Innovateleadershipiv

Influential senior leadership implies the high level of intellectual and emotional maturity, strategic foresight, profound insight, decision wisdom, and high-level leadership influence.

Companies crossing the industrial boundaries are at different stages of organizational maturity. Senior leadership makes influence from mindset to attitude to behavior, and evolving to what is needed next for radical changes and societal advancements. Upon their guidance, business management should identify stories on the basis of the "strategic" or "tactical" value of the organization and take a holistic approach to help the business become sustainable and "future proof." 

Hence, as a senior leader, defining your true purpose is a helpful instrument to guide yourself, your team, your business, your relations along different dimensions in order to steer the organization in the right direction and lead transformative changes effortlessly.

Senior leadership makes impacts on learning and innovation: In face of intensive changes and fierce competitions, businesses need to not only think of survival at the moment, but they also have to keep learning, building unique competency to thrive in the future. Every organization has its own unique set of collective thinking and behaviors, some are reluctant to change, and others are open to change. Without learning, individuals or businesses get stale. Learning and development occur when it is encouraged and supported by senior leadership. Business innovation today is heavily dependent on having the right people with a growth mindset to keep leaning, spur creativity and drive change relentlessly.

Top leaders convey a clear vision, share a good strategy, and set a great example for learning and change. An organization's philosophies, core values, and organizational objectives drive learning and development continually. It is supported by senior management to move the strategy of the business forward consistently. The culture of learning comes from the top. The logic of improving learning agility is that there must be an organizational culture from top leaders all the way down the leadership chain that promotes learning, continuous improvement, and development that follows through as the top priority.

Senior leadership makes impacts on business agility and competency: In many cases, senior managers are afraid of the change because historically there were no solid roots for adopting new ideas, and there is full of uncertainty and unpredictability of upcoming changes. Business agility is the ability to create change conditions as well as the ability to adapt to changes. Top management should assess the current state of business agility and maturity by asking: How will being agile support the organization's strategic goals? Does it address current tactical needs as well as the business capacity you're trying to build to compete for the long run? Do you understand what the organizations are trying to accomplish? Improving business agility is a necessary step in developing core business competencies and accelerating strategy management.

There are potential conflicts between how senior leadership perceive agile and how the development team understands it because they are often in the different position to look at the things from different angles. Senior management needs to focus more on “WHY & WHAT” - a set of agile philosophy, principles, and management discipline. They influence the mindset, behavior of groups, teams and departments. They play a significant role in shaping the agile culture - the collective mindsets and behaviors for inspiring progressive changes. They need to focus on creating the synergy of teams, improving business changeability and competency.

Senior leadership makes impacts on unlocking corporate performance and potential: Organization as a whole is superior to the sum of the parts. Lower level operational metrics nearly always fall hierarchically under some higher-level strategic goals, such as profitability, quality, innovation, people-centricity, time to market, etc. When the company fails to achieve any of those goals, senior management needs to do a comprehensive data-based cause-effect analysis, finding the right cause of the problem is a halfway to solve it. They should delegate effectively, to ensure the right people with the right skillset can solve the right issues timely.

Senior executives are more holistic, interested in “value realized” by the organization than the “value delivery” by the team. To ensure the seamless strategy execution, they would more likely “scrutinize” the metrics from different angles and strike the right balance of short term gain and long term business advantage. The effective way to track the achievement of strategic goals is to cascade those well-defined key performance indicators down throughout the organization with the use of operational performance indicators, which should link all the way back to the transactional metrics. Senior leaders need to spend some time on identifying and unleashing business potential into more solid forms by making wise investments on talent, technology, and using resources smartly to build differentiated business competency.

Senior leadership implies the high level of intellectual and emotional maturity, strategic foresight, profound insight, decision wisdom, and high-level leadership influence. The senior leadership of the organization or the society is like the steering wheel to ensure their ships are moving in the right direction towards the uncharted water or blurred territories. They have to convey their vision with clarity about internal and external environments and the dynamics that affect them, provide comprehensive guidance and input, communicate frequently, and work collaboratively to tailor business needs for delivering multifaceted value with continuum.

Posted in: C-Level Collaboration,Future of Leadership,Leadership Master