Is Your Organization Creating the Future or Accepting It?

How one global company balances contradiction to humanize the future through active daily learning and relevant actions?

One thing that transcends my career regardless of company, business, industry, scope or legacy is how leaders direct their future. For some, the future is what they envision and thus go about creating.?These leaders view communications and marketing as strategic components of the business, investing, developing, recruiting and challenging the status quo. Regardless of the challenges and setbacks along the way, they persevered, pivoted and positioned their companies as relevant and viable.

But for those who chartered their own course forward, there are just as many who didn’t.?The latter leaders managed only for today.?They focused on cost, efficiency, productivity and expense, believing these areas alone would breed sustainable success. They treated communications as an operating expense and dumbed down to perform “tasks” vs. initiatives. The lack of insight, perspective and analysis kept people in the dark and constantly on the defensive. Relevance was an afterthought if it was a thought at all. Retention was only an issue for the change agents and go-getters.

For so long, this bifurcation of leadership style puzzled me.?How could leaders be so diametrically different??Was there a middle ground??One example of such a contradiction is Toyota.?While I was at General Motors, I spent time studying Toyota and learning not just about its vaunted production system but also its leadership model. The company has long touted its ability to manage for today but lead for tomorrow – called dynamic duality.?The essence of this mindset is the division of tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge.?Put simply, knowledge that is shared, amplified and leveraged and knowledge gained from life experience.

For Toyota, this paradox allows people to intuitively and iteratively learn while pushing for huge leaps such as the Prius.?It also is reflected in how it approaches competition.?The company is also looking over its shoulder, so to speak, not in a fearful way but in a practical way to ensure distance and differentiation.???

Communications is also tied to both the long-term brand opportunity and the day-day need to move vehicles. The narrative is clear, consistent and relevant to the current reality.

In a world where leaders are being held more accountable than ever for revenue growth, profitability, workplace excellence and citizenship, the need for balance or even contradiction in leadership style is critical. There are a number of take-ways from both approaches:

1)???What are you chasing? – First and foremost, leaders must determine early on what the north star is.?What is the future??What is the organization’s purpose? Why should our company be there?

2)???What is important? – What is the focus internally and externally that will not be diminished?

3)???What is your bridge? – How will you convey the future by transitioning the present?

4)???How do you listen to the market? – Can you pivot fast enough or before shifts happen?

5)???How do you create relationships that foster open communication internally? –?Sharing information and knowledge happens best through a network of human interactions.

6)???How do you change the conversation internally to be future focused??– ?Internal communications needs to be viewed at a strategic level to shift discussion to the big picture and link daily, weekly and monthly goals to long-term results.

Digital is the Future

Creating the future of an organization is an incredibly difficult yet exhilarating responsibility for any leader.?Doing so lifts the entire enterprise, providing direction, meaning, energy and personal reward.?But a leader must also ensure that today is covered, keeping the organization running effectively. From a practical point-of-view, organizations must move aggressively to become data-oriented and insight-driven to inform and influence decisions so they can transform into a digital enterprise. The by-product of such a shift actually makes it easier for people to straddle multiple, often contradictory, behaviors as identified here.??

This seeming paradox is now the approach organizations need to take to achieve long-term success through short-term achievement.?Creating the future is no longer the province of a visionary but, rather, someone who can piece data together into a coherent picture.

Gary??