Inquiries about Organizational Maturity

To think critically and change progressively perhaps more often than not, involves some level of discomfort and interdisciplinary transcendence. 

Digital management is fundamentally an iterative cycle to design, build, scale and optimize business competency and achieve the desired effect under specified performance standards and conditions. There’re a growing number of organizations that shift their risk management orientation from bottom-up operation-oriented to top-down strategic focus, with more senior management and board involvement. Organizational senior leaders today should ask insightful questions, and make an objective assessment of the organizational capabilities to improve overall business effectiveness and manageability.

How to assess and measure leadership vs. management tangibly: Leadership is both hard and soft, management is both art and science. Leaders guide, and management controls. Great leaders not only have great vision but are realistic towards making it happen, and have a great manager to compliment the execution process to achieve measurable results. There are numerous circumstances that organizations “get lost” in the “VUCA” reality, great leaders tell data-based stories and initiate information driven conversation via questioning, pulling, debating. Demonstrating tangible value brought by either leadership or management is important.There are both tangible and intangible factors which should be scrutinized by top business leaders by applying systematic views and disciplines. There are quantifiable elements such as inefficiencies which can be brought to light by leveraging the right management system.

Great leaders unleash business potential, good managers focus on organizational performance. Good leaders navigate the organization in the “VUCA” reality towards the right direction; good managers practice scientific discipline, enforce the right dose of controlling, improve business efficiency with measurable ROIs. Thus, measuring leadership vs. management in a tangible way helps the organization to strike the right balance of long term goal achievement and short term quick win. And the business can build their competitive advantage in a stepwise manner. They should make measurement easy and enjoyable to monitor progress and outcome of business initiatives.

How to identify and empathetically listen to various stakeholders, and what should you do with the information? When trying to initiate business planning or take strategic moves, business management needs to be able to recognize the priorities and struggles of the company by understanding the business, identify stakeholders involved, and listen to them empathetically. Different stakeholders such as peers, subordinates, co-workers, clients, and vendors all have their various observations. Their respective viewpoints can indicate useful areas for further exploration and confirmation. But they rarely know the mandates imposed by management, nor do they understand the constraints and circumstances under which the subject must operate.

To initiate transformative effort, business management needs to encourage creativity and constructive criticism to build a highly innovative working environment. They should ask questions around which of the stakeholders would be impacted positively and which of the stakeholders would be impacted negatively by the change. Accept input from any source but weigh it accordingly. Once you have collected feedback and identified the impact on various stakeholders, you need to ask how you can modify the process, or how you can execute the rollout so that the positives are enhanced and the negatives are reduced, refine information to capture the business insight of growth opportunities or customer insight.

Do you have the right mix of people to achieve strategic goals, and what are your top prioritized goals to begin with? The critical thing for effective business leaders is to identify significant problems and set the right priority to solve them smoothly. Prioritization starts with a right mindset to focus on the most critical challenge business needs to overcome. That could be macro problems which directly impact on the business strategy or that could also be the micro problem which impacts the business’s bottom line for surviving. Organizations must identify the talent bench strength and weakness, address their common and unique skills requirements and map that out through skills/competency matrix, put the right people in the right position to solve problems that really matter, to achieve organizational goals at a technical, behavioral and attitudinal level.

Technically, it’s important to install the value systems which are reinforced through celebration, storytelling, communications, rewards and recognition then these get embedded into the unconscious psyche of all associates, and also engage employees by co-setting their work goals From talent development perspective, what you can and should do is to provide the opportunities (talent development) for people to hone their talents and develop their skills, train them well and well align the employee’s professional goal with the strategic business goal, so they can become highly engaged to achieve high performance results. Always attempt to identify areas in which measurable improvements can be realized, providing demonstrable value is essential, in some instances, these areas have been low-hanging fruit.

Are you simply surviving in your industry, or are you innovating? As the business and society expands, it becomes more complex and instead of remaining a society more complex, it reverts to chaos hence the struggle for survival more intense. Forward-looking organizational leaders should make objective assessment of their core business competency by asking: are you simply surviving in your industry, or are you innovating? The problem is that if the manager gets stuck in the day to day activities and remains happy with compliance, then there is no room for creativity to do better than expected. If we don't take risks, try new methods and challenge the traditional approach and follow innovative leadership, then the task gets boring and not effective, and the business gets stuck.

Different organizations have different strengths, capacity, and capabilities to innovate, innovative skills and capabilities an organization always needs depend on the circumstances the business is in. More and more firms are learning and implementing industry best practices in innovation, perhaps it is a better approach to strive for using good innovation practices. There is a recognizable core of approaches and activities that produce profitable innovation, and there are companies that use them. Highly innovative teams do not focus on hierarchy but on ideas, information, creativity, to unleash their full business potential.

Due to frequent disruptions and unprecedented uncertainty, there have been enough abysmal failures to prompt some caution. To think critically and change progressively perhaps more often than not, involves some level of discomfort and interdisciplinary transcendence, continue to see the importance of dealing with blind spots and overcoming challenges. The business should try new methodologies and next practices when there are clear returns that can't be found in the existing management practices, of course with great care on the potential risks, build up the new set of core digital capabilities in transforming itself and business as a whole to get digital ready.

Posted in: Digital Master,Leading by Questioning