Tuesday, November 6, 2012

The Art of Managing Leadership in Changing Enviroment



Leadership is the ability to inspire confidence and support among the people who are needed to achieve organization goals. It is the process of providing the direction and inspiration necessary to create or sustain an organization.

The 21st century has already spawned a sizable volcano of daunting new challenges to leadership. Deregulation, digitization, ecosystems, strategy life cycles, and competition at present, represents change have permanent rhythm for every business firm. This change process gives a role of decision making initiative for the leaders such as:

  1. Broadening the scope of employee freedom by managing less, without sacrificing focus, discipline, and order.
  2. Creating an organization where the spirit of shared values and community dominate, not programs and policies.
  3. Providing for a mission that justifies extraordinary contribution .etc

The best effective decisions made within the available limited resources and constraints to provide an optimum solution for the change process makes a leader and a manager to achieve their objectives in many change process. Further to handle the change initiatives efficiently  an organization must recognize that succession planning and leadership development are two elements of the same process that of ensuring there are leaders now and in the future who can implement the organizational vision .while succession planning can identify those individuals who have the abilities ,talent and potential to turn the vision of the organization into reality, the alignment to leadership development can ensure that this potential is realized .In so doing, an organization can ensure that there is indeed long term leadership sustainability and opportunities of entrepreneurship this will be a source of having competitive advantage of developing next generation leaders in the years to come for an organization to succeed .

Introduction

Leadership is the energetic process of getting people fully and willingly committed to a new and sustainable course of action to meet commonly agreed objectives whilst having commonly held values. Leader's values must offer 4E's frame work-envision, enable, empower and energize, for establishing a climate for creative thinking and promote innovation.

21'st century has already experienced with deregulation, digitization, globalization,

Strategic business management, the result is familiar to every business firm "Change",

Change is a common occurrence in business today. Leading change describes the role of leaders in accepting and managing many change process  .many of the change initiatives fail to achieve their objectives because (1) Absence of a definition of what actually would constitute organizational success. (2)  "Results" a powerful concept if left unmanaged, poses a risk in future. (3) Intransparency ie, lack of clarity of the changing situation. (4) Lack of succession planning and building bench strength.

Leadership attempts to have integrated systems to solve the problems of change process.

"Leadership is about being adaptable to change and uncertainty" (Mark .A. Morgan MD of citigroup private bank).

An organization to develop the next generation leaders should consider the following important points such as (1) Identifying core set of skills to equip leaders of next generation. (2) Tracking and networking alumni of young professionals. (3) Determining the value of pooling program evaluation efforts. (4) Recognizing the key challenges in finding the resources and enhancing youth programes.

Key words: Leadership sustainability & roles, change process, toxic leadership etc.

Contemporary Leadership Roles

The 4 contemporary leadership roles that are important for the organization to achieve its objectives are:

Providing team leadership
Leadership is increasingly taking place within a team context .as teams grow in popularity; the role of the leader in guiding team members takes on heightened importance.

Mentoring
Organizations have formal mentoring programs where mentors are officially assigned to new or high –potential employees to present ideas clearly, and empathize with problems of their protégés.

Self leadership
Self –leadership propose that there are a set of processes through which individuals control their own behavior and effective leaders help their followers to lead themselves.

Online leadership
To lead the people who are physically separated from you and with whom your interactions are basically to written digital communications like telecommuting with employees you need online leadership.

Factors for effective leadership

(1) Follower. (2) Leader (3) Communication (4) Situation

Figure showing factors of effective leadership

Factors influencing changes in organizations environment

Globalization and developments in the field of information and technology.
New management strategies and the competitiveness in the business environment.
Implementation of news business processes.
New goals and performance standards established in the business
Structural changes in the economy. Etc
Need for implementation of change in the organization's environment

Based on Michael E Porter's five forces of competitive position we can analyze that there is a need for "change" in the organization to survive in the competitive modern business.

Michael Porter's five forces:

  • Existing competitive rivalry between suppliers
  • Threat of new market entrants.
  • Bargaining power of buyer
  • Power of suppliers
  • Threat of substitute products (including technology change)

Leadership role and responsibility in implementing change in organization

Organizational culture is the primary source of resistance to change a leader should understand the organization culture and then plan the change process.

The use of value based management model 0f 7-s model can be helpful in implementation of change by coordinating 7-s namely, shared value, strategy, structure, system, staff, style and skill. (MC Kinsey's 7-s framework)

Leadership should determine clear decision making framework to ensure the organization has means and resources to achieve its goals.

Analyzing the change process through a experimental project  with the five factors such as project duration, the project teams performance ,integrity of management commitment, employee commitment and employee effort required to cope with the change that are essential to be implemented.

Change can be implemented through organizational transformation by ensuring succession planning initiatives are closely aligned to leadership and development and organizational vision
Ensuring that succession planning process occurs in such a way that it is in itself a transforming experience.

Drawbacks of implementation of changes in the organization.

Some the reasons why change initiatives fail to achieve their objectives are:

Absence of clear definition of what actually constitute organizational success

Lack of knowledge about changing situation in business environment.

Lack of integration between succession planning and leadership with organizational vision.
Toxic leadership performance.

Lack of planning premises and constraints, inadequacy of resources and means to implement the planned change process.

