Heroic Leader or Team Coach?

Check out this video log at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-waJGj7ciM&t=6s

Transcript:

Unlike any other point in history where there may have been one accelerating technology at any one time.

 So for example, in the 20th century we saw the airplane, the television, personal computers and the internet amongst others.

 Today, there are probably around 12 accelerating technologies. Things like AI, Robotics and Nanotech, all digitizing our world very rapidly.

 And as we have all now found, when you digitize, things become very disruptive.

 Our industries and business models are changing rapidly.

 So much our brains can’t keep up with the rate of change.

We’ve already seen the impact on Journalism, Music, TV and Education.

 Every industry is being or going to be affected.

 Even some disrupters are finding themselves disrupted in a short space of time.

 Your future success is based on your ability to change and adapt, not how great your business is now.

 And small and mid-sized businesses, probably for the first time, have an advantage over the big companies because they are able to adapt and change faster.

 But the greatest barrier that small and mid-sized businesses are facing as they grow is having the time needed to manage all the change when they’re already busy running the day-to-day business.

 So how do we create the space to work on these two things together – run the business and transform at the same time.

 There are so many strategies to be implemented and changes to be managed today.

 Responding to changing customer demands, developing new products and services, identifying new markets, new partners and new networks to grow the top line.

 Improving productivity through automating processes or outsourcing non-core activities to improve the bottom line.

 Hiring and retaining talent, applying the latest technologies and improving in-house innovation to build business capabilities.

 The reality is that strategizing and managing change is now an unending process.

Welcome to Summit SCALE. Where entrepreneurial leaders come to learn how to grow their businesses into mid-sized companies.

The days when, in any organisation, small or large, integrating the different needs of all the stakeholders could be managed by a charismatic founder CEO are past and gone.

No single leader can any longer meet the complex demands placed on them by all the various stakeholders - customers, employees, investors, suppliers, partners, regulators, even the communities in which you operate.

This isn’t a time management problem.

Yet many CEOs carry on, believing that it takes a heroic individual, working silly hours, making all the decisions, firefighting, doing the heavy lifting on the critical issues and constantly work in the business instead of on it.

We’ve seen an example of how that kind of leadership over the last two years has been a disaster for Brexit.

It now requires an effective leadership team to share the leadership demands.

The rate of hyper change and hyper connectedness means we need an integrating group, not an integrating individual at the top of the organisation.

The challenge is not in managing the parts - the various stakeholder groups - it’s in managing the connections.

But the problem is that 20th century leadership development taught us to lead vertically.

Organisations are employing fewer people, but the number of people they are partnering with is increasing – so 21st century leadership requires us more and more to lead across boundaries, if you like, horizontally.

The members of the leadership team have to be able to represent the whole company, not just their part of it.

They can’t be a company leader for the hour or two while they sit in the leadership team meeting then go out of the room and be the head of their function for the remainder of the time.

Companies don’t have ideas, only people do – and it is the interactions between and among people from which innovation and insight emerge.

Today’s leadership is about creating the conditions in which those interactions are most likely to multiply.

Most top leaders today recognize that they can’t achieve change alone, that they depend on the contributions of their team members collaborating highly with each other.

But many expect – or hope – that the smooth interaction of capable people will develop naturally.

That almost never happens.

The CEO has to move from being team leader to team coach.

To move the focus from current and past problems to thinking future-back, and outside-in by asking questions like “Where do we need to get to and what are the expectations of our stakeholders?”

As the team coach, the top leader coaches the team to be constantly learning from each other and to be growing the collective learning and capacity of the team.

This helps to both create and adapt to the future and create greater value for all the stakeholders.

The heroic CEO is dead, long live the team.

Where are you on this journey? 20th century hero or a 21st century coach?