John F. Kennedy, the former US President said, ‘The time to repair the roof, is when the sun is shining.’ There’s something profound about that quote that sparked an insight for me.

There’s no need, really, to repair the roof when the sun is shining. We can ignore the hole in the roof, or even better, enjoy the sunlight through it. But if we do not work on it, we will face the consequences long after, when it rains. Perhaps, the best time to work on ourselves is when we don’t really need to.

The best time to invest in our professional and personal development is when there’s no need for us to invest in it. The best time for leaders to invest in their people is when everyone is doing great, and things are going well. It is these investments that pay off later in either mitigating the effects of turbulent times or even thriving through them. As leaders, we all have an immense potential in the way we show up and make things happen for ourselves and for others, yet sometimes we just don’t; we unknowingly settle for doing less than what we are capable of. When things are going great, we reduce investments of time, energy and money into the things that matter in the long run. And we pool all our resources into fire-fighting when things finally do not go as planned.

Take the simple example of business continuity planning. The companies which have invested in planning and testing their processes for crisis management have clearly fared much better through the global lock-down than those that did not. A lot of firms have business continuity teams because it is easy for us to foresee that things might go wrong on a process level – we employ procedural redundancies. What is it that makes it difficult for us to grasp that people are the bigger asset to an organisation than processes? If we are willing to take a step back into the fundamentals, it is clear that processes are for the people, and not the other way around. Yet we act sparingly when it comes to investing in our people. As leaders, we think that this is the soft part of our job – something that is taken care of automatically if we do our actual job properly. Maybe we need to take a fresh look at what our actual job as a leader is. Maybe our job as a manager or a director or any other designation is different. But then we would be our designations and not leaders. We would be reduced merely to whatever collective titles we hold, and not be qualified as the leadership.

Maybe the best time to rethink about our leadership and its impact on our people is when we don’t really need to. The workforce of the future needs leaders. Is it really that difficult to foresee that this proactive approach becomes a key differentiator between managers, directors and leaders?