Unlearning Scarcity in Your Organization
I believe that having a scarcity mindset is a blocker to growth, innovation, and a trustworthy, positive work experience. Scarcity is pervasive and constantly reinforced in our society, and even more so in workplaces.
Scarcity is the fear that there’s not enough — time, money, ideas, information, patience, customers, talent, skills — to succeed. It damages organizations and leaders trying to make decisions, share information, and collaborate. Over the last decade, I’ve worked diligently to shift my mindset so that I don’t perpetuate scarcity thinking and behaviors in my life or role at Smith & Connors. I consider my mindset practice to be my most important job as a leader.
How might you or others in your organization be perpetuating scarcity in how you think and operate? Is your culture ruled by it? Here are some thoughts about how to spot it, and ultimately, how to begin the journey to reduce its presence in your work.
How scarcity shows up
- Rigid control of information and workflow within the team
- Ideas and innovation are not welcome because they challenge tightly held boundaries
- Leaders are resistant to staff ideas in favor of making the decision themselves
- Urgency drives everything with no space to pause, reflect, and learn
- The first answer to new ideas is always a quick “NO”
What abundance looks and feels like
- Meetings and the work feel collaborative and spacious
- Leaders genuinely seek feedback to improve their work and management style
- When new ideas arise people respond with curiosity
- Team members of all levels are encouraged to offer their insights and ideas
- Failure is encouraged and reframed as an opportunity for growth
How to shift away from scarcity
Once upon a time, in the early days of Smith & Connors, we founders were still learning how to lead teams and clients, all while trying to form a solid business foundation that supported our families. Naturally, we felt insecure and anxious as we hit roadblocks. We led with that anxiety and insecurity, which to others felt like defensiveness, stress, and control.
The first step is learning to notice those patterns before acting on them. What are you afraid will happen? What are you trying to protect? Is the decision in front of you actually responding to the situation, or to your fear about what might happen?
Then you can introduce a different set of questions: What becomes possible if we aren’t trying to protect ourselves? What could we learn here? What decision would we make from curiosity instead of fear?
This doesn’t mean pretending risk isn’t real. It means making room for something other than fear to determine what happens next.
A leap into the unknown
During the COVID pandemic in 2020, we were forced to face ourselves and our business with new eyes. It was either close the doors or remake ourselves and culture.
We leapt, as true entrepreneurs, and committed to shifting our mindset and our business. It was scary. But it felt less scary than living in a belief that we would fail, then seeing evidence of that all around us.
By spring 2021, we established a new perspective that we designed intentionally, rooted firmly in wisdom, certainty, and abundance. What happened next in our business was miraculous. We began to see everything as opportunities for growth and expansion. Our problems now looked exciting and interesting. We were anchored in curiosity and possibility. And outcomes quickly began to mirror this positive perspective.
I shared more about this transformation and what it changed for me as a leader in my EO Talks keynote. Watch the full talk here!
We rerooted (and rerouted) our company
My partners and I set out to build a new version of S&C from the ashes, with a clear and very different purpose:
Rather than focus our business goals on growth and revenue, we decided that the purpose of our company would be to create exceptional experiences for our team, clients, and community. If it didn’t feel right or good, it didn’t belong.
Fear and scarcity thinking does not feel good — it feels constricted, tight, anxious, and scary. Curiosity and excitement feel buoyant, expansive, comforting, fun. We committed to the idea of the S&C Experience as our touchstone.
The business immediately took off in the right direction, and at speed. When we started hiring again, we built a new culture, shifted our leadership structure with me officially as CEO and reorganized our accountability chart. We looked at potential clients through the lens of scarcity and abundance. Are they open to approaching the project as a creative opportunity for clarity, rather than defaulting to established ideas or norms that may not serve? Or will they lead with fear? How open-minded are they?
Our clients and team began to transform with us
I started to bring the conversation about mindset into initial meetings with potential clients and hires. When clients were completely stuck in fear and not willing to budge, we parted ways. We were not willing to have our team suffer for a paycheck. Remember, it’s all about the experience.
Most of our clients leaned in with great enthusiasm to our invitation of directness around fear. We began conducting a SWOT analysis at the start of new relationships to get the big questions out on the table. We developed language and methods to quickly and compassionately address issues. We got better at creating safe containers in which our team and our clients could voice their own fears or uncertainties, and get vulnerable.
Internally, this has been a seismic shift for us. Our approach mixes emotional intelligence and business acumen, which makes for thoughtful and sensitive listening sessions. These sessions often contain strong emotions. Together, over time, we’re able to convert this energy into productive changes in how we run our business and help others change the world.
“This ability to translate and work in the deeply human side of our organization, and also build the business structures, processes and systems to produce outcomes for our community, is unique, in my experience. It has been humbling to work alongside S&C. I have learned an incredible amount and have grown significantly as a leader. Now, we have tremendous positive momentum in building our new institutional culture.”
Current Client
This new container was magical. Inside it, innovation and creativity thrives. Being encouraged to bring our full selves translates to a tremendous amount of wisdom and creativity in a room. Our clients began to level up with and alongside us. We started to grow as individuals, as leaders and practitioners, and our business has grown.
Scarcity no longer rules our mindset. The core of the S&C Experience is expansiveness, abundance, infinite curiosity, creativity, and fun.
“The result of working with S&C has been an extraordinary and transformative shift in culture and communications. Smith & Connors are a team of great listeners, thinkers and designers who make the work smart, interesting…and FUN!”
Stephanie Swanson, VP Marketing & Communications, Oregon Community Foundation
Where to start your transformation
1. Notice evidence of scarcity
- Look for how often people say “there’s no time,” “that’s not how we do things,” “we don’t have the resources”
- Ideas are shut down before they’re fully heard
- There’s urgency, without space to pause or reflect
- Information or workflow is held tightly by one or two people
- Decisions are driven by fear of loss rather than possibility
2. Look inward first
- Look at how your own fear is showing up in your leadership, decisions, or reactions
3. Name scarcity mindset with compassion, not shame
- When you notice scarcity thinking in yourself or your team, talk about it without shaming anyone (or yourself)
- Separate the person from the pattern — scarcity is a mindset, not a character flaw
- Create language your team can use to flag fear-based thinking in real time
- When a new idea shows up, ask “what’s interesting here?” before “why won’t this work?”
- Normalize naming fears and uncertainties out loud, early
4. Practice moving there with people
- Run a SWOT (or similar process) at the start of new relationships or projects to surface threats and weaknesses together
- Reward vulnerability and admitting failure instead of punishing it
- Notice which teams, customers, community members are open to seeing failure as opportunity
- Notice who leads with fear and resists new ideas
- Be willing to part ways when scarcity is too deeply entrenched to shift
- Invite input from every level of the team, not just leadership
5. Redefine what success means
- Shift the goal from growth-at-all-costs to the quality of experience you’re creating for team, clients, and community
- Treat failure as data, not a verdict
- Let “Does this feel right?” be a real decision filter, not just a nice idea
