My guest post at Tanveer Naseer’s blog, The Great and Perilous Leadership Journey Ahead, reflects my perspective on the rapidly and radically changing nature of leadership in our emerging environment. Perhaps my subhead says it best: “Welcome to the Leadership Blender.”
The art and science of management is much about coping with risk. There are few certain outcomes in business, and that’s particularly true when we factor in the reality that people are darned complex and don’t always act rationally. More often than not, I see managers and leaders looking at their world through the eyes of “what can go wrong?” and basing their decisions solely on attempting to minimize those identified adverse outcomes. Here are 5 ideas that leaders can use to help experimentation flourish on their teams.
There are ample reasons for organizations to change business processes and business practices in this fast moving and complex environment. The market drivers are strong, the business justification is clear and often, ideas on how and where to change are clearly visible to some inside organizations. It’s too bad that most change management initiatives fail, in spite of the best of intentions. With a bit of advance warning and some darned hard work however, you may be able to avoid the fate of so many that have come before you. Learn to ask yourself some core questions and keep asking these questions and you might just put one in the win column.
I’ve had the great privilege this past year to work with a Fortune 50 company that is methodically conquering the retail world. Specifically, I’m working with a group of high-potential mid-level professionals all focused on increasing their contributions and growing their careers. During our recent time together, the program sponsors arranged for a good number of the senior executives of the corporation to sit down and share insights on how to develop as senior contributors; how to develop executive presence and in general, how to seize the opportunities being presented by the firm’s great growth. Over the course of 3 development days, we invested approximately 5 hours engaging with executives. The impact was priceless.
It’s nearly first and ten for the 2010 NFL season, and Dan McCarthy, the venerable proprietor of the Great Leadership blog is doing his part to get the party started with his September Leadership Development Carnival.
I had the good fortune to connect recently with Jocelyn Davis, one of the co-authors (along with Henry Frechette, Jr., and Edwin Boswell) of Strategic Speed, for an interview, where we discussed the high failure rate of strategies, the meaning of “strategic speed,” and a number of other issues important to anyone interested in improving strategy execution. Jocelyn’s insights into the book and the world of strategy and leadership were fascinating.
The lot of professionals inside many organizations can easily be characterized by a series of endless status meetings, hurried hallway conversations and messages quickly dispatched on a pda while walking, ignoring the meeting in process or consuming a protein bar on the run. Nonetheless, work gets done, customers are served and growth often created. I do however, worry and wonder about the human costs and the cost to the organization in lost-ideas, missed opportunities and a much more superficial existence.
We invest a great deal of time talking and writing and preaching about change. We discuss resistance to change, fear of change, our own need for personal change and the challenges that organizations face when it comes to embracing change. We’re not very good at changing, but we sure like to talk about it.
A great friend and talented product manager once offered in a moment of frustration that he viewed his principal job as one of “managing reduced expectations.” This brilliant, but depressing turn of words reflected bigger business problems, including a logjam in development that effectively precluded us from doing anything to enhance the competitiveness of our products in a timeframe shorter than something that you might find on a geologic time-scale. The “managing reduced expectations” seems to be a theme inherent in our society right now, and it is a dangerous mind-set.
Chances are, we’ve all read about and heard from mid-career managers complaining about the younger generation entering the workforce. The “don’t want to pay their dues,” and “you can’t pry them away from their PDAs,” and “poor work ethic” laments are in my opinion, lame copouts by managers stuck in their own inflexible ways. There’s good and bad in every generation, it’s just that this one feels different, because it is.
