ABS students in the final year unit 'Strategic Responses in Business' competed all semester in a globally run computer simulation, and ranked in the top 25% worldwide in many of the success measures! The final assessment in the last week of semester involved the students holding an Annual General Meeting (AGM) for their shareholders (Staff, Students and other guests invited from throughout the College), in which they had to report on their companies’ operations and answer questions from their shareholders.
The unit aims to give the students a simulated business experience, which involves the students managing a computer sensor company over an 8 year (fictional) period. For each year the students were required to make over 160 decisions involving marketing, financing, human resources, production, and R&D. Throughout the semester there were assessments based on competitor analysis, preparing minutes of meetings and compiling company reports based on their results.
Following the completion of their AGM, their lecturer Dr Warrick Long revealed to those who attended that of the success measures used by the simulation, this group of students achieved a ranking in the top 25% places world-wide in three of the seven success measures, and in the top 40% for the remaining four measures, competing against nearly 100 other teams from universities around the world. This was an outstanding achievement from this group, involving Craig Louwen (Chair), Mikayla Davidson, Manish Kumar and Josh Pannekoek, Andrew Bradley, who should all be justifiably very proud of their achievement. Well done.
As well as being true of our personal lives, the constancy of change is often the case in organisations, too. The risk associated with constant organisational change is that employees begin to experience change fatigue—a lingering sense of weariness and negative reactions to change such as frustration, burnout or apathy.
Why is change fatigue damaging to organisations? Because lack of employee support is one of the top reasons for failed change attempts. Since not making any changes is not an option for organisations, we need to look at increasing the capacity of employees to absorb and cope with changes.
“Change is the only constant in life.”
Greek philosopher Heraclitus
This article from the Australian HR Institute contains some excellent practical suggestions on how to combat change fatigue and is worth a full read, but I will summarise some of these below.
The first is to involve employees in the change process. Create an environment where people can speak openly about the changes, provide feedback and actively participate in shaping the decisions. Participation is useful for helping employees see the value behind the change and increasing their emotional motivation for supporting the change.
The other key suggestion is to start from seeing changes from the perspective of those who will be impacted by them. Does the organisation currently meet their needs and will the proposed changes help with this? This perspective contains five steps:
To manage the underlying contributors to change fatigue, we need to focus on how employees experience those changes not just on the behavioural outcomes.
Photograph
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels.
Amit Mukherjee, in his book Leading in the digital world:
How to foster creativity, collaboration, and inclusivity (2020, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology) throws down the gauntlet to existing leaders when he
notes:
“Leadership experts present their percepts as ageless and universal, rarely
mentioning technology. Digital technology experts see leadership merely as a
tool necessary for guiding complex projects. Both groups ignore the changes
digital technologies are demanding of leaders.” (p. xii)
This book differs from the other leadership books I have read because the model of leadership it presents embraces and incorporates the impact of digital technologies. And importantly, it recognizes that to change takes time and so provides guidance on how you can prioritize those issues most important and relevant for you.
Mukherjee has been the Professor of Leadership and Strategy at the Institute for Management Development (IMD) Business School, with a swag of major research projects and publications. He has also worked as a global technology consultant for nearly 20 years. He brings the perfect balance of academic and practitioner to the book.
Using a 700 respondent global survey as well as previous publications and research data, he presents a very convincing proposition and approach in a really well organised book that is logical and sequential, with great summaries and anecdotes throughout.
This book would appeal to aspiring and established leaders who realise that leadership in the digital era requires a new mindset, behaviours and actions, and is a book I very highly recommend.
The Avondale Business School (ABS) was recently approved to offer a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from 2021. The MBA is the most popular professional degree in the world, being internationally recognized and designed to develop the skills required for careers in management and leadership within the not-for-profit and corporate sectors, government, private industry, and other areas.
MBA Course Coordinator Dr Warrick Long is proud of Avondale’s history of postgraduate programs in leadership and management over the last 20 years, and notes that the MBA is the next logical step in the suite of offerings, complementing the existing Graduate Diploma and Graduate Certificate in Leadership & Management.
While there are many MBAs on offer through many universities, the Avondale MBA is unique because of its emphasis on being based on the Seventh-day Adventist Christian values and foundations of Avondale University College. Avondale MBA graduates gain the preferred qualification for professionals wanting to pursue a career in leadership and management with the bonus of a Christian values-based emphasis as well as the latest ideas and principles behind effective leadership and management.
Flexible study options are available and for more information, simply click here. Enrolments for 2021 are being accepted now.
The New Business Ventures and Innovation class at Avondale Business School had the opportunity this week to pitch their business ideas to a panel of judges with a high level of business expertise. These students were set the challenge of overviewing their business, honing in on their target markets, evidencing their market research, assessing their competition, providing details of their marketing strategies, and outlining the financial projections for the business idea they had developed, in only 10 minutes.
The panellists, who included current commercial managers of sales and operations planning, new product development technical managers, research and development managers, solar energy consultants, and former company directors, were impressed by the calibre of student presentations, which included a range of sole trader businesses, company structure entities and partnerships.
The students had the opportunity to gain individualised feedback from these panellists, specific to their chosen business idea, with valuable insights provided which the students can now further flesh out as they finalise the written business plan for their chosen enterprises. It was noted that five students from the class are actively planning to develop their business idea, with one already running the business they presented.
Employee engagement has become an area of increasing focus for organizations, and rightly so. After all, engaged employees are happier, more productive, and tend to perform at a higher standard. A similar, yet different focus is emerging known as the employee experience.
