Relevance and Courage

There is an “umbilical” nexus between the fortunes of an organisation and the career development of its leaders.
In a truly high-performing culture, organisational performance and career development are inseparable. The workplace grows in direct response to the challenge on an employee’s ability, skill, talent and competency through regular encouragement and continuous learning.

A leader that epitomises self-preservation is working against himself. Most of his efforts will be counterproductive. Leadership must be supportive and nourishing. In an ideal workplace, employees will always be willing to expand capabilities and embrace new challenges.

The leader’s behaviours have ripple effects. They trickle down. The employee must have clarity on why his work matters. Their activities must provide beneficial values to the customers. These values must become the norm, and everybody must be committed to delivering bottom-line results and goals.

Today’s leader must be careful about counterproductive tendencies. The leader must regularly question his own values and be open to his colleagues’ values. He must draw the line between responsibilities that will move the organisation forward and his personal expression.

The leader is the architect, bridger and catalyst. He confronts headlong what needs to be corrected. He cares deeply for team members and challenges directly the blind spots in the organisation. He strategically and from time to time releases control to empower with impact and influence.

He flows day-to-day with clarity and accountability. His style is the highly demanding professional leadership. He thrives on chemistry with the team. He is focused, brilliant and leads with creativity and innovation. He is versatile and always challenging the status quo. He radiates strength, grit and collaborative subtlety. He demonstrates resilience and epitomises dignity and integrity.

What are his antidotes for navigating today’s hard times? How does he confront low patronage? The answer is carefully mapped-out relevance in paying markets.

He significantly pays high premium on beneficial outcomes. His strategy is a people-centred approach. This approach prioritises essential needs and services that promote well-being: How are people surviving? What do they want? What are they buying? Capabilities, skills and mindsets are deployed to achieve this perfect position.

The formula for this leader or strategist to succeed and win is to stay relevant. This formula must be measurable and, of course, follow systematic principles. It must be strategically executed and not carried out through intuition or innate abilities.

The second antidote is courage — sacrificial courage. The leader must be strong and capable. The leader and his organisation must deliver beneficial outcomes at affordable prices no matter the situation. He must take well thought-through risks — stunning risks — to succeed and win. The leader’s and his team’s unyielding courage must be leveraged for growth and profit. His mindset must be invincible. He must become the leader that anchors stability, profitability and growth on grit.

To navigate through today’s hard times, organisations must avoid the traps of the usually trumpeted strategic planning. Some leaders are used to planning and are always clothing this in the robe of strategic planning. Strategic planning is based on what the leaders want and the usual day-to-day activities — for instance, improving customer experience and hiring more talents. Experts refer to these activities as the cost side of business.

Today, we should be talking about customer obsession and not customer centricity. In other words, organisations must be obsessed with satisfying customer values and outcomes. To achieve this, you must step out of your comfort zone. You must be relevant to customers’ needs and wants, as I mentioned earlier.

The solution is strategy — an integrated set of thought-through choices. The leader must become the avant-garde of customers and not the customer of costs. The leader must do great business to win and not just be a credible participant. Costs must enhance outcomes. Strategy positions the organisation in a selected playing field to win.

The organisation must become better than its rivals. There must be coherence in activities, and the customer must determine efforts. The goal of strategy is winning in the marketplace. It is an innovative journey that is regularly tweaked and refined. You can constantly hone it and be committed to making it better as you go along. It is indeed the best approach to stability and winning in these hard times. Organisations must adopt the strategy option for winning — that is, positioning in an excellent way to do something relevant, meaningful and indispensable to people’s welfare.

Let me conclude with the great idea that leaders must take control of organisational culture and not allow it to evolve as we have been doing.

Organisational culture must be purposeful, intentional and systematic. We must author it, create it, drive it and make it what we want it to be. This new approach must be practical for us to achieve a truly high-performing culture that is different from the typical, the esoteric and the abstract. It must be actionable and sustainable. It must also be deliberately developmental in its approach and have clear goals. There must be attention on bottom-line profitability and employee development. This model must showcase the combination of challenge and support.

We must be clear on efficiency and operational excellence. There must be clarity on what is celebrated, tolerated and forbidden. Values must include customer obsession, building a great and enduring organisation and the eagerness for entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation. The framework for this approach is flexibility, adaptation, internal and external orientation as well as market-based orientation.