How Leaders Build Strategic Capacity in Chaos | Ep. 104

Episode Summary

Organizational change rarely waits until leaders feel prepared. When priorities shift, teams struggle, and uncertainty increases, many executives respond by working harder, solving smaller problems, or remaining trapped in worry.

In this episode, Coach Mo speaks with executive consultant Avy Leghziel about building strategic capacity during chaotic transitions. They explore how leaders can identify the “big stones” blocking progress, examine the internal stories driving their reactions, and use nervousness as information rather than proof that something is going wrong.

The conversation also examines leadership self-awareness, decision-making under pressure, and the importance of creating enough space to think clearly before taking action. The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty. It is to develop the composure and clarity required to lead through it.

Key Takeaways

• Move the big stones first. Solving dozens of small problems may create activity without creating meaningful progress.
• Choose clarity over a perfect plan. Plans can be disrupted, but a clear understanding of priorities gives leaders something stable to return to.
• Interrogate the nervousness. The scenario creating anxiety may reveal a real risk, an exaggerated assumption, or an opportunity to prepare.
• Map the internal and external environment. Sustainable leadership change requires examining both organizational conditions and personal leadership patterns.
• Stop treating every transition like a crisis. Change is becoming a normal leadership condition, which means navigating uncertainty must become a developed leadership capability.

Transcript

Welcome And The Core Framework

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome to the little let's speak of my function. We're high achievers, stuff performing, and start transforming. I'm coaching mode, start a file, core energy leadership coach, founder of the inner leader, and creator of the framework. Self-learning, life power, mind action, and rent. And when I'm here, entrain your mindset, challenge your limits, and turn touching into purpose. Subscribe now and join me on YouTube at Swann Coaching. So let's get your reps in.

Meet Avi And Sao Paulo

SPEAKER_00 1:04

His name is Anvi Legzil. Advie studies how chaos affects how we work. After 15 years serving as a senior manager in global organizations, he launched his executive development consulting practice, helping executives around the globe navigate chaotic transitions. Since then, he's provided consulting to more than 120 executives and trained thousands of professionals. His newsletter, Masters of Babel, is read by 7,700 subscribers. Avi is originally from Rome, Italy, and is currently based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. His website is avvileg.com. Avi, welcome to the show, my friend.

SPEAKER_02 1:50

Thanks a lot, Coach Mo. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

What's one thing you could tell us about Sao Paulo that we should know about here in the United States?

SPEAKER_02 2:02

I think that it's a city that is very difficult to understand. It's huge, literally the biggest in the hemisphere. Unlike any city I've ever visited before, there's no center, no historical center, but still it has just a lot of interesting surprises. And it's built of the people and of the urban landscape rather than its history. So it's a very different urban experience than what most of us know when we visit typical touristic places. It's I recommend it.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Avi, tell us who you are, what you do, and the type of value that you bring.

SPEAKER_02 2:44

Yeah, sure. Thanks for asking. As you mentioned, I'm an executive consultant. I work with executives that are going through chaotic transitions. I know that's a little bit abstract, so I'll make it more concrete. It could be a founder, the founder of a growing startup who now needs to manage both a bigger team and growth. It could be a first-time executive manager that has an incredible track record as a professional, but it's managing for the first time. It could be an executive manager that is now transitioning to a different industry. So all kinds of transitions that require rerouting of the management practice of the professional. So I help them build that methodology while performing without taking the break to thinking through what they should do. I am specialized in professional development and in strategic management. And as you said, I research how chaos and chaotic environments affect the way that we work. Having those conversations about how does an executive perceive the chaos around them? What are the main forces? How are they becoming a problem or how are they becoming an opportunity? How can that provide them ideas to develop a better professional life? That's really what keeps me busy.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

Thank you. Strategic management, chaotic transitions. Because you also mentioned in your bio, you as a senior manager in global organizations. So you've seen a lot as it pertains to chaotic transitions. And focusing on strategic management, there has to be a strategic capacity aligned with that. And what I mean by that is as leaders in these organizations, we have to lead self first before leading others effectively. So take us back.

Clarity Beats Perfect Plans

SPEAKER_00 4:43

First, when you were a leader, how did you implement for yourself strategic capacity?

