, not VUCA time! Get that smile back on your face and shake off your frustration, prepare a delicious meal for the family and then enjoy playing a game together instead of opening a beer and staring morosely into space.
So, the boss has shredded the current project and trimmed the resources, meaning that you now have to achieve even more with a much reduced budget? LIDL! Keep smiling and carry on! Head off to the team briefing simply brimming with energy and oozing good humor – even though you don’t really feel like it. This is the classy way of dealing with the situation and has nothing to do with dissimulation.
It’s simply recognizing that failure is not an option, that every screw-up along the way is what it is, and that the best has to be made of the situation with good grace.
Matthias Kolbusa
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