Recently the global consulting firm BCG noted that “75% of transformation efforts don’t deliver the hoped-for results”. Building on this. Nadya Zhexembayeva highlights how bad we tend to be at adapting to overcome risks. In a recent article (read it here) Zhexembayeva suggests that by flipping three of our very ingrained assumptions, the results will improve.
The three assumptions Zhexembayeva challenges are:
Sharing our failures can both increase creativity and strengthen a team, and there is ample research to support this. Equally so, engaging employees in scenario and contingency planning can encourage them to think about being proactive about improvements, rather than waiting for a crisis to force change. And the idea of sharing unused capacity to save money has plenty of support from major industries across the world.
The main thrust of Zhexembayeva’s article is that the environments in which we operate are now in constant flux and adaptability is necessary to survive. So by taking on board these strategies, your organisation can not just survive, but thrive.
“Organisations are moving away from the pure profit motive, to broadening their purpose to include all stakeholders. Including the communities they serve and society at large,” is the view of 50 percent of respondents in the Deloitte Insights report 2020 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends (Download it here) which polled nearly 9,000 business and HR leaders in 119 countries. This now sits in the context of advancing technology, increased industrial action by workers, major re-emergence of racial discrimination and massive unemployment issues associated with a global pandemic. We are heading into another period of major uncertainty and a changing workforce.
With this context, the report by Deloitte Insights foresees the need for organisations to make three bold shifts in order to negotiate these troubled waters:
In addressing these shifts, organisations will need to redefine their purpose, potential and perspective. The full report addresses these and the associated issues for organisations to consider. Included in these issues to be dealt with are:
Leaders who want to stay ahead of the pack will take the time to download this report and consider the implications for their organisation.
Leaders need to be confident, but can they be overconfident? Of course, and we all know examples of leaders like that. Naturally, we never include ourselves. And that is the problem – we all have blind spots. A recent article by Joan Shafer, Adam Bryant and David Reimer entitled Revealing Leaders’ Blind Spots’ (read it here) highlight that the gap between the areas that leaders think they need to improve, and those identified by those they lead is quite wide – highlighting blind spots.
This is inevitable, and not necessarily an issue, unless leaders choose not to understand what these blind spots are and to address them. Following their research into this, the authors concluded ‘that leaders are mostly oblivious to the way their colleagues view their weaknesses.’. The authors also note that these disconnects have consequences, including hampering the organizations ability to execute its strategy.
The theory arrived at by the article is that if executives realised how they were perceived by their co-workers and leadership teams, they would better understand how to improve their performance. To highlight the lack of understanding held by executives, the research found that in 80% of the cases reviewed, there was no alignment in the top three areas needed to work on, in 19% there was one or two matches and in only 1 percent of cases was there total agreement.
Significantly, EQ and time management were two of the major areas where leaders were unaware of their ineffectiveness. But the biggest blind spots were:
The authors conclude that ‘there is a 96 percent likelihood that leaders do not understand that their organizations perceive them as ivory-tower executives who do not provide adequate clarity on their company’s strategy’.
A reading of the full article will explain these in more detail, including offering some strategies to address this. However, the biggest step any leader can take, is to understand and accept that they do have blind spots.
Organisations that can respond quickly and adaptively to the changing environment are those that will survive, and even thrive when others fail. We are in those strange and uncertain times now, and examples abound of leaders that have been able to keep their organisations moving forward.
A very recent report from McKinsey & Co offers advocates for leaders to drop the old command and control style of leadership, and adopt the network of teams approach, which enables organisations to quickly respond and adapt to their changing circumstances. You can find the report here.
As the authors note, often waiting for decisions and approvals can cripple your organisation during these times. But as leader, you can’t do everything, so this is where creating a robust network of teams comes in, that is empowered to operate outside of the current hierarchy and bureaucratic structures of the organisation. These teams are able to make faster and better decisions.
The report proposed 4 steps that leaders can take to create a cohesive and adaptable network of teams. These appear in summary form below, and I highly recommend reading the whole report to get the details of the process.
Other benefits from establishing a functional network of teams include infusing the organisation with a common purpose, highlighting empathy, communication and clear decision-making, and pointing the way to what the organisation can become in the future.
To conclude, the authors finish the article by challenging leaders to take this opportunity to reflect on what kind of organisation, culture and operating model they really want the organisation to be, and to start doing that now.
The military calls it ‘Telling truth to power’ but for the rest of us it is about leading up. That is, managing the relationship with those above you in the organisation so that they are informed and engaged. It is tricky waters, but when achieved, provides a huge bonus for the organisation.
A recent article by Willie Peterson from Columbia Business School (read it here) gives a very good summary of leading up, and how to achieve it. While the key is to have willing participants, the consequences of senior executives not learning from below is very dissatisfied employees and a lack of organizational competitiveness.
Peterson acknowledges the risks and barriers, including perceived challenges to authority and the potential psychological sensitivities, but the benefits far outweigh these. When leaders fall under the “curse of power”, they often are too isolated from what is happening at ground level, and subordinates tend to tell you what they think you want to hear, and then they become blind to truth. And yet Gallop note that companies who listen to their employees are 21 percent more profitable then their competitors.