This article from Gallup is worth a read, as it provides an in-depth overview of the differences between employee engagement and employee experience. It suggests that the employee experience is made up of the entire journey an employee takes with your organization. This includes every touch point from the first time they see your company website or job advertisement, through to their onboarding and their eventual exit (as well as everything in the middle). What experience does the employee have when interacting with your organization? Is it smooth and easy to navigate, or are there multiple roadblocks? Is it easy or difficult for them to identify and understand the organization’s values and what is expected of them?
Gallup suggests that engagement can be summarized as the basic psychological needs that must be met in order for an employee to perform their work well. While this includes the usual points of knowing what is expected of you and possessing all the necessary tools for the job, it also encompasses wider social and emotional needs such as finding meaning in your work.
The point of the article is that engagement stems primarily from relationships within the workplace. In fact it states that the most important relationship is between the employee and their manager, which accounts for 70% of variance in employee engagement. Because of this, engagement is not quickly fixed through incentives, perks or one-off team activities. In fact, one could view these as more ‘employee experience’ solutions. Engagement is built through the consistent cultivating of workplace relationships and the work environment.
Essentially, the employee experience could be summarized as the surface-level interaction with the company, while engagement stems from the deeper workplace culture. Which do you need more? Both! Employees who have a positive experience will likely seek to be engaged, and engaged employees tend to feel better about their work and will view their experience in a positive light.
Corporate values statements, although nearly universal, rarely matter. Such is the finding in a very recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, by Donald Sull, Stefano Turconi and Charles Sull (find it here). And nearly all of us can most likely cite examples of where this is true (think Volkswagen, Enron, and more). The purpose of the research was to find out how well behaviour inside a company aligns with cultural aspirations, or as the authors put it, “when it comes to their core values, do companies walk the talk?
The research found that companies “rely on a set of core values as the guideposts for helping employees align their behaviour with corporate culture.” Regarding these values, most commonly companies are reporting five core values, and nearly 75% list between three and seven values. By far, the most commonly listed values are:
There is quite some distance between these four and the next ones.
What was most interesting from the research is that “there is no correlation between the cultural values a company emphasizes in its published statements and how well the company lives up to those values in the eyes of the employees”. That is “data shows no correlation between official values and corporate culture.”
Thankfully the authors don’t just leave the discussion there and go on to offer some tips on how to close that gap between culture and values. Each of the following three tips are explained in the article, with examples of how to achieve them, but in summary they are:
These can easily be summarised under the banner of communication. While we may think we are good at communicating, the evidence does not support that for most organisations. The disconnect between what leaders preach and what is practiced through organisations is distinct.
Take a moment to reflect on you and your organisation – do you see the espoused values being practiced throughout your organisation? How do you know?
Every other board member believes someone on their board should be replaced – according to the recently released PwC 2019 Annual Corporate Directors Survey (Find it Here). Further, 23% believe two or more directors should be replaced! That is quite startling and speaks to the quality of directors on boards. The top reasons noted in the survey are that directors:
Many boards now conduct board assessments (ABS have experience assisting boards in this process), and an increasing number are beginning to also conduct individual director assessments. But still many do not. What are the roadblocks? There are three main ones arising form the survey. The first is that directors and management simply view it as a compliance exercise, the second is that they use an approach that doesn’t really allow for honest feedback, and the final one is a failure to follow-up on the results.
To overcome these roadblocks, PwC recommend five key actions to ensure the board assessment process is a useful and effective process. Each of the following five actions are explained in detail in the report, but in summary they are:
Boards that are willing to engage in this process will find themselves on a pathway to continuous improvement that can result on changes that allow the board to deliver greater value to the company and stakeholders.
So how does an eight-year-old Southeast Asian company become ranked as one of the world’s top innovators? Grab has become a leader in innovation and credits its phenomenal success to a strong, value-based culture.
McKinsey & Co associate partner (Berlin) Philipp Hillenbrand speaks with Grab co-founder Hooi Ling Tan (read it here) to find out what it takes to achieve such achievements in such a short period of time. The full article is worth the read, but a quick summary of the key insights are:
How successful have these strategies been? Well, Singapore-based Grab is Southeast Asia’s most popular ride-sharing company and has facilitated more than four billion rides since its founding in 2012. The Grab app has been downloaded onto more than 163 million mobile devices, and it also offers a wide range of on-demand transport, food- and package-delivery services, as well as payment and financial services, across 339 cities in eight countries. In 2019, Grab was ranked the second-most-innovative company in the world on Fast Company’s list of The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies.
Maybe there is something in having a values-based culture after all.
Rarely is a textbook so easy to read and packed with such useful information for practitioners, but ‘The New Psychology of Leadership: Identify, Influence, and Power (2nd ed.)’ by Haslam, Reicher, and Platow (2020, Taylor & Francis Group) does just that.
It offers a unique perspective on leadership and its interaction with group dynamics by arguing that successful leadership occurs when the leader creates, champions, and embeds a group identity to create a shared understanding of ‘us’, of which the leader themselves is representative. The primary suggestion is that leadership is not a product of one’s “I-ness”, but of their “we-ness.”
Inspired by research on social identify and self-categorization theories from decades of scientific and anecdotal evidence it addresses alternative theories in order to strengthen the authors’ position, and the argument is very convincing.
This is a well-organized book, that walks you through the traditional view of leadership before leading you into the new theory that leaders are identity entrepreneurs and champions who create a shared sense of who ‘we’ are and then motivate the group into a shared endeavour.
Highly recommended for anyone working in leadership, organizational psychology, or aspiring to do so this well-written and engaging book is definitely worth the read, and re-read.
