>1. A Leader’s Emotional Intelligence
In a Forbes article, Keld Jensen writes:
“Research carried out by the Carnegie Institute of Technology shows
that 85 percent of your financial success is due to skills in ‘human
engineering,’ your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate,
and lead. Shockingly, only 15 percent is due to technical knowledge.”
In an economy that’s driven by collaborative knowledge and synergistic
ecosystems, ‘human engineering’ requires leaders to be authentic and
emotionally intelligent. They need to:
- Inspire and Influence. A strong leader must
be able to inspire everyone with a clear vision. This results from the
effective communication of a leader’s vision. Making people “do their
job” and people “wanting to get the job done” are two very different
scenarios that will lead to two very different outcomes.
- Create a Community. A healthy ecosystem
must be nurtured to achieve that long-term success. It’s the structure
we form around our organizations--inside and outside--to get through
tough problems. It’s that environment that allows us to partner with
differing individuals and groups who bring unique perspectives and
skills. All this enables cross-boundary collaboration.
- Think Long-Term. In order to strive and
thrive in a creative and innovative economy, leaders must always set
their sights on long-term goals. Balance sheets alone don’t measure
success, and operating based on quarterly returns or short-term goals
usually does not work for achieving sustainable innovation.
2. Cultivating A Cross-Collaborative Culture
A leader's most important responsibility is to prepare his or her
organization for what lies ahead. That means change - including changes
in workflow, breaking down the organizational silos, forming
multi-disciplinary teams, and preparing for the unknown.
An essential part of this transition requires both left-brained
(analytical) and right-brained (creative) talent and culture. Leaders
will have to approach these collaboration challenges by defining
cross-functional teams. Team member’s skills and behaviors influence
their interactions with other people. Here is an approach to
understanding and forming cross-functional teams:
- Learning Teams that keep an enterprise from
being too internally focused and trapped within their comfort zone.
Learners need to be sufficiently humble to question their worldview and
remain open to new insights every day.
- Organizing Teams that serve to move the
innovation lifecycle forward. Even the best ideas must continuously
compete for attention, resources, and time. These champions are skilled
at navigating processes, politics, and red tape to bring an innovation
to market.
- Building Teams create the connections
between the learning and organizing teams; they apply insights from the
learning team and channel the empowerment from the organizing team to
make new things happen. Builders are often highly visible and close to
the heart of the innovation action.
3. Establishing Repeatable Processes
It is one thing to wish for long-term change and innovation, but a
very different story to practice sustained innovation throughout an
organization. Leaders need to create a set of repeatable processes for
how to identify growth opportunities; design and enhance future options;
and manage in order to realize sustainable value. A few required steps
to get you started:
Identify Innovation Opportunities. An on-going process to identify innovation requires:
- Identification of your most critical opportunity areas--people, process, markets, and guidelines
- Knowledge of the capabilities, assets, and processes needed for success
- Selecting the right long-term performance indicators to drive the activities that create repeatable results
Design and Enhance Future Options. Options/Scenarios
with interconnected 360o operating blueprints should be created and
modified regularly with continuous dependency analysis that includes:
- Operating models for growth concepts, business models and
infrastructure that generates new revenue with repeatable and scalable
processes
- Risk/Reward analysis and metrics that guide optimal investment decisions
- Collaborative governance model that engages cross-functional team participation from concept to value creation
Manage in Order to Realize Sustainable Value. Ensure realization of value creation and preservation through ongoing performance analysis that includes:
- Ability to sense and respond in order to manage risk and support the delivery of committed long-term value metrics
- Centralized visibility, control and calibration of program and investment decisions
- Ability to rapidly adjust resources, initiatives and investments to strategic goals and to changing mandates