Don’t stay on the Chair!

Of course staying on the chair and earning money is good for everybody. If a leader is thinking that now we have good financial performance and shareholders are supporting me, this is good for a certain while. However the future can be black due to the sleeping on the table and  staying on the chair.
Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality – Warren Bennis
Leadership is being a crucial parameter to enhance productivity, innovation, sustainability and launching more and more successful transient competitive advantages. This is critical to a company’s future and it should be recognised as a key challenge for firms and nations by policymakers and businesses. Globalisation and hypercompetitive business conditions are creating a big pressure over the leaders. They focus on the short-term financial performance.  There is also an increasing pressure of technological changes and linked behavioural changes of consumers.
According to the my experience and knowledge, I have to define that more effective leadership and management capability create more productivity, profitability and innovations. Look at, around, you will see the examples.
Today, company leