Corporate Dysfunction
Brexit uncertainty, political unrest and technological pace are creating a maelstrom of challenges for the modern business leader.
Targets
The constant challenge of year-on-year growth, reinvention and precarious markets are making the modern business leader search far and wide to maintain their USP in the marketplace in an ever-fast-changing world where uncertainty is the only constant.
Reinvention
The reinvention process in products, design, technology and sales is the focus of the modern business leader, often recycling ideas mixed with new technology to maintain the advantage.
Clients and customers demand cheaper, faster, and even better service levels, forcing companies to constantly monitor and rethink how they may maintain their competitive advantage without the erosion of margin.
Choices
The main toolbox would appear to be 'make it' and 'save it' and do both in unison, along with mergers and acquisitions, to create synergy and cost saving; however, statistics prove that 90% of these strategies never deliver the projected cost benefit to the shareholders.
Headcount reduction and business uniformity are the main big guns leading to the loss of good people through feelings of unfulfillment and the lack of autonomous entrepreneurial spirit and creative decision-making at the team level.
Repetition
With all this frenetic energy, the classic hamster wheel operation comes to mind, often recycling and repackaging, leading to a loss of creativity, imagination, empowerment, self-worth and performance!
Modern leadership
Where has the modern leadership model gone wrong? Where are the 'Shackleton's' of this world? The great motivators, inspirers, and leaders of men, not just bean counters!
Empowerment
With the high cost of recruitment, hiring and firing of its most excellent resource is not only a massive cost to the business in terms of money. Many underperforming, demotivated individuals are sent home on gardening leave for fear of sharing their intelligence for months at a time with large pay-offs.
Loss of knowledge, know-how and understanding are reduced to the recycling bin. What a complete waste of time, resources, energy and useable experience.
Answers
Should it be a war? Is it Brexit? Or is it a revolution that needs to create the change?
Maybe it's down to the thinking and values our modern-day leaders place upon their people. Not in terms of package and money but in terms of people and their thinking, motivation, and ingenuity, and their potential, given the right circumstances, to think differently, act differently, and create something of value, including the ability to belong to an organisation with a higher motivational value than money.
Alignment
Many companies and modern leaders create a corporate strategy in isolation from their people, believing that good recruitment without good leadership, motivation and inspiration can be dealt with through salary and package, buying its people by paying the most.
We all know this outcome leads to short-term thinking and behaviours, ultimately open to the highest bidder when the going gets tough. Something is missing!
Purpose
We all know about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but we must look deeper.
We need to look closely at the corporate working platform and how we can lead and inspire through the alignment of strategy and behaviour to maximise the potential of our workforce at all levels.
It is time to consider that while individuals must be positively valued in terms of their package, this, as we all know, only lasts for about nine months in their position, with each subsequent pay rise or share option addition to their package providing a short-term incentive but doing little to address the other issues related to their motivation, purpose, and overall well-being.
Working platform
Should we consider the need for a new working platform that will lead to greater sustainability of the human performance element, creativity, ingenuity and significantly improved performance through its people for its people?
A sense of belonging, ownership and accountability of being creatively M.A.D ('making a difference').
A true cultural revolution in which the modern leader, through all their pressures, appears to be somewhat disenfranchised, ignoring the 20% growth of overall performance through its workforce.
Managers and directors may ultimately be achievable by addressing the working platform.
Making it happen
I have previously shared the basic working platform formula for change, namely:
P = E² V² B² D.
This formula identifies the key factors of environment, emotional intelligence, vision, vulnerability, belief, behaviours and daydreaming (purpose).
I have proven that one can positively alter the performance of an organisation by 18-72%, all through its people, using the above formula.
Why?
The only constant we have is change and uncertainty.
Our people, with the proper working platform, leadership and inspiration, can change the fortunes and the focus from a hamster wheel mentality only driven by numbers to that of an outperforming, well-led and entrepreneurial organisation of any size with the appropriate thought and input to its greatest resource and expense: its people.
We need this change of mindset, and we need it now!
A business cultural revolution with all haste. We can and must change how we lead and manage our most incredible resources, putting as much effort into the reinvention of our working platform as we do into technology and products.
Brexit and trading uncertainty are challenging to wrestle with; however, our challenges become even greater without our motivated, purposeful and inspired workforce.