How to move from a culture of execution, which is geared to excellence, to a culture of creative emancipation, which is geared to the extraordinary

EXTRACT OF CHAPTER 9 OF "A CRUCIAL IMPETUS"

All along my professional path I learned to recognize, appreciate and promote the key characteristics of the leaders who succeed and bring real value to the people and organizations with which they work. There are many styles, many personal traits that can lead to success. Over these last few years, I’ve had the opportunity to hire dozens of managers and several hundred employees in Italy and France. This incredible experience helped me to reflect on the characteristics that bring success for the future.

I’d say that there’s a subset of skills that are more invaluable than others in the context in which we live. We must clearly recognize several fundamental elements in the way that each modern organization must function.

First, the world is full of ambiguities. The boundaries of the problems that we want to solve are blurred and changeable, we all have to learn to live with this state of affairs. We must be agile, capable of aggregating the right skills at the right moment. And beyond the boundaries of an organization, to solve large and small equations, to have the perseverance to continue to repeatedly find solutions to stand up to the challenges. These challenges systematically present themselves again at a different rhythm and often in another form.

The markets in which we operate are increasingly complex, multidisciplinary and volatile. Everything that is a basic discipline becomes a hygiene factor. It must be intrinsic in the work we all do, without any inspection or control, because this leads to losing efficiency and competitiveness, without adding any distinctive value. Our level of play must constantly be the best possible. This requires not only a quality of our skills but also extremely close attention to our interactions with others. Lifelong learning and an incessant curiosity are indispensable to stay responsive with a rapid innovation rhythm, as much for the individual as for the entire organization.

As for values, it becomes necessary to go beyond appearances. The question is no longer one of respecting the rules that a state, a society or a company establishes. It is a matter of tackling the subjects head-on, taking ownership of them and treating them with intellectual honesty and depth. Without proactivity, without conviction, the limits of the approach will quickly be seen on the surface. They will make a speech, a position, an initiative or governance lose all credibility.

An organization’s talents want to see around them and in their leaders transparency, simplicity and truthfulness, unthinkable in the past. Today, no one wants to follow a leader who functions using fear, constraint, judgment and threat mechanisms. Eighty percent of talents leave a company because of a disagreement with their managers. Organizations that don’t know how to choose leaders on the basis of modern principles and behaviors will very quickly suffer from the consequences.

The complexity of the subjects that we treat forces us today to have zero tolerance for a lack of collaborative spirit. We have lived with compartmentalization in practically all the human organizations in the world. This is now unthinkable. Real talent must be reinvented with a collaboration that is structured by definition, at the risk of simply being ousted from the organization. The efficacy of teamwork prevails over the individual talent, in each field of work.

Client orientation can’t be just an assertion written in a mission statement. This must be the organization’s mantra. In the event of a conflict, it must be systematically favored over any internal optimization reasoning. The large majority of organizations that I know are still far from a quality and commitment level like this. They will be left behind, sooner or later, by more sincere and proactive competitors.

The transformation speed of industries is so great that each organization, each company must constantly reinvent itself. This makes the need for creativity in the teams increase considerably. The capacity to conceive, design what doesn’t exist is a talent that will become more and more sought-after. Whereas, a few decades ago, knowledge and precision in execution were favored.

As a result of this same transformation speed, individuals and organizations must better assimilate the capacity for risk-taking. This is one of the most complicated things to acquire and build from the professional development viewpoint. We’ve been brought up, notably in Europe, in a system that is very much based on tepidness, not to mention an aversion to risks. Learning to like taking risks implies a real intellectual revolution against the principles that have been inculcated in us for decades. It took me between two and three years to make management teams more ambitious and more favorable to risk-taking in their work, to seek out exceptional growth with projects and investments. Even the best talents fundamentally have trouble projecting themselves, as entrepreneurs, on value creation. Most will prefer to have success on a less ambitious plan rather than taking the risk of failure on a much more extended, but potentially overfulfilling, plan. Yet, this skill will be increasingly fundamental for the transformation of our economy.