Sunday, June 5, 2022

Innerprofessionalpitfalls

Better understand yourselves and how knowing who you are and your own style of influence affect how you respond and interact with your surroundings.

The pace of change for organizations is overwhelming. There’s knowing unknown, there’s unknowing unknown. In such a new normal, business leaders and professionals are in face of numerous barriers and hidden pitfalls blocking their way to be agile to adapt to the dynamic environment. 

Here is a set of characteristics that cloud your vision, trigger silo mentality or negative emotions, cause procrastination, decision-ineffectiveness, and compromise your professional competency.



Unplanned, reactionary: Digital means increasing the speed of change and continuous disruption. How successful the individuals or organizations can handle frequent disruptions depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to the ever-changing environment. Reactionary professionals are usually at transactional mode, order-taking, lack of motivation to drive change proactively; or lack of creativity to think & do things differently. In the organization scope, the opposite of strategy is unplanned, reactionary to business changes without sufficient planning, distract business focus, and slow down the organization's speed to reach their vision ultimately.

Proactive change capability will differentiate the digital masters from laggards. There's a big difference between someone who works just to keep their work done and someone who is engaged and enthused to solve problems thoroughly. If people demonstrate strong intention and positive attitude, let thoughts and behavior flow smoothly to keep motivated, they can take a moderate risk with realistic optimism to drive changes and create change momentum proactively.

Inflexible, silo-driven: Individuals become inflexible if they hold conventional wisdom or stale knowledge without practicing critical thinking; or they get used to routine work, homogeneous team setting and “we always do things like that” mentality leading towards slowness and small-thinking, enlarge multiple gaps for changes In many traditional organizations which get stuck at the low level of maturity, silos, inflexibility, or bureaucracy, etc, create divides and slow down idea flow, stifle changes. People often have to follow overly restricted rules or algorithms in the workplace, they are unable or unwilling to think out of the box and take initiatives when they have to face a challenge that is out of the norm.

The larger the organization are, the more complex our society becomes, the larger the amount of rules necessary for its functions, to keep dependent variables and output delivery stable. If not handled well, organizations turn to be overly rigid, inflexible and become so vulnerable to the dynamic environment. The danger of inflexibility is that it reduces the scope for a critical approach and creativity, leading towards slowness and small-thinking, and generates multiple gaps for achieving high performance. Good ideas nearly never emerge spontaneously but from interactions, not single individuals or even single functions. if there is too much centralization and inflexibility, and there won’t be room for growth and seamless idea flows. Companies in today’s uncertainty need a more flexible workforce and take more adaptive approach, whereby they can constantly refine goals & tactics, shift, acquire, or divest resources smoothly and execute the strategy in cascading format promptly.

Micro management styles: When we jump into the digital future of “VUCA” new normal – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, there are no other choices but being proactive, courageous and innovative to explore the new reality. However, there are so many things business leaders and professionals have to handle, micro-management has a negative connotation of overly focusing on trivial details, lack of big pictures or scientific prioritization skills to improve management effectiveness. Often, a micromanager overemphasizes the 'how' over the 'what' and ‘why’ and will be laser focused on minutiae to the detriment of the overall outcome. The “result” of micromanagement is perhaps tangible in the short run, but more often causes significant damage for the long term.

There are so many things going on a daily basis, today’s business leaders and professionals should learn how to “ignore,” focus on top prioritized issues without getting distracted or inundated with overloaded information, and avoid the trap of "busyness" for achieving betterment. Prioritization forces us to become more proactive in crucial activities and provide a focused approach to solve the most critical or urgent problems. If someone is trapped in micromanagement there are little ways to change it without changing mentality and discipline. Micromanagement is a culture thing, it can be changed by making effective decisions, encouraging autonomy, inspiring innovation, striking the right balance of short term results and long term outcomes.

Nobody is perfect, you should always be self-aware, including your flaws and shortcomings. To avoid professional pitfalls, digital leaders and professionals today should spend time on developing themselves and others, and set a strong leadership tone in building the culture of learning and high performance. Better understand yourselves and how knowing who you are and your own style of influence affect how you respond and interact with your surroundings, fix your set of problems and improve professionalisms to unlock performance continually.



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