Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 296 | Leading & Managing | 1

Extractive summaries of and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Week 296 | May 12 – 18, 2023.

New leadership for a new era of thriving organizations

By Aaron De Smet | McKinsey & Company | May 4, 2023

Listen to the Extractive Summary of the Article

We are living through an era of unprecedented challenges and opportunities. How should leaders navigate this moment? What does leadership look like in an era where turbulence and disruption are the norm?  The answer to those questions can’t be divorced from the answer to another one: What does an organization that thrives during such unstable times look like? For decades, organizations were designed and managed for an industrial environment. In its place, a new form of organization and management has been slowly emerging. The new organizational approach that seeks to be open, fluid, and adaptable; unleashes the collective energy, passion, and capabilities of its people; reimagines strategy; and focuses on delivering greater value to all stakeholders. This new model focuses on a powerful aspiration: creating sustainable, inclusive growth. For leaders, this requires making five fundamental shifts in mindsets and ways of working.

1. How we show up: Beyond expectations to wholeness.  Today’s leaders must move beyond their identity as professionals and show up as humans, with the courage to be, and to be seen as their whole, best, authentic selves. It is challenging. It means recognizing and acknowledging the deeper inner essence of others and being unafraid to reveal one’s own essence, even the quirky bits. The intent is to move beyond task-driven and transactional relationships by taking the time to get to know one another and connect at a human level, sharing values, beliefs, hopes, and fears and enabling all to reveal the greatness that lies within.
2. How we organize: Beyond command to collaboration.  This shift requires leaders to evolve beyond being directors that receive and give instructions up and down a vertical hierarchy to being catalysts that empower and guide self-managing teams, fostering connection, dialogue, and cooperation across traditional organizational boundaries. This evolved approach cultivates trust, respect, and compassion; requires letting go of the power that comes with positional authority to embrace a stance of openness; and enables human connection within teams and across formal hierarchies.
3. How we get work done: Beyond control to evolution.  Leading companies today seek to become learning organizations that are continually evolving, exploring, ideating, experimenting, scaling up, executing, scaling down, and exiting across many different activities in parallel. We are in the midst of a profound shift in how work gets done, one that asks leaders to go beyond being controllers with a mindset of certainty to becoming coaches who operate with a mindset of discovery and foster continual rapid exploration, execution, and learning.
4. How we create value: Beyond competition to cocreation.  While it remains essential to offer customers greater value than other options they might consider, in an era of collapsed product life cycles and rapid commoditization, organizations must move well beyond a focus on competitive advantage. They must create new levels of value for customers and other stakeholders by reimagining their business models and industry ecosystems.  This shift requires that leaders evolve beyond being planners operating with a presumption of scarce opportunities and resources to becoming architects who shape new business models and systems by understanding and utilizing the abundance of available opportunities and resources.

2 key takeaways from the article

1. We are living through an era of unprecedented challenges and opportunities. How should leaders navigate this moment? What does leadership look like in an era where turbulence and disruption are the norm?  
2. For leaders, this requires making five fundamental shifts in mindsets and ways of working. The five shifts are: beyond profit to impact; beyond expectations to wholeness; beyond command to collaboration; beyond control to evolution; and beyond competition to cocreation. Taken together, the five shifts redefine leadership for a new era.

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Topics:  Strategy, Business Model, Leadership