I’ve had a chance to speak for and facilitate several private sessions for groups of senior executives. The goal of these sessions is to help them develop the structure needed to efficiently develop and execute growth work.
At the beginning of each session, I ask a series of questions designed to gather insight about the runway-level challenges they are seeing right now. Most recently, to put a finer point on the discussion, I have been asking why now is different: what in the first quarter of 2019 is making the work of designing and executing growth more difficult?
Here is a summary of what your peers find challenging right now (as well as some of the implications):
- The pace of change is even faster than last year. Leaders are needing to move groups to action faster, which can quickly get into say/do versus participatory leadership. By having to be directive in their leadership, it doesn’t help build independent problem-solving, which is so critical to talent development. This also leads to a lack of alignment, as well as shallower engagement on the part of staff members.
- They feel pressure to balance the need to work on enterprise efficiency while also driving innovation. This can create conflict, which can come across as indecision on the part of leadership, as well as an inability to prioritize.
- Talent is (really) scarce. Directional business decisions are being made on the new scarcest commodity: human capital. They need people at all levels, and particularly, they need to find and develop leaders as there are great projects with strong business cases with no one to work on them.
- There is external instability. It has become very hard to find a clear base case (an agreed to bedrock scenario) for the strategic plan. Policy decisions used to be slow and predictable. Now things like tariff structures can turn on a dime. Leaders are having to bet options.
- Client and customer expectations are very high (i.e. free shipping). The digital transformation wave has spoiled us all – we expect to be able to research and acquire anything we need right now. Even small firms have global reach and much more complex competitive decisions to make.
So what are the takeaways?
Distilling this down leaves us with three things to think about as leaders:
- Agility to do multitasking is the new normal. The expectations of shareholders and clients have never been higher, so we need to build strong, balanced teams that are flexible enough to take on work in the core product, as well as assignments in the new product and services space.
- Clarity will help us remove friction in our teams and our employees. The days of “loading up” our employees and then leaving them to manage the issues around completing a project need to be long behind us.
- We need to be very vigilant to watch out for oversubscribed team members. No team ever budgets for the “switching costs” of taking on multiple assignments.
If you’d like an opportunity to unpack and customize the approach to your “root level” growth challenges as a senior team, I would be happy to chat with you about our process and the insights we are able to develop.
Our work involves equipping firms and leaders to have outstanding results by activating the right project, the right team with the right plan. We have built coaching and tools based on deep knowledge and experience for complex firms and their leaders. Please reach out via phone or text to 847-651-1014 or use this link to set up a short call.
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