The most accurate and current information of the market and industry lies with those closest to the interface with customers and competitors. Leaders that clear the channels for this information to flow upwards are in a much better position to steer the company in the best direction. The full article provides tips on how to ensure the information flows smoothly and the reader will benefit greatly from taking the time to digest the contents.
Restrictions are easing, and it seems the worst of the Covid-19 crisis may be over, but the hard work of recovery is just beginning. A timely article from Deloitte entitled ‘The heart of resilient leadership’ (read it here) addresses the issue of leadership through the three phases of a crisis – response, recovery and thriving.
The article is packed with some excellent advice on leading through these three phases, and is well worth a read. A very quick summary of the main points are:
Now is the time for leaders to be planning for moving forward and responding to the new opportunities, rather than bouncing back to the status quo.
Ensuring your organisation has a clear purpose enhances its chances of being profitable. The latest McKinsey Quarterly includes a fascinating article (read it here) that highlights how important it is for organisations to have a clear purpose.
The article includes an honest reflection on the difficulty of balancing the tensions between the having a worthwhile purpose, maintaining a profitable stance, and looking after the interests of a diverse range of stakeholders. However, their research also indicates hat most stakeholders feel that organisations should have a purpose, beyond that of wealth. However, where an organisation has a stated purpose, but is not perceived to be living up to it, then the purpose gap can be detrimental to the health of the organisation.
To help bridge the purpose, gap, the article advocates embarking on a process to discover the entities purpose, and then align all aspects of the organisation with this. There are four steps proposed:
However, being a leader in such circumstances is a double-edged sword, as you may be achieving in all areas, but if you are perceived as being inauthentic, and not true to the entities purpose, it will be a whole lot of trouble. As the article notes, “to be authentic, you must be unrelenting in elevating and stimulating debate about uncomfortable truths and tensions you may be tempted to sweep under the rug’.
The role of your organisation is much more than just making money. Determine your purpose, hold true to it, and make a difference in the word.
“Think small to reach big” is the theme of this excellent and very practical book on how to achieve big things. Think small: the surprisingly simple ways to reach big goals (2017 Michael O' Mara Books Limited) is written by Owain Service & Rory Gallagher, managing directors of the Behavioural Insights Team, who lead programs of major reforms and policy implementations.
Through use of extensive research and practical examples the authors show that you are unlikely to meet your ambitious, long-term objective unless you get the small details right along the way. Hence the theme ‘to achieve big, your need to think small’. It is very solidly backed by research and documented outcomes of their programmes, which makes it very convincing and compelling.
I found it to be a really well organised book that is logical and sequential, with great summaries and anecdotes throughout, making it very well written and easy to read.
This book will appeal to anyone that wants to implement or make changes, either personally or within a business. It is very highly recommended.
A recent article in strategy+business notes how poor management effectively imposes a “dysfunction tax” on the company (read it here). Adam Bryant contends that “For every dollar of revenue that your company brings in, figure out how many cents are being frittered away to cover the cost of dysfunction — the self-inflicted wounds of bad strategy, poor execution, and ineffective communication, among other things, within your organization.”
Bryant is realistic enough to recognise that every company is paying some form of dysfunction tax, the issue is just how much – “How much time and energy are spent on internal matters that have little to do with creating value for customers and clients?”
To help stimulate thinking regarding how to measure the dysfunction tax, Bryant proposes that there are 3 main drivers of a dysfunction tax. These are listed in summary form below, but the full article expands on these and is well worth reading.
1. Lack of clarity around strategy. That is, the strategy may be clear in their own head, but it is murky to everyone else in the company.
2. Life in the matrix. Complicated frameworks often add complexity rather than reduce it. To check, just ask yourself whether the number of meetings rise markedly after the restructuring, undermining the promise of a more structured approach and thereby raising the dysfunction tax?
3. The wrong people in the wrong chairs. Under performers are kept around too long in senior teams, or they are put in jobs that are misaligned with their skill set. It’s the Peter Principle in action.
There are also a number of additional dysfunctions that Bryant discusses that could be added to the dysfunction tax, but I’ll leave that to you to read. He concludes the article by challenging business to focus attention on the underlying problems as if there were dollar signs attached to them.
If ever there was a time to rethink the traditional workplace it is now. Through necessity, organizations have proven that they can in fact operate in a ‘non-traditional’ format and still maintain productivity. As we move toward the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations have an opportunity to consider how their workplaces may look moving forward. Through these discussions the concept of the four-day working week has begun to gain more traction.
While in a compressed working week employees work longer hours over four days, the four-day working week means employees maintain their existing salary and simply work their usual hours for only four days.
You can read about the experience of two organisations who have implemented this here and here, but a few of the reported benefits are:
However, in implementing a four-day work week there some important considerations:
Whether or not the four-day working week is a realistic consideration for your organization, may this concept and time in history be the prompt for a wider conversation about the future of the way we all work.
