This Simple Mindset Shift Could Make or Break Your Company During Crisis

How to engender the strategic flexibility necessary to survive the Covid-19 crisis.

Sameer Bhatia is an Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) member in Los Angeles, and founder of ProProfs, which provides software tools that help organizations have smarter employees and happier customers through interactive training and quiz software that improves knowledge and collaboration. As an EO member, Sameer accessed EO’s Virtual Speaker Tour featuring Mike Merchant, a consultant with expertise on leadership development and change management. The webinar series helps entrepreneurs find the strength, courage and tools necessary to persevere during the Covid-19 crisis. Sameer shared this summary of Merchant’s message:

Want your business to make it through Covid-19? Use S.A.M. 

That’s the advice of Mike Merchant, senior consultant at the Arbinger Institute, a management-training firm founded in 1979 on the premise that the best executives have an “outward mindset” that helps them understand other people’s needs and objectives, as opposed to an “inward mindset” that keeps them focused only on their own.

What is S.A.M.?

S.A.M. is a tool to help you develop an outward mindset. It works both at home and in business. Merchant, a graduate of Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management, uses it with his seven “redheaded and musical children,” and it works great, he says.

S.A.M. stands for:

• See others
• Adjust efforts 
• Measure impact

The world must be full of raving narcissists if “seeing others” qualifies as management advice, right? Maybe so, but Merchant encounters a lot of well-meaning, driven corporate leaders who are blind to others’ challenges and needs. They are so concerned with being productive that they lose sight of whether their product is what customers want.   

That is a hallmark of the inward mindset. Another one is only seeing other people for their usefulness to oneself–seeing them only as vehicles or obstacles. Change starts with recognizing that other people have challenges and needs of their own, Merchant explained on a recent EO Virtual Speaker Tour webinar.

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