Leadership the human vessel to
Leadership the human vessel toLeadership: The Human Vessel to the New Business Frontier
As our workforces grow more diverse every day, and customers are demanding better, faster, and less expensive service, companies are faced with the challenges to create and meet the changes necessary to remain in business. The organizational environment must also learn to assess the direction of these changes while also being able to respond successfully to those that roll in at a completely different direction than expected. The leadership required to handle these wonderfully tumultuous times, so that organizations in transition remain profitable, is crucial.
Today’s companies become successful based on their abilities to create and manage change. They can no longer survive without “…courage and imagination – the courage to challenge prevailing business models and the imagination to invent new markets.” As the globe continues to evolve into a marketplace with vanishing boundaries, competition becomes stronger, tighter, and smarter than ever before, ultimately forcing organizational change. The tidal strength of competition that has been upon us over the past few decades has fundamentally changed the “blueprints” of many corporations and how they now need to be led. Businesses have awakened to the hard fact that leadership can no longer be defined by the effective management of people and systems, but most importantly by the effective leading of change. Leadership, or the lack thereof, is proving to be one of the most crucial determinants of whether organizations will survive and flourish in the next century’s business frontier.
“We live in an era of organizational reengineering. To become or remain competitive, leaders often must realize improvement through radical change, or reengineering.” As defined by Jon R. Katzenbach, author of Real Change Leaders, radical changes are:
Those situations in which corporate performance requires most people throughout
the organization to learn new behaviors and skills. These new skills must add up
to a competitive advantage for the enterprise allowing it to produce better and
better performance in shorter and shorter time frames.
The changes that are most relevant are those that demand companies to redefine their organizations in order to profit from the changes or even just to endure them. Change, such as that which comes with new technology, comes so quickly and frequently that business are forced to develop new organizational models and practices. With the unrelenting evolution of technology, organizational structures have had to be reinvented. No longer do we find the centralized, multi-layered hierarchies that once offered organizations bureaucratic control over employees. Towering organizational structures are now collapsing into flatter pyramids with wider spans of control offering greater flexibility, cost-efficiency, and more interdependent departments capable of rapid action and reaction.
As with advances in technology, economic, political, and socio-cultural environments are also faced with swift changes. Unfortunately, such a rapid rate of change can turn an organization’s strengths into its weaknesses. Leaders must now think like change agents, because the issue is not only how new concepts and skills are acquired, but also how to unlearn things that are no longer serving the organization. This means that leaders must carefully examine organizational cultures and then reinvent them to promote and maintain success.
The most important thing to understand, however, is that leaders cannot change culture arbitrarily in the sense of eradicating dysfunctional conditions. By evolving culture they can build on its strengths while diminishing its weaknesses. “Culture is ‘changed’…through changes in various key concepts in the mental models of people who are the main carriers of the culture. Note, however, that such transformations do not occur through announcements or formal programs. They occur through a genuine change in the leader’s behavior…”
If culture cannot be manipulated through hard-core policy changes and formalities, how does a leader gain the loyalty of the organization’s members? How does a leader influence others to voluntarily commit to his or her vision of where the company is going and how it will get there? Robert Rosen, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the George Washington School of Medicine tells us that “Americans are hungry for new leaders; emotionally intelligent leaders with vision and character who can guide their downsized organizations back to health and high performance.” However, before they are willing to go through the growing pains of organizational changes, employees want to and must see that the leader is willing to “walk the talk!”
The path of a leader is one of a trailblazer. Forging new ideas, concepts, and theories to raise the success level of those he or she is leading. Throughout history, there have been many leaders who have fundamentally changed the way the world viewed things such as freedom, politics, and the importance of forgiveness. These magnetic individuals are able to draw out not only their own magnificence, but also that of those who follow them. Within their skills to lead, they cultivate others’ abilities to rise above their difficulties and self-doubts. Leaders of truly positive change can breath life back into an organization that is on the edge of collapsing. With their abilities to instill values that reflect courage and respect in their followers, they also are more than willing to share in their visions for the future. If a leader truly wants to transform an organization that can and will endure the inevitable changes that the future holds, he or she must work to unify its members by building a shared vision with common values and direction.
Vision is an essential element of leadership. It is a leader’s image of what the company will produce or provide, where the company is headed to achieve those successes, and how it will arrive there. “Vision refers to a picture of the future with some implicit or explicit commentary on why people should strive to create that future.” It is also “…the [intuitive] ability to see the potential in or necessity of opportunities right in front of you.” Vision is necessary to clarify the necessity and actions of organizational changes. When people understand why they are going in a certain direction and they fundamentally agree with it, they are much more motivated and willing to put in the work it takes to see a leader’s vision materialize. “…the real power of a vision is unleashed only when most of those involved in an enterprise or activity have a common understanding of its goals and direction.” When a journalist inquired about the remarkable success of the Hewlett-Packard corporation, David Packard spoke only in terms of the “… attributes of immense operating freedom within well-defined objectives, the pay-as you-go policy that enforces entrepreneurial discipline, the critical decision to enable all employees to share in the company’s financial success.” These organizational attributes are not just simple choices made to see if the organization’s members would use them to assist the company in its successes; they are carefully thought out plans that began as someone’s vision as to how the company could flourish through its people. To companies whose leaders mobilize their people and unleash their competence, creativity, and commitments, success is almost sure to follow.
Once a leader has formed, articulated, and shared with the other members of the organization his or her visions for the future, those other people will be watching very closely to see just how much conviction the leader has in those visions. They expect leaders to show up, to pay attention, and to participate directly in the process of getting extraordinary things done. Leading by example is how leaders make visions and values tangible. It is how they provide the evidence that they are personally committed. That evidence is what people look for and admire in leaders, people whose direction they would willingly follow. This makes credibility a very important attribute that people look for in a successful leader. Those looking to a leader need to believe in that person; that he or she can be trusted; that he or she is truly excited about the direction that the company’s heading. People expect their leaders to stand for something and to have the courage of their beliefs. It is also equally as important for the leader to know that his or her credibility is not being challenged.
Leaders believe their personal credibility is more important than their
formal position of power. Credibility is what they think enables them to inspire confidence among the people they must influence to take initiative and personal risk. The best leaders show their personal credibility both in what they have accomplished and in what they know about the change task at hand.
Courage is another primary attribute of a successful leader. One of the greatest challenges for leaders of change is to develop the personal skills that are necessary to effectively generate and cultivate courage, in themselves as well as those around them. “They recognize that courage is really about making the connection between what’s changing in the business world and what needs to change in their personal behaviors. They also recognize that personal change offers far more potential rewards than sticking with the status quo.” As the hallmark of a true leader, courage is necessary to take risks, to create a vision, to empower others, and to challenge the current conditions of any situation. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu said: “Leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humanness, courage, and sternness.”
The most essential aspect of how the leaders of the next century will sustain their companies is the continual facilitation of the people within their organizations as the primary factor for success. Although empowerment has become somewhat of a “buzz” word within the business arena, it’s power is nonetheless stronger than any other tool used by leaders to get results from people. Because in its most simple form, empowerment is sharing the decision-making process with others, it is closely related to courage. Those companies that have stood the test of time, such as Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nordstrom, and Wal-Mart have infused into their organizations the practices of empowering their employees.
Leaders of the future must have the strength and fearlessness to go against the grain of old assumptions or paradigms. They must continue to trailblaze in their efforts to see that the organizations of the next century will remain in tact. They will be the encouragers of change for positive results; they will be the beacons that the others look to guide the ship through any storm; they will hold their heads high in recognition of success and have the courage to admit when outcomes are not what they had planned. Tomorrow’s leaders of change rise to the occasion and take the others with them.