“Situational Awareness is the understanding of an environment, its elements, and how it changes with respect to time or other factors” (per Wikipedia).
Now that COVID has ebbed, many leaders have been trying to return to the life they once knew. 
It’s a natural tendency to seek comfort by restoring old habits. Seems like everyone wants to ‘harken back to the days of yore.’
But those old days aren’t there anymore. We live in a much more dynamic, fast-paced world of almost constant change. We must become much more responsive to these changes occurring all around us – an adaptive leadership skill commonly known as “situational awareness” (or SA, for short).
As adaptive leaders, we must develop and sustain our situational awareness through practicing the “Big 6”:
- Set the Azimuth
- Listen
- Trust and Empower
- Do the Right Thing When No One is Looking
- When in Charge, Take Charge
- Balance the Personal and Professional
There’s one more key element in having situational awareness and adapting our leadership to that awareness: modeling curiosity. We must approach every day as a learning opportunity by asking thoughtful questions, sharing information and experiences (storytelling), and using two-way communication to confirm understanding.
With our situational awareness skills in place, we can adapt to the world we’re in instead of trying to re-create some unrealistic version of the past. We may be “back” from the isolation COVID created, but the new world is far more demanding of us as leaders than whatever the old one was. We have to bring the “Big 6” to life in everything we do. It’s what our team members expect of us more than ever. Welcome back… enjoy the journey!
This blog post is partially based on the book, “The Power of Being All In.” You can download the first chapter for free at this link. Or, if you’d like to purchase the entire book (available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook), it is available on Amazon.
