Falling Back, Moving Forward

Gary Burnison is CEO of Korn Ferry and the author of Love, Hope & Leadership: A Special Edition.

Holding that watch, I could hear my father’s voice. “You can never turn it back—only forward.” The memory of those words has stayed with me….

Many of us have had to make tough decisions recently. It’s never easy. But the truth is, in any organization, leaders must sometimes make difficult decisions in order to keep moving forward.

And that brings me back to the watch.

I’ve had it for many years, though I don’t wear it very often. As I looked at the hands that mark each moment, I thought of the end of daylight saving time—just one week from today. In many parts of the world that means resetting our watches one hour earlier—falling back.

That’s when I remembered my father’s advice about adjusting the time. As paradoxical as it sounds, to go back one hour I will actually have to move the hands forward 23 hours. The reason—the mechanics of the watch aren’t meant to move in the opposite direction. Time is always advancing.

And so, it is for all of us.

The past is just that—the past. While it’s good to reflect on history to see how far we’ve come, it’s only a brief pause to center ourselves.

In leadership, there is real risk in getting locked in the past. After all, past performance does not guarantee future success. Only in this moment can we apply the lessons learned in the past to move toward a better future.

When we stay with what is comfortable and familiar, instead of anticipating and navigating in the moment, that’s actually a blind spot.

We all have them. An executive shared with me a few weeks ago an experience while being examined by an optometrist. “Do you want to see where your blind spot is in each eye?” the optometrist asked him.

Surprised and a little shaken by the question, the executive blurted out: “What’s wrong with me?”

“Everyone is born with blind spots,” the optometrist assured him. It’s all part of being human.

The challenge is that we naturally tend to see the world and ourselves through the lens of our good intentions—what we want to do and who we hope to become. But there can be a gap between those intentions and the actual impact we have on others.

In fact, the more than 100 million assessments conducted by our firm reveal that 80% of leaders fail to see their own skills and deficiencies clearly—and that carries a high cost. Our research also shows that people who greatly overstate their abilities are about 6 times more likely to derail than those who are self-aware.

Leadership is not about you—but it starts with you. One blind spot can cascade to hundreds—even thousands of people. It’s a multiplier effect.

A new executive we worked with wanted to transform the company he joined, which had become stuck in the past, overly reliant on what had worked before. And so, he tried something different, starting every meeting with a seemingly simple, but profoundly impactful question (said in different ways, but with the same message): “What are we doing to keep moving forward?”

With that small act of empowerment and encouragement, it was like someone had turned on the lights. Before long, everyone was reflecting on their interactions and behaviors. Rather than critiquing the system, everyone looked at what they could do to change the system. By seeking out and sharing their feedback, everyone gained a future focus in their decisions and actions.

Yesterday is just that—yesterday. None of us can turn back time. Indeed, just as with that watch, the only movement is forward.

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