Leading in ChallengingTimes

Leading in ChallengingTimes

Never before have companies been challenges to reach new levels of innovation and achieve significant increases in productivity, all in the face of shrinking human, material, and financial resources. Never before has the rate of change accelerated on an ever increasing basis. Yet many companies are still working with ways of thinking, business processes, and technologies that have yet to touch their toe into this century. This is why leading in challenging times requires a new set of skills and a new demand for leaders at all levels of an organization to rise to meet the challenge. We are all entering a very advanced stage of economic, social, and technological evolution. This unfortunately requires that we look beyond the simple formulas of the past and challenge ourselves to grasp how things work at an advanced level.

Unleashing the untapped power of collaboration with an organization is now the primary job of the new leader. This is because collaboration creates a formidable bond which connects all of the parts of an organization so they become an unbreakable whole that can face any challenge domestic or global. Here are four critical skill sets that will accomplish this:

Being a Collaborative Leader

This initially requires an understanding of the high value of collaboration and the high cost of internal competition. To be a collaborative leader much is required. This is because the normal operational condition always drifts toward competition and away from collaboration. Competition is how people normally react in the face of challenges and this is why entrenched habits get formed. Collaboration has to be generated all of the time or else it quickly fades and falls into the same “operational normalcy.” Leaders must know how to be a collaborative leader. They must know what they do to empower collaboration and what impact they must have on the people accountable to them.

Get a better understanding of how this is accomplished:

 

Dismantling Barriers to Collaboration

Collaboration starts and ends with a conversation. Leaders that are driving change are skilled at dismantling the entrenched communication habits based in competition, conspiracy, and conflict that are the primary barriers to innovation and collaboration.  These inherited, acquired and reinforced communication habits need to be exposed for what they are. This requires an objective understanding of what is really taking place in every communication in three dimensions – subjectively, objectively, and creatively. Also such leaders must be adept at navigating the complexity, diversity, and competitive aspects of normal conversation. These habits can easily betray even the best of intentions. Leaders must get control of this lever so they can shift the entire paradigm of communications across the organization. This shift will be from one that fosters the normal condition of competition, conspiracy, and conflict that thwarts innovation and undermines collaboration – to one that cultivates people’s natural inner skills of creativity, compassion, and collaboration that provides fertile soil for innovation to thrive.

Get a better understanding of how this is accomplished:

 

Speaking Collaboration Into Existence

An organization is defined by the dominant mode of discourse that shapes every conversation that takes place within an organization.  Companies can change their location, change their products and services, change their process, and change their people but something called the organization remains the same. This is the dominant mode of discourse, which is made of the web of conversations people are having with each other all day every day. By learning to speak collaboration into existence, collaborative leaders can reshape the entire culture of an organization. This does require developing the skills of positioning, packaging, promoting, and producing a collaborative reality, through their speaking, that is powerful enough to displace a critical mass of the previous competitive reality.

Get a better understanding of how this is accomplished:

 

Sustaining a Collaborative Culture

The fact that there is no such thing as an organization without people is a good thing. This is because people are unique in this universe in that they can “create from nothing.” Machines can calculate and other species can procreate but that is all making something out of something. Only people can innovate, that is create something from nothing. Therefore, anything that can be generated in this universe is at risk of going out of existence all of the time. The universal principle of entropy is constantly at work eating away at anything we create. The answer to the questions: “What did the Romans build?” is “Ruins.” Learning the skill of sustaining collaboration are necessary if it, and all of its benefits are to be maintained over a long term. Cultivating means putting special attention of the seeds we have planted and tending to t hem on a  consistent basis so they not only survive but thrive.

Get a better understanding of how this is accomplished:

 

GET STARTED

Wish List

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>