The Promises and Perils of Top Management

To succeed, top management needs a unified “one sight” focus, strikes a dynamic balance between the inner and outer success factors of the business to unlock business potential.

Digital organizations as coherent, self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystems "become complex," not for their own amusement, but do it to respond to environments proactively. They have to keep cultivating their top management competency, tailoring their own circumstances, and making change as an “innate” business capability.






Interpret top management vision and goals into workforce "language": Top management often gets involved with strategic decision-making, focuses on the bigger picture, develops strong, insightful strategy, translates strategic goals into workforce language, and builds the competitive advantage for their businesses. They rely on the skills and intelligence of the staff they lead, develop an inclusive and innovative team to compete and collaborate as they deem fit. To build an innovative and productive workplace, top management needs to pay attention to creating shared and admirable goals, make constructive conversations, take away the stigma and fear, proactively ask questions, challenge your own views, invite opinions and ideas for stimulating creativity and catalyze change.

Strategy management and change Management often go hand in hand. The commitment from top management is crucial for change management success. They shouldn’t devolve the entire change management to middle management but be fully involved to ensure buy-in and commitment on the lower levels. Top management teams need to mentally review the pros and cons, potential cause and effect to other areas, short and long-term financial implications, and the overall impact on the company, prior to suggesting an alternative approach. The goal is to make a seamless strategy execution and unlock organizational performance.

Top management needs to have a good reputation for leveraging the right information to make right decisions at the right time: Nowadays at the dawn of the digital era, the abundance of information flow, click-away knowledge, and advanced digital technologies make it possible to gain real-time insight and business foresight if organizations are truly being digitized underneath, at the process level. To make strategic decisions effectively, top management should leverage the right data. The more important the decision is, the more you need to have all the data, perform all the preparation, and improve decision intelligence.

There are also many senior leaders who failed to deal with blind spots because they have a very homogeneous team who always “think the same.” Truly best of breed organization should have an analytic team that can help to look for trends and insights behind the high-level results. They should come up with actionable insights and recommended actions for top management to look at and then make the informed decisions wisely, proactively, timely, and collectively.

Top management plays important roles in setting principles for improving performance management effectiveness and monitoring performance outcomes smoothly: Performance Management is a significant management system that does not have hardcoded programming like other business systems but directly drives corporate mindset, attitude, and behavior. One of the good ways to engage top managers is to apply a suitable Performance Management framework. The top team has a significant influence on implementing Performance Management into practices in the right way.

Each higher-level person must be capable of managing a more ambiguous/longer time frame set of issues and ensure the people component is considered so that all facets of performance are covered especially since the implementation of the strategic plan will be done by people. Digital technology trends such as collaboration platforms and tools bring an unprecedented level of convenience and make it possible to handle much of the vertical communications in both directions by eliminating management redundancy, improving manageability, and bringing high-performance business results.

Leading change and implementing a strategy is risky. Most companies would never take a huge leap even with the enticement of a huge payback due to the minimum risk culture which delivers minimal payback. To succeed, top management needs a unified “one sight” focus, strikes a dynamic balance between the inner and outer success factors of the business, understands the relation and dynamics between consciousness (thinking), energy (emotions) and information deeply, and builds differentiated organizational competencies for driving progressive change confidently and unlocking business potential smoothly.

Posted in: Change Management,Strategy,Talent Master