Schlagwort-Archiv: Leadership

Building blocks of a value-adding whole

Aristotle already had in his metaphysics, more than two thousand years ago, the right intuition – The whole is more than the sum of its parts. However, the Cartesian perspective has broken the world down into its components for centuries, thereby obscuring the look at the holistic possibilities. Despite the encouraging experiences of companies like 3M or W. L. Gore & Associates GmbH, large corporations struggle to rethink. Aligning collaboration based on the needs of the employees and creating a more fruitful whole through with the resulting engagement is the ultimate purpose. The inability to leverage these strengths can only be explained by the inertia of the responsible managers. They are unsure how it will go on for them when the bureaucratic regulations, permanent surveillance, and excessive news dissemination are no longer needed, and they become obsolete. The brave are already trying agility in various forms – agile enterprise, agile organization, agile employees, agile managers, agile culture, agile mindset, agile project management, and agile product development, simply agile hodgepodge.

The following building blocks promote productive wholeness.

  • Positive diversity
    In a VUKA world, the components found on different levels influence each other mutually. To react appropriately, i.e., to act at the right place and, above all, on time, other capabilities take center stage. Ashby’s law of required variety has clarified that the greater the variety of acts of a system controlling others, the better it can compensate for disturbances. This means that the remaining managers and employees must be more diverse in their traits, behavior, and means than the tasks and the competition. The difference is created by:
    –  a wider range of skills (e.g., besides technical, also social and systemic capabilities),
    –  an extra commitment of all,
    –  extended perseverance,
    –  the restriction to tasks that are needed,
    –  the interaction in the team, and
    –  a strong sense of responsibility.
    The losers are all those who continue to worship lockstep and only add skills that already exist in the company.
  • Leadership style without leadership
    The new style replaces leadership with fostering. The most significant burden for a company is a legacy structure, whose decision-making and reporting paths are unnecessarily long, diluting resolutions and slowing the speed. Leaving the choice to employees at the point of action creates a momentum that the usual leadership cannot match. At the same time, the open work style provides employees with a common direction and security. Influence then no longer comes from a formally established position but trust and contagious enthusiasm.
  • Entrepreneurs in the company
    The days of economic officialdom are coming to an end. The new understanding of leadership works through entrepreneurial action. The employees can no longer pull back from solving a given task but must behave like they owned the company. They have, as a result, more risks. On the one hand, a large company offers the danger of unintentional mishaps and losses, but on the other hand, these are more than offset by surprising gains. Even if individual units can fulfill their tasks more flexibly, the whole remains a large fleet that works together because of its joint alignment.
  • The energy is in each personality
    Everything that happens originates in the minds of individual employees. If the human image of the Theory Y is adopted by the leaders, they can bring their experiences and abilities to effect. Together, they experience adventures that expand their mental models with new insights. With a shared vision, ideas emerge that are no longer predetermined but are jointly elaborated and move the company forward. Combined with the personal drive fueled by shared momentum, the fitness evolves that secures the business.

Bottom line: It is not a question of the size of your company whether it has to take care of the new leadership beyond agility, but when. Change is happening no matter what. And if you are already suffering from the feeling that you should be taking more care of your employees, or that cost pressure is melting your margins, or that the economic climate is threatening you, then the right moment has come to act. Should you have done it earlier? This question is useless because you cannot turn back time. The positive diversity, the leadership style without leadership, the entrepreneurs in the company, and the use of the existing personalities are building blocks that already take you extremely far. You only need to activate your most vital advantage now – namely the whole that is jointly generated with everybody and brings more than the tayloristic waste through the old-fashioned bureaucracy.

Leadership nightmare

If it is sometimes not going in the direction that you desire as a boss, in the first place the others are responsible. We assume that the ideas of the superiors are thoughtful, and meaningful in a consistent and beneficial way. The feedbacks of the colleagues create the impression that it is the right way. For any reason, however, the employees do not move in the desired direction. Actually, a nightmare for the boss.

overlap

The nightmare begins not immediately, since one explains oneself the missing momentum with lack of commitment. At a closer look you find three aspects that contribute crucially, that the forces of all unite into a common direction.

  • Expectations
    The expectations of the executives determine, above all, how strongly they are satisfied with the outcomes. Depending on character, they have negative fears or positive hopes. The expectations include the actions that should be done, the results that you eventually hold in your hands, or the consequences that result in the following. The management of expectations is difficult, since rarely, if at all, only a few people take care of documenting them comprehensibly for everybody.
  • Strategy
    The long-term initiatives describe the direction of the enterprise. The individual aspects create the crash barriers for all employees, partners and even the customers. Here you find the vision that offers a conclusive snapshot of the future. It is supported by the mission that supplies the Raison d’être. During the management of everyday tasks the critical success factors, the weighted value disciplines as well as the descriptions of the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities and the risks help. The long-term direction needs clear messages, so that the enterprise builds upon it. The easily understandable and well documented strategy is the steering wheel that gives the enterprise the direction.
  • Activities
    The many actions that are accomplished on all enterprise levels can only be collected and listed with very, very much effort. In larger companies, they understood that this collection is not economical. The efforts of all appear in the common results. It is only important to find the right level of detail for the description of the positions and processes.

A crucial executive task is the controlling and coordination of the interests of all involved people.

It becomes a nightmare, if the three aspects mentioned do not overlap. This minus scenario means that the leadership team formulates their strategy outside of their expectations and nobody accomplishes the expectations or the future picture. The employees make something that does not go into the desired direction. The good news is that the staff orientates themselves on each other and moves them jointly in a common direction. In this case you can forego the leaders, since their contribution does not impact at all.

The plus scenario provides in any case a way out by taking consciously care of the three aspects.

  • This starts with the attitude. Should the employees only do, what they are told? Hopefully not, since otherwise the enterprise moves into a dead end. The creative ideas of the staff are what improve the enterprise. The minimum requirement is that they act into the general direction, however with enough free space for the new things.
  • The same is valid for the expectations of the executive team. A broad positioning increases the opportunities of the company. On the one hand that comes from the different functions of work (e.g. development, production, sales). On the other hand there are the personal interests and the ambitions of the protagonists.
  • The strategy should reflect as clearly as possible the results of the alignment of all involved people.

Bottom line: The executive nightmare that results from missing adjustment can be avoided. Clearly formulated expectations make the conceptions transparent. The sophisticated plan determines the general direction. The employees develop the actual implementation of the plans and realize the new operational sequences, the flat structures and a fruitful culture.