Leaders Must either Adapt Or Perish

Brands with visionary leaders never cease to grow. Leaders spur ideas which take organizations into other dimensions – they go beyond limits to achieve success and sustainability. Today, brands such as Google, Facebook, Ogilvy, and Microsoft are a few of the most famous in the world organizations whose leaders dared to step into the unknown and achieve the impossible.  

You might wonder where all the innovation and creativity began. Simply, inventors, marketers, and strategists started with a vision. The vision set them apart from the cluster. They believed they could make a difference like help people connect with ease, enhance work performance, and make the communication process more sound and many other advantages.

In the digital space today, there are dramatic changes happening each day – agile digital leaders understand that being reactive and proactive guarantees success. There is no place and space for mediocrity as it erodes efficiency.

While the digital world continues to expand and businesses are scaling, leaders need to be equipped with skills and capabilities which will empower them to create new business models in conjunction with the disruptive technology. According to 2017 Global Human Capital Trends, ‘only 5 percent of companies feel they have strong digital leaders in place’.

This also means leaders need to be an example and set the pace towards organizational success. Moreover, they have the responsibility to train millennials, build effective teams, keep people motivated, engaged and foster the creative environment in an organization.

Agile leaders need to hire the right team with the right mindset to develop solid ideas. To some, this is a bitter pill to swallow, no? This is a hard decision, hiring those who are more knowledgeable. This, however, is a shared opportunity for incumbent leaders to learn new experiences and help others to grow in an organization.

Strong leaders admit mistakes and rectify them where necessary. As we first saw, the world today is rapidly changing – decisions and ideas need a lot of testing before implementation. Not every idea will work but leaders should involve teams that would be able to address challenges and come up with new solutions. This is the ability to develop new technologies that take advantage of opportunities and threats.

It goes without saying, leaders have the obligation to respond to external feedback. These are customers outside their organization domain – customers are ingredients of the best product and service of an organization. Their feedback is equally as important as the internal teams.

In times of distress and tension in the ecosystem, vision must dictate the long term benefit. This is probably the fundamental component of effective leadership. Leaders who create long term solutions to problems, strategies that encourage modern development broad techniques and resources – they can either balance the status quo or safeguard the continuity of an organization in the coming years.

Leaders need to communicate fluently across divisions and departments. If the future is seen by a few, there are others who will be left out. In worst cases, the organization’s vision won’t be communicated and understood by customers out there. In an organization level, it requires constant communication through channels that enable to and fro information i.e. each staff or employee has a stake here.

What does this mean to traditional leaders? Adaptation and flexibility are required to withstand modern and rapid digital developments. Traditional or conservative leaders need either to adapt or perish. The digital world is here to help companies redefine their policies and restructure their business systems to accommodate new developments. A necessary factor to excel in the new world of technology and innovation.