SPEAKER_02 4:51

Yeah, that's a great question. So I used to manage an educational tourism company, and it was a lot. There were 12,000 clients a year, more than 100 activities per year. It was really a lot. And I remember that the first thing that you want to make sure you're onto is the operations. You don't want mess up, you don't want to mess up the operations mainly because they tend to escalate. Something doesn't work from a logistic perspective. You didn't book a venue, you didn't have a speaker. So I thought that success means making sure logistics are perfect. But then I realized that even when logistics are perfect, there will always be something that hits you when you're not expecting it, and you have to deal with it. You can't just say, But I took care of the logistics. So I remember that at that point I decided that I'm gonna cancel all the meetings of the afternoon. Of course, they weren't urgent, otherwise, I wouldn't have done that. I closed my door, I locked it, and it just took three hours to make sense of what's going on. It wasn't just stream of consciousness, journaling, or I just took a board, I started writing, I started mapping out what are all the activities and my team, I had an amazing team, and different partners, different colleagues, what are the priorities, and I came out of those three hours with just a clearer picture. It doesn't mean that I knew everything that I had to do, but there was a higher degree of clarity that I could play with. So when I'm thinking about meeting chaos for the first time, for me, it's about realizing that it's never about having a good plan because plans get ruined by problems, challenges, pandemics, wars, or even by new ideas that you just don't want to lose and you want to act upon. It's never about the plan, it's really about the clarity, their ability to go back to that safe pier to the picture of what's going on and how you want to work, and then moving the pieces as you can to make progress.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

That's great, man. Now take me through the process of how you help your clients do that.

Finding The Big Stones

SPEAKER_02 7:13

Yeah, it's not very different because what I'm seeing is that uh many clients they get to win, they have a lot of successes behind them, they have a plan, they have a theory of change, meaning they know this is my job, this is what I'm supposed to achieve. I know how to articulate desired outcomes. Sometimes not 100%. We can go back to this if you want later on, but they know pretty much which direction they want to go, but they feel that something is off. They feel, first of all, on a personal level, they're overwhelmed, they're burned out, they're stressed, they're frustrated, they want to take a break urgently, but they also want to solve matters as soon as possible. But also they just see symptoms around them that things are not working. Their team is frustrated, is dysfunctional, as conflictual, they work a lot, but they don't move forward, or the partners are leaving, there are financial issues, not enough runway to really make the progress that they were intended of doing. So, what I do with them at the beginning is just to understand what are called the big stones, meaning if you wanna move a roadblock, you're going on a path, and you just want to make room to move forward, not only you, with your whole team, with your project, with your ideas, with your ambitions, you can't start by picking the pebbles and throwing them to the trees. It's not gonna work, you're gonna be there for years. You need to find what are the three, four big stones that if you manage to move them, even if it takes a lot of effort, and that's why you have to be strategic. When you manage to move them, you have a way forward. So we start mapping what's going on around them to understand what are the big stones that they can leverage. It could be a beautiful relationship with a colleague that can be their mentor to change perspective, it could be a professional development blitz to learn a new methodology and understand what they're doing from a different perspective. It could be a reboot of the project or of the specific initiative, or even the way they think about working together as a team, but they need to find what are those big stones and not to solve every little problem because that's just a lot of effort for very little progress. And usually that leads to some degree of clarity. At least they understand what's worth focusing on and what's worth letting go.

Internal Patterns Meet External Chaos

SPEAKER_00 9:51

I love that. And resonates with me is when you said mapping what's happening around them externally, and I think the approach to coaching is I'm trying to map what's going on internally. So I believe that we all have our own leadership patterns that we came up the ranks through and how we just see ourselves in these different dynamics. Yeah, let's map that out. Let's map that out.

SPEAKER_02 10:24

That's very interesting because it's always both internal and external. Eventually, want to change your behavior. You want to leave aside the practices that are not serving you, you want to adopt new practices, you want to double down on those that are working, and that's external, but it has to start from some more internal drive. But you want to convince yourself that it's worth making a change, changing a little bit the way that you think about your values, about who you are, your abilities. Every single time that I work with a new client, even before I start working with them, the very first call, they just tell me about their problems. We want to understand it's a match if we want to work together. And I always make sure to say, I'm not a therapist. If you're searching for someone to inspire you, I'm not the right person. That's just not me. I'm not equipped to do that. I'm not equipped to be a therapist, I'm equipped to help you move forward from a professional perspective. But then after four or five meetings, the profound questions always come up, even if I don't intend to go there, because the client that there are some beliefs, assumptions, stories from their past that they're just blocking the way. They need to rethink about them. It doesn't mean that they need to erase them, it doesn't mean that they were wrong necessarily, but they have to reorganize the way that they think about the work so that they can move forward. That's why I think that it's always internal and external.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

Absolutely. And it ties back to the strategic capacity because it all starts from within. You have to, in my opinion, executive coach. We start where you are right now and look at ourselves internally, and what steps do we need to take to move forward? And so when we look at ourselves where we are today, what is the pattern? What do you react or approach? Transitional or chaotic transitions? What's your feelings about that? Is it this draining feeling? Is it your ego telling you gotta perform harder, you gotta overfunction? Is it some sort of decision fatigue that comes up when you know there's some sort of change that needs to take place? And what's the pattern in how you deal with it? And how can we be more strategic in shifting the pattern in how you deal with it?

SPEAKER_02 12:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

And I think that's very important because when we can put self-awareness around our current behaviors, because a lot of us are in autopilot in how we approach these different leadership dynamics, and we don't even think about it. We just respond, we just react. And whether it's good or bad, we're still in autopilot. And so that's why I put a lot of emphasis on my swag framework, self-awareness, why power, aligned action, and grit, because that's the self-regulation piece of it. And we all have a process in how we regulate ourselves in these leadership dynamics. Let's put a name on it. Let's put a name on it. And my name on it is swag. Is your swag on or is it off?

SPEAKER_02 13:40

Yeah, yeah. That's very interesting. There are two things that I want to riff on a little bit. The first one is really self-awareness. I want to look at the idea of self-awareness from a different perspective. I want to name a dynamic that we're all affected by. When I say chaotic transitions, I usually talk about the examples that I gave before, but we're really thinking about something that happens to each one of us. There is a change. I didn't necessarily choose to be a part of the change. I don't know, an MA or I've been fired or whatever. Okay. I need to deal with the change and it requires change from me. That's stressful for a lot of people. There is a minority that is obsessed with that and will be chasing changes and transitions for their whole lives. That's a minority. Most of us, even if we are not bothered by changes, we understand that it requires more effort from us and a lot for many reasons. And the other piece, chaos, meaning chaos intrinsically is a negative word, but it's not. Meaning, we are our culture is a culture that really celebrates order and linearity. And therefore, when we think about a change and even a chaotic change, when I don't understand what's going on and what is the right success, I'm thinking that something bad is happening. But that's the point. We don't want to just surrender to those cultural assumptions. We want to be self-aware. We want to stop for a moment. We want to really reach out to our values, our beliefs, the true ones, not those that have been imposed on us by the culture we live in, and understand what are the opportunities there, what are the efforts that are required from us, and they're maybe an invitation, their trigger to move forward. So, in other words, when you're talking about self-awareness, I think that it's an invite to leave aside all the tags that come with, and rather understand how I can manage my behavior and my relationships in the near future so that I make progress in a healthy way. I don't have to think about how my status, I don't have to think about how stressful this is going to be, because it might not be that stressful. Or maybe I am building that stress and it's not coming from outside.

Nervousness As Useful Data

SPEAKER_00 16:04

Yeah, it makes total sense. And the other thing that really steps out to stands out to me from what you were saying, we don't control over the external change. When I talk about strategic capacity, we have the opportunity when these environments are starting to affect us in one way or another. And we respond that we react or respond to that. And sometimes we don't have the comfortability around how to deal with change. It generates a certain nervousness. And I was just coaching a client around this, they about this nervousness thing and the feeling. Let's just say hypothetically, a person isn't performing to this to the standards of the organization, and they are really getting this difficult conversation with them to get them back on the right track. But they're a nice guy or nice woman, right? It generates this nervousness, this feeling. We were talking about that, and what came up was why is nervousness viewed as a bad thing? What if we shift the paradigm to leverage nervousness as a signal that there's a growth opportunity about to happen? So now you're in an environment where change is always happening, and your pattern is to feel nervous and worried. What if we just maybe, what if we try shifting our paradigm the way that we feel and see the nervousness within self and utilize it to our advantage to think it's a signal that's telling me there's a growth opportunity that's about to happen, and what question do I need to ask self so that I can move forward?

SPEAKER_02 18:06

Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. And I think that an executive is feeling nervous many times, is because there is at least one very dramatic scenario that is running in their head, and they're thinking this is here's a change is coming. A change is coming, and something bad is going to happen. And this is the scenario. That scenario is wonderful data because you can just have a conversation about that. Most of the time, the executives themselves are going to diffuse it, they're gonna say, Oh, but actually, the likelihood that's gonna happen very low. Second of all, if the negative scenario might come up, then that might happen. So that means that you have some sort of understanding of the dynamics at play. It means that you can control some of it, you can intervene, you can talk with the right people, you can build the right capital, social capital, professional capital, etc. etc., so that you're not gonna get to that scenario. So I think that the nervousness, being able to name that nervousness is already a great step forward. Being able to name what is the scenario, the imagined scenario that leads to that nervousness, because it means that you can act upon it. And then you have to act upon it. Maybe that's the biggest challenge. But I agree with you that there is a lot that can be done when nervousness and in a good way.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Absolutely. It can also be, in my opinion, the opportunity to pause and reflect in real time. Okay, now is the time to take a deep breath. And just like you said, go into a space, use your whiteboard, write down different scenarios, think through some things, or simply just pause, do a box breathing exercise so that you reground it and then take a step forward. But it just means so much. But it goes back to what I was saying: strategic capacity. Create a meaning for the nervousness you often get when you're in certain chaotic transitions. You know, you have a certain feeling as these things start to pop up that's out of your control. How can you start to be strategic about the nervousness when it does show up? That's powerful. When you can do that, your leadership naturally becomes lighter.

SPEAKER_02 20:37

100%. 100%.

Chaos As The New Normal

SPEAKER_02 20:39

And also European, if you're looking at the last decade and we compare it to the decade before, we see that chaotic transitions. I mean, think about the amount of mass layoffs we had between 2005 and 2015. I think we had three mass layoffs that were across the market. And in the past decade, we just see a couple of years. Almost every year, there is at least one good reason for a chaotic transition on a macro level. Just think about on a micro level how many of them we see. The pace is much higher than what it was. So I am assuming and I'm thinking, and I keep saying this to my clients, even though I know that it's difficult, that we cannot think about chaotic transitions as crisis anymore. That's just how life looks like today. Maybe it's going to change 10 years from today. But right now, we are in a society, in a world, in an economy that just invites a chaotic transition after another. Sometimes it's in our company, sometimes it's in our department, sometimes it's in our industry, sometimes it's in our personal life. But the pace of it just keeps faster and we can't run away from it. We just need to learn how to deal with it in a healthy way. I know that takes a lot of and it's a muscle that we need to develop, but I think that we don't really have any alternative. I'd love to hear, first of all, if you see that as well. If you think that how do you clients?

SPEAKER_00 22:02

I think it's the way that see it. And when you look at chaotic transitions, it has this negative tone to it, in my opinion. And that tone generates limiting beliefs, assumptions, and interpretations. It generates a story in our mind about self and how we're approaching this. And a lot of times that story about self and how we approach it is negative. And that's what generates the worry and the fear in how this. And so with my clients, really teach them, let's shift it, let's shift the paradigm from that negative story that we're telling ourselves about the transition. How can we flip it to be more positive, more abundant, more of a learning opportunity so that we can create a win-win for all? And regardless of the decade, there's always some sort of layoffs happening in the environment across the world. There's countless stories of people who's been made millionaires through these difficult times. And it all comes back to their mindset and how they saw the change. I remember in my started when the pandemic hit, I was a professor, local colleges here in the states. And the pandemic hit, schools shut down. And my mindset was, oh, this is an opportunity to get my coaching credentials. Let me go get my coaching credentials. And from there, I created a coaching unit in the Department of Justice here where I currently reside. In a time where all businesses closed. The point that I'm making is my mindset was on growth, not on worry. And how is this going to affect me feeling overwhelmed, doubtful? What can I build in a time like this? And that was the end result.

SPEAKER_02 24:22

Yeah, totally understand that. Sometimes there are very good reasons to worry. Absolutely. Think about a few clients where they just said, I'm having issues with my colleagues, my CEO hates me. I'm afraid that I'm gonna get fired. I have you know, absolutely, etc. etc. etc. That's concrete. That makes sense. Yeah, I think that what we are saying here is you cannot just stay in the place of worry. That is not something that is going to push you forward. You want to say, okay, I'm worried about let's think what are the potential scenarios, not the toxic ones, not the overdramatic one. Let's see what are my options, let's map them out, let's find what are those big stones, as I was saying. And let's see also how I can live this transition in a way that invites further opportunities, as you were just saying. Entering a chaotic transition that has some real worries doesn't mean that you just need to focus on the worries and make sure that they don't become damaged. It means that you want to name them, you want to realize how real they are, you want to understand how they what you can do about it, and you need to understand that even if they take a lot of brain space and a lot of of your energies, it is not the only thing that you're having in your life right now. And there are a few more things that you can just leverage to take care also of your interests and ambitions alongside resolving those issues. I think a realistic way of looking at those.

Closing Thoughts And How To Connect

SPEAKER_00 25:56

And as much as I want to keep this conversation going, man, I could talk to you all morning about this. Yeah, me too. We gotta get ready to sign off. What lasting thoughts do you have for the audience?

SPEAKER_02 26:08

Times, and I think I'm gonna keep thinking about that. Maybe I will write about it, it's an interesting trigger.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

That's what this show is about. Let's think about it. That wasn't staged. Hey, how can my audience find you again?

SPEAKER_02 26:22

So, my website is Avi Leg Avi with a Y. You can find it on Substack and be linked in the show notes. Reach out on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to get a new message and connect with new people.

SPEAKER_00 26:34

Sounds great, brother. Thank you. Thank you for your wisdom today. Thank you for your presence. Thank you for a conversation just filled with insights, wisdom, and most importantly, nuggets. Thank you. Thank you. That's another rep in the inner arena. You didn't just listen, you leveled up your swag, self-awareness, lie power, aligned action, and grit. If this hit home, share it, subscribe to the Let's Think About It podcast, and log in with me on YouTube at Swag Coaching. Until next time, stay aware, lead with your why, act in alignment, and keep your grit flowing.