Toxic leadership and organization

Toxic /Bad leadership is one of the main reason we can point out for the failure to         implementation of change in the organization. "A Toxic leader is someone who has responsibility over organizations employees but abuses the leader –follower relationship by leaving the organization in a worse condition than when he/she first found them". (Barbara Kellerman)

Barbara Kellerman analyzes Toxic/bad leadership into seven different types:

(1)Incompetent (2) Rigid (3) Intemperate (4) Callous (5) Corrupt (6) Insular (7) Evil.

Toxic leadership can effect organization in change implementation by following way:

Lack of definition of vision, strategy and business plan.
Inappropriate execution of the vision, plan strategy and business plan.
Lack of team building skills and business ethics.
Lack of sponsoring, supporting, measuring results.
Destruction of organizational culture, values and employees trust and confidence.

Understanding the change process

Understanding the change process helps the leader of present and future generation to develop the suitable technique to solve problems in initiating change process in organization. To understand problems, determining the characteristics of the difficult problem is key to initiate change process.

Dietrich Dorner and Joachim Funke have elucidated typical characteristics of difficult problem they are as follows:

Intransparency-lack of clarity of situation.

Polytely-multiple goals which have

a)      Inexpressiveness.

b)      Opposition

c)      Transience

complexity- large number of items interrelations and decisions which have

a)      Enumerability.

b)      Connectivity(hierarchy relation ,communication relation, allocation relation)

c)      Heterogeneity.

Dynamics- time considerations, which have

a)      Temporal constraints

b)      Temporal sensitivity

c)      Phase effects

d)     Dynamic unpredictability

Problem Solving Techniques

Abstraction: solving the problem in a model of the system before applying it to the real system.
Analogy: using a solution that solved an analogous problem.

Brainstorming: (especially among the groups and teams)suggesting a large number of solutions or ideas and combining and developing them until an optimum is found.

Divide and conquer: breaking down a large complex problem into smaller, solvable problems.
Hypothesis testing: assuming a possible explanation to the problem and trying to prove the assumption

Lateral thinking: approaching solutions indirectly and creatively.

Means-ends analysis: choosing an action at each step to move closer to the goal.

Method of focal objects: synthesizing seemingly non-matching characteristics of different objects into something new.

Morphological analysis: assessing the output and interactions of an entire system

Reduction: transforming the problem into another problem for which solutions exist.

Research: employing existing ideas or adapting existing solutions to similar problems.

Root cause analysis: eliminating the cause of the problem.

Trial and error: testing possible solutions until the right one is found.

Developing The Leaders Of Next Generation

Michael G.Winston who has been working with fortune 50 companies partnering with key executives in developing the next generation of leadership explains how they develop the next generation of leaders.

Seeking and securing top management support
Leadership development initiatives are launched with clear communication from the senior executives explaining the mission, strategy, objectives and expectations for participant's .later stage measurement tools are designed to assess and reinforce leadership accountability for results.

Determining required skill sets.
Firstly you define key leadership requirement and develop a plan to improve critical skills and competencies required to implement the current and projected business strategy and review both current and prospective markets, competitors, customers, channels and determine critical success factor.

Building Best-in-class leadership development initiatives
An integrated and highly focused set of initiatives is crafted that should reflect the company's strategic agenda, address critical challenges and opportunities and strengthen leadership capability ,programs are generally used as a combination of company's presenters, external world-class subject matter experts,E-learning technologies and post-program project work to reinforce key strategic initiatives.

Launching a tiered Talent Identificfation,Assessment and Succession process
Succession management is a critical activity in business organizations must serve to identify, develop and retain those people who are able to deliver superior performance both individually and as a part of team. This can be done like:

Alignment of top performers to most critical jobs.
Identification of successor candidates for key roles
Assessment of strengths across key competencies
Identification and development of high potentials.
Identification and elimination of key succession gaps.
Figure showing how to strengthening talent development in the organization.

Developing an enterprise perspective
The CEO can ensure a balanced focus on leadership development and business

Needs as well as movement of people across organizational boundaries. This will

Promote sustainable leadership in the organization

Integrating the organization
Creation of an organizational integration function provides diagnostic processes to identify and eliminate or reduce the overlap and duplication that often emerges in decentralized structures. High impact instruments can be created and implanted to identify and build upon key organizational, structural process and leadership elements to strengthen and enhance business performance.

Metrics for driving accountability
Systems are then installed to hold line managers accountable for building leadership.

Leadership development and succession becomes an unavoidable "gate" for promotion and significantly affect compensation, this can be understood with the diagram given below

Figure showing metrics for driving accountability

Institutionalizing the process

Ultimately the objective is to institutionalize a simple consistent process across the enterprise which promotes leadership and succession cycles

Leadership and Entrepreneurship

It is leadership style that creates the appropriate climate for entrepreneurship and innovation in an organization.successfull leaders are not only good executives they are also great entrepreneurs .a entrepreneur today has to face several changes in the organization .he has to adapt the change process efficiently and convert the disadvantages of changes into advantages of business for which entrepreneur needs strong leadership qualities mentioned in above paragraphs leadership ,creativity, ability to solve problems makes a leader successful entrepreneur.

Source: articlesbase.com

1 comment:

  1. Very well. Leadership involves overseeing, arranging and directing, assuming liability for individuals; guiding, sorting out and persuading them. Thanks for the useful post.

    ReplyDelete