Strategies for Leading Through Stress Events

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Jul 05, 2023, 10:10 ET

Part 2 of The Miles Group's C-Suite Intelligence Podcast, "The Preparedness Playbook for Leadership in Difficult Times," featuring TMG CEO Stephen Miles and Oracle EVP Rob Tarkoff

"What does good look like in a stress event? You leverage your team; you leverage the company; you leverage trusted advisors; you communicate in high bandwidths; you make decisions." – Stephen Miles

NEW YORK, July 5, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- "The world is less predictable," says Stephen Miles, CEO of The Miles Group. "Most of us don't know what's going to happen tomorrow and we have to respond to whatever that is. For many leaders and for many employees inside companies, it's hard and stressful."

On today's episode of The Miles Group's podcast, C-Suite Intelligence, Miles welcomes back Rob Tarkoff, Oracle EVP and General Manager, Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX), to conclude their 2-part conversation on "The Preparedness Playbook for Leadership in Difficult Times."

"I think of leading in a stress event as binary," says Miles. "You're either a zero or a one. If you're a zero, you turn inward; you don't leverage the company; don't leverage advisors; often micromanage elements of the event that are not material. You make decisions poorly, either you're frozen and don't make the decisions or you're shooting from the hip."

"What does good look like in a stress event? You leverage your team, you leverage the company, you leverage trusted advisors. You communicate in high bandwidths. You make decisions…based on the available information. And most importantly – you absorb, absorb, absorb, because your absorption allows the place to remain the clear thinking, actionable environment where people can participate in solving whatever caused the stress event."

There's No End to How Much Preparation You Should Do – "Never lose your enthusiasm for being the most prepared on domains that you're supposedly an expert on," says Tarkoff. "Being the first to the Zoom, being the most prepared, being the most prolific reader of outside resources that are challenging things you know really well – there's never an end to how much preparation you can do. I think your team will draw inspiration and enthusiasm from that, and it'll make them want to be better too."
Be a High Context Leader – "An empowered organization is a 'high context' environment," says Miles. "We want to enroll people with context so they're empowered, and they can make a set of decisions, sequence, and prioritize. That allows them to be high performing, wherever they sit inside the organization."

"If you can be a high context leader – and give two seconds, two minutes, or ten minutes of context so we're on the same page – then we can be productive together."

"Everybody comes in having some awareness of what the assumptions are, the limitations are, the constraints, and the go forward strategy," says Tarkoff. "People create their own stories if you don't give them context, and that's when you get disengagement, and that's when you get folks who just really don't give you everything they can."
Build Organizational Capability – "Some of the greatest companies have figured out how to differentiate when times are difficult. They win in the business of today, but they are always building bridges and tentacles to the business of tomorrow...which is usually people, technology, process," says Miles.

Tarkoff agrees: "You have to be able to keep things going well and also learn the future technologies and build towards what the advantages of the suite are going to be in the future. Helping employees become ambidextrous in that regard, and think about both things, is really important."
Use Resilience as a Learning Opportunity – "There are large generations of people in Silicon Valley who have never spent more than two, two and a half years at a company," says Tarkoff. "Every setback they've hit was a signal to move to something else. And when you do that, you really do give up the resilience learning opportunity; you don't develop that behavior" or know how to act in that situation.

Miles adds, "We are in this world now that's really hard with lots of setbacks everywhere. We need to prime our teams for setbacks so we can get up faster than everybody else and outperform a whole bunch of people who get knocked down."

Tarkoff concludes: "Now we're all facing the challenge of what generative AI will do to our businesses. And so, resilience is something that has to be in the front pocket of everyone."

"The Preparedness Playbook for Leadership in Difficult Times" – Part 1 and Part 2 – is now available on Apple, Google, Spotify, TMG's website, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For more information, please contact executive producers Davia Temin or Trang Mar of Temin and Company at 212.588.8788 or [email protected].

About the C-Suite Intelligence podcast
CEOs running the world's top companies don't start out that way – they pull ahead of their peers with behaviors and practices that make them the "best of the best." Stephen Miles and the team at TMG coach some of the world's most successful executives, helping them continuously up their game even as business conditions grow more complex every day. Learn the secrets of the highest performers and use this intelligence to power your career. New episodes are released bi-weekly on Apple, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

About The Miles Group/TMG
TMG develops talent strategies for organizations, teams, and individuals – focusing on high-performance, world-class leadership. Through assessments and development, coaching, leadership transition planning, and organizational design, TMG helps clients cultivate exceptional talent from the C-suite to the next generation of leaders throughout the organization. Clients include many of the Fortune 100 as well as VC portfolio companies, firms in transition, and organizations around the globe and across industries. TMG has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, C-Suite, Entrepreneur, and Chief Executive. The firm is headquartered in New York City and operates globally. For more information, visit https://miles-group.com. Follow TMG on Twitter and LinkedIn, and Stephen Miles on Forbes.

About Rob Tarkoff
Rob Tarkoff leads Oracle's Customer Experience (CX) business responsible for the front-office application suite, including Sales, Service, Marketing, Content, and industry cloud offerings. His goal is to help companies succeed in providing their customers with the best experience across the front office. Rob spent the past 15 years focused on customer experience, developing products and businesses for both large and early-stage companies; he joined Oracle in 2018. Previously, as president and CEO of Lithium Technologies, Rob created the leading software in online communities, leading to the company's sale to Vista Equity Partners. Prior to that, he ran the Digital Enterprise business for Adobe, leading several key acquisitions. Rob holds a BA from Amherst College magna cum laude and a JD from Harvard Law School.

SOURCE The Miles Group/TMG