Leaders are leading (mostly)
The world needs leadership, now more than ever during this pandemic. We need to look up to someone (anyone, really) to give us the reassurance that everything will be OK. We need someone who seems to know what they are doing, even if they don’t. If you look at our current leaders around the world, they tended to have succeeded in their leadership because we, the people, needed them to. We needed our leaders to be successful, so we have given them the benefit of the doubt and have become less critical of them. Without them, mass panic could set in and we know it.
Bad leaders are being viewed as OK, OK leaders are viewed as good and good leaders as great. It seems that if you are currently the president or prime minister of a country, all you had to do is to not screw up. Apart from a few notable exceptions (yes, we all know who they are), country leaders have performed well enough to get us through the worst of the pandemic. Post pandemic however, the story might be different and only time will tell.
Does this correlate to business leaders? Are they experiencing these tailwinds and are their staff and shareholders being more sympathetic? From what I’ve seen, I think that most leaders are weathering the initial storm quite well, apart from the odd few who may have badly handled the furloughing of staff, either through mass firing over Zoom or forcing staff to leave rather then being made redundant to avoid bad press.
I know what you’re thinking: why would I need to read a book about leadership if leaders are seen in a positive light and their followers are being supportive? Well the truth is, the game has changed and leaders are again being critically measured. Now the green shoots are appearing, businesses are gearing up and quite frankly, the world as we know it has changed. We have seen massive acceleration of digitization, with the experts saying that two years’ worth of digital transformation has occurred within just two months.
You may feel that the technology aspect of your organization has improved, but could you say the same for your company culture? I would say no, and if anything, it has regressed. Now is the time for you to accelerate all those other parts of your organization outside just technology. The lessons contained in this book are simple, effective, and represent what the best-in-class organizations are doing to gain agility and increase the productivity of a company’s greatest asset, their staff.
In my mind, all a leader has to do is to inspire their staff to do their career’s best work. This, combined with an effective digital transformation, will turn any company into a leader in their industry and maybe even into the world’s best!
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Certified Project Management Professional (PMP)? | Certified PMI Professional in Business Analysis (PMI-PBA)? | Administrative Professional | Semi-Retired
4 年I’ve just bought the book. This is a topic that’s hot on my radar now. Thanks for bringing this to attention and loved the foreword. That final para there is great because it is rather rare to find a leader that inspires (and truly cares for) their staff to do their career’s best work. Staff + Digital transformation is indeed a powerful combination.
Managing Director, Global Head of International Banking
4 年Added to the list !
Sustainability Mindset & Digital Transformation towards NetZero
4 年Neal Cross - thanks for the support and inspiration over the years.
Cloud Technical Advisor | DevOps
4 年Twenty years ago IT departments used to function perfectly well with a single runtime, framework, or architectural style. But given diversity of modern application requirements, it is no longer feasible to have such a limited catalog of development options. Culture is more important to enable teams to build the right thing the right way easier. In Today's digital world, business strategy means software strategy.