For developing new leaders, build a great project management culture, a culture that deals realistically with the tradeoffs of budgets, deadlines, and deliverables, instruct Leo Hopf and William Welter in ‘Rethink, Reinvent, Reposition’ (www.vivagroupindia.com). They explain that projects are the mechanism businesses use for bringing about the changes needed to execute strategy; and that planning and leading projects are what can give young leaders the opportunity to build the skills they will need later in their career.
“They will have to make a suite of decisions during the course of the project. They will have to build relationships with temporary team members. They will almost always have to deal with cross-functional issues. And most importantly, they will have to learn to hold themselves accountable for the results they deliver.”
Think bigger than the job
The authors also advise future leaders to be able to analyse changes to the business in the context of emerging industry change and understand the implications of the changes. They urge future leaders to think bigger than the job because the answer to the question of ‘why’ is always in the environment outside the company. “For example, a procurement manager might not understand why you want to upgrade logistics support software if she doesn’t know about the need to integrate with global suppliers.”
The book offers two suggestions to make future leaders understand the larger goals and the numerous ways of achieving those goals. One, give these leaders every opportunity to build relationships with real customers, not just to read summarised market data, because competitive truth is always found at the customer interface. And, two, help future leaders develop their critical thinking skills. “Ask them about their assumptions. Encourage them to look at situations from multiple points of view. Focus on their thinking skills more than their knowledge of today’s tools and techniques.”
Six qualities
An educative section in the book speaks of six basic responsibilities of every business leader, such as understanding and communicating the vision and values, sensing the signals of tomorrow, and deciding on a course of action in a timely manner.
The penultimate responsibility in this list is to ‘act on the decision.’ Most organisations deny themselves the full value of their decisions by underestimating the resources necessary for execution and adding more onto the managers’ existing to-do lists than they can ever accomplish, the authors fret. “This results in a significant gap between the intention behind and the execution of our business decisions. And that is one of the main reasons so many businesses fail to renew themselves in time.”
A book with many takeaways for watchful leaders.
**
BookPeek.blogspot.com
