In the new world a significant business change is required  |  Change starts at the top in the minds of the leaders  |

Tomorrow’s organization needs to be fast, flat, flexible, focused and structured as a network of teams. Agility, ideas, collaboration and global reach dictate who wins and fails. In today’s business context it is the leader that works for the team, it is about building high performing diverse & inclusive teams with people coming from multi-cultural backgrounds and experiences.

Human Centricity is critical to the overall experience – Need to think experience as a continuum – employee experience driving he customer experience. This brings company leaders as HR/ People teams as the key contributors to ensuring a good customer experience.

GO TO LEADERSHIP BEHAVIORS FOR SUCCESS  |

• Provide Clarity and operate with Transparency. Transparency and ongoing clarity foster psychological safety and a trusting work culture. This helps to reduce overall anxiety levels, and everyone can get behind solving the challenges together than be in emotional highjack.
• Rebuild Capability and Setup systemic coaching / mentoring networks. Invest more time and energy into understanding the capability needed to succeed and then actively build those inside out.
• Build higher empowerment. Focus on digitizing and simplifying.
• Inspire with Empathy and Openness rather than stay aloof in the headquarters.

WHAT DOES THE NEW LEADERSHIP TEAM LOOK LIKE?  |

COVID has reset everything about work. That includes the leadership teams and the “pecking order” of the different roles in the leadership team / The CHRO and CIO have had to move in closer to the core group that drives the company. However not all C suite members are ready for this central role. So what can the board and the CEO do about this?

USING A MANAGEMENT MODEL AS STARTING POINT FOR FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE  |

Robert E. Quinn developed a Management Model which Is called The Competing Values Framework (CVF) which has been used by thousands of organizations. It draws together extensive research on leadership, change, and organizational performance to help leaders make sense of the complexities and contradictions of organizational life. It explains how managers can come to see new possibilities for structuring organizations, designing jobs, and solving daily problems by learning to embrace and transcend paradoxes.

For the past 7 years I have worked in my Leadership Advisory practice with this model and with the psychometric assessment tests highly correlated to the CVF model of Robert E. Quinn in the Asia-Pacific and European region. I have worked with a number of Fortune 500 and private companies and supported the Boards with change and transformation and helped them with measuring organization culture, aligning the company values to the organization culture as aligning the leadership teams towards the strategy across countries and cultures.

The benefit of using a model like this is  |

• Provides a framework and common language
• Helps to make organization culture the core of your approach to competitive advantage
• Helps to develop the capacity to create tomorrow, today
• Helps to generate a top-down, bottom-up approach and therefore engage all in the organization, especially the middle management.
• Helps to make your organization values alive in everything you do.
• Helps the organization to be fast, flat, flexible, agile focused and structured and able to change faster than the competition.
• Helps to identify and find the innovative talents in your company

LEADING THE TRANSFORMATIONS  | 

Now is the time for organizations to make fundamental business changes. The chances are pretty slim that businesses will go back to pre-covid.

Transformations are tough. Research shows that 70 percent of transformations fail. Taking a more holistic, cross-disciplinary approach increases the chances that organization will, in fact, see significant and sustainable improvement in the years ahead. It all starts with the leaders choice.

• Create and design the organizational structure and culture you need to be successful tomorrow.
• Build cross functional high impact teams
• Setup for faster decision-making processes and reduce number of alignment points
• Experiment with bite size changes to business models but anchor firm to purpose
• Think high-tech and high-touch along the ‘employee experience driving the customer experience’ continuum

CHANGE STARTS AT THE TOP  |

To transform organizations to fast, flat, flexible and focused, a human-centric approach and a structured network of teams are key to success. This change starts at the top and requires from leaders to change their mindset and leadership styles from commanding, pace setting towards visionary, coaching, affiliative and democratic leadership styles. The key is to create an organizational structure as a network of teams and an agile climate of innovation with cross-border and cross-functional collaboration. Carefully building the teams with the right people in the right teams for the right challenge will set organizations up for future success in the new world.

AUTHOR(S)  |