Tag Archives: Complexity

What is Agile Leadership? Five Perspectives

Situation: The environment continually becomes more complex for leaders. Not only must leaders perform classic roles, but they must also deal with increased uncertainty and change. How do you build a new leadership paradigm to address ongoing change? What is agile leadership?

Advice from the CEOs:

There are three challenges facing leaders today.

  • First, given that change is constant, what does the next likely settling point look like in your environment? How is this different from past settling points? Everything starts with your people. Once you determine the likely next settling point, conduct a capability inventory with your leadership team to determine whether you have the right people to handle the new reality. Can current members be trained to take on the new challenges? Do you need to add new talent and capacity?
  • Second, are your processes limiting or enhancing your flexibility? Do current processes encourage adaptability, cross-functional connection and communication. If not how will you change them? Deconstruct and reconstruct all critical processes to make them more agile, responsive and adaptable to current and future needs.
  • Third, how are you linking desired outcomes with rewards and incentives within the company? Growth in the past may have focused on building up infrastructure – adding more people and capacity. Now, knowledge management focused on tools and processes is required to make people more effective. Individualized assessment and reward structures have become an obstacle and have to be shifted to emphasize the importance of collaborative versus individualized performance.
  • Agile leadership and management focuses on reaching outside the boundaries of your own company. To deliver differentiated value suppliers and customers must be included in the exercise. It is necessary to reinvent engagement with suppliers and customers so that they are part of the collaboration.
  • The agile paradigm focuses on the unspoken needs of suppliers and customers. This takes the conversation beyond the transaction and includes quality, on-time delivery, and other differentiators that are mutually important. This can include competing for your competitors’ suppliers by being a better customer!

Thanks to Jorge Titinger, CEO of Verigy, Inc. for his contribution to this article.

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Do You Launch a New Brand or a New Company? Six Suggestions

Situation: A company is launching a new service – using existing technologies to address a new market. The CEO is curious as to whether it makes more sense to create a separate firm or corporation, a division within the current structure, or a new brand to take advantage of this opportunity? Do you launch a new brand or a new company?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Because you are utilizing an existing process in a new market, don’t create the additional conflict or complexity that you might by splitting this into a separate entity just yet. Utilize the collaborative talent within the company to create a new brand rather than a new division or corporation.
  • Adding the additional overhead, accounting and other complexities of a separate entity is overkill – start it as a division or a brand.
  • Use this as an opportunity to grow your overall company brand. Create a series of icons to represent the company’s various capabilities. The icons will also help you to describe the range of capabilities of the company to prospective clients.
  • The market which you are addressing is early stage. By developing this new market as a new capability of your current well-respected brand, you have the opportunity to become the category leader.
  • When another CEO created new capabilities as extensions of existing technology he followed the following route:
    • Create a sub-brand as you develop and start to develop the new capability;
    • If it is successful and grows, develop it into a division;
    • If the capability grows to the point that you attract and decide to take outside funding to accelerate growth, create a separate company so that you don’t give away ownership of the parent company.
  • Think “effective vs. efficiency.” Start with efficiency. Add effectiveness (dedicated people) as opportunity proves itself out.

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How Do You Manage Change? Four Perspectives

A company is experiencing change in both organizational complexity and culture as it grows. Employees feel that the company doesn’t have the same team atmosphere that it had when it was smaller. How do you manage change associated with growth and new opportunities?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Change is an inevitable part of growth. Employees need to understand this simple fact. Change is tied to: age and stage of growth, changes in leadership, performance challenges, changes in customers and competition, and changes in the working environment. For example, the simple addition of Millennials to the employee pool will change the nature of a company.
  • What else do we know about change? That it is: an opportunity, filled with uncertainty, complex and disruptive.
  • Typical responses to change from staff are: denial, resistance, anger, fear, confusion, being divided about the impact of change, and chaos. It is important to understand this and to communicate to employees that their reactions are normal. They will also get over these reactions as they adapt to new conditions.
  • Denison Consulting has developed a model that represents four factors – Mission, Consistency, Involvement and Adaptability – with measures under each factor. The model provides a visual representation of how the organization currently measures up in each of the twelve factors, and provides a clear and understandable map of where the organization needs to focus to make the changes required to survive and thrive.
  • Special thanks to Paul Wright of Denison Consulting for his input to this discussion.

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