If you want better results in your organization, improve the leaders’ strategic thinking.
Defining Leadership
Many organizations have too many projects, too few resources, internal competition for rewards, and too little focus. Most critically, there is little understanding about how all of the parts of the organization work together (and therefore the projects to support that direction) to accomplish the purpose of the organization.
Without a clear purpose and a methodology to accomplish it together, it doesn’t matter:
how great the projects and people are,
how hard the people work,
how efficient the processes are,
what “best efforts” and “best practices” are used, or
how many defects the Six Sigma methods reveal.
Leadership must create a system and optimize it. If not, the “parts” can all be great, and the system (organization) can easily fail.
Leadership is not easy. It requires the ability to inspire people and communicate effectively to engage them and harness their commitment to a purpose larger than themselves. It requires that executives have the thinking, knowledge and traits that are often not common in American or Western style management.
Is the “Best” really Best?
Leadership requires knowledge that challenges what is currently being taught in many of the “best universities” by the “best professors” churning out the “best job candidates with the highest G.P.A.s.” If we buy into the “best” mentality, we will achieve much worse and create win-lose strategies in work and life.
Why do the “best job candidates, best schools, best efforts and best practices” often lead our organizations, our projects, our cultures into decline and dysfunction? Lack of leadership: simple and fundamental. We need leadership with systems knowledge that is rarely understood and practiced today. Without this knowledge, executives and managers manage individual departments, silos and divisions, without understanding that all of these parts must work together toward a common aim.
To understand this, let’s think about a car. If we take the “best” parts from the Volvo, Mercedes, Lexus, Mini cooper, and BMW and put them together, will be have a car that works? Of course not. This is why many organizations and projects fail. We think that if we bring the “best” candidates from the “best” schools and use the “best” practices, we have the recipe for success. Instead we have a sure recipe for failure. Systems and statistical knowledge needed in organizations has not been taught in our schools and universities. But if it were understood globally, we would have: people working collaboratively doing good work (any work with committed people working together with a common aim and supportive resources) and a strong and healthy world-wide economy, healthcare and education systems that serve people, and a vibrant, sustainable environment.
At a recent commencement address I gave to a group of Naval Intelligence officers that had just completed an intense two-week leadership class, I stated, “Much of what I will share with you in the next thirty minutes will be in direct conflict with what you have just been taught; my aim is to provoke your thinking so that you will not adopt this status-quo learning or the practices that are commonly being used in corporate America, but have no common sense.” During the next thirty minutes, they began to think differently, to question, to dialogue, and to challenge the adoption of “current thinking and the way things are done.” The ways things are done are based on too many managers reacting, not challenging their beliefs and assumptions, and being in auto-pilot with actions. This leads to poor decisions and outcomes and very dissatisfied customers.
So what are we missing?
Real leadership requires:
Knowledge, based in a theoretical foundation of management;
systems and statistical thinking; knowledge about people and how they learn, interact and are motivated;
the understanding that management is prediction; data are presented over time and in context for better decision-making;
a genuine commitment to rigorous and continual learning, especially at the executive level;
patience with chaos and upheaval and the ability to instigate and manage the chaos and upheaval;
dedication to both articulate the organization’s direction well and repeatedly;
to listen deeply, with perseverance and tenacity; respect, understanding, and care for people; and
lastly, courage and humility.
Leaders with this knowledge can discern the difference between management fads and powerful transformation and supporting projects and tools that can accelerate the organization’s progress. So how are you doing? Are you a leader? What is the legacy you will leave? What will your employees and customers say about your leadership and the ease of doing business with your organization?
Focused leaders work tirelessly to transform their organization and adopt the key strategies to continually improve, innovate, focus on delivering quality, and commit to adding value and serving customers. They create leadership and communication as systems, a portfolio of inter-dependent projects and operations to fulfill the system optimization, and the culture to deliver continual learning (the only hope for a competitive edge,) progress, and success. They ask the “what, what if, and how?” questions. They never accept the status quo. They never adopt complacency, arrogance, or greed. Their aim is to be responsive and not arrogant. They identify fear in the organization and work relentlessly to reduce it and build trust.
For example, “old thinking” in organizations often reflect business and management models that fundamentally don’t work. We know they don’t work. They create silo’s, finger-pointing, blame, cultures full of fear, analysis-paralysis, and poor decision-making and results.
