Corporate board’s bottom up consensus helps the management close blindspots, avoiding pitfalls on the way.
Overseeing strategy management as strategy execution should always be Bottom-Up: Corporate boards oversee business strategy. Strategies are really not meaningful unless they include an implementation plan and overseen by corporate boards, making the organization aligned with the broadly shared goals. Everything depends on the internal and external context; the dimensions you and your organization want to focus on and how you go about it. The superior execution requires the leaders’ inquisitiveness to dig through the root cause, take a bottom-up consensus approach, figure out the true solution, rather than fixing the symptoms only.
The success of strategy management undoubtedly lies in “timely execution,” and it can only be achieved through continuous persistence, improvement and following up. Bottom up consensus approach requires healthy feedback-feedforward cycle. Senior leaders need to recognize great ideas, justify criticism, so they can make timely strategic adjustments to an ever-changing environment. It might take a few weeks to craft a good strategy; but it takes significant time and effort to implement it. Execution or implementation is always more important than design in a “VUCA” world. The bottom up consensus is critical for discovery and problem identification, helping the management avoid pitfalls and improve business effectiveness.
Setting principles to encourage bottom up customer-centric innovation or problem-solving scenario: Innovation is the light organizations across the industrial boundaries are pursuing. innovation is just too important to delegate to management without the corporate board’s oversight. The customer-centric innovations often come from the floor and not the ceiling. Breakthrough innovation is usually bottom up, and starts with a problem, having no solution in the current situation or existing solutions cause too many side effects. Emergence and timing brings uncertainty, but also opportunities to nurture breakthrough innovation. From idea generation to implementation, you can’t manipulate innovation from top down, it has to be managed via bottom up collaboration as well.
Corporate boards set principles to cultivate a creative culture and encourage innovation. It will be easier to develop an innovative product in order to satisfy a need or shortcoming; rather than manipulating the whole environment and market so that you can define what the customer should need. To successfully deploy quick solutions in the organization and to work with agents of change, spread the word and create the appetite for more, amplify the best practices & next practices to improve innovation competency.
Enhancing the right mix of bottom-up and top-down change management practices: With change as digital new normal, every business leader needs to become the change leader including board directors. The hybrid change management takes the right mix of bottom-up and top-down approaches. Change management is an interdependent ecosystem that includes many business factors such as the company goals, policies, processes; involving both top-down sponsorship, planning and bottom up initiatives & implementation. Change needs to be inspired from top-down. But bottom up engagement and feedback are also critical to make change happen.
For large-scale business transformation, it’s crucial to both embed change into business DNA and integrate change management into strategy management for driving the long term business transformation success. Radical change often needs to restructure the root of the company such as values, beliefs, and objectives, besides the hard business components tuning such as process optimization or technology update. The goals of change need to be communicated within the spiral of conscious awareness and apply an interdisciplinary approach to manage change systematically. All critical elements of change management should be synchronized to accelerate speed. Make sure business processes and people are integrated to ensure a consistent ability to deliver change results continually.
The rate of change has accelerated, indicating that business leaders must learn how to strike the right balance between managing complex issues today and forecasting the trends and uncertain issues of tomorrow. Corporate board’s bottom up consensus helps the management close blind spots, avoiding pitfalls on the way. The boundary-pushing at lower levels would be encouraged, a healthy amount of errors should be tolerated and the organization becomes more innovative to unlock performance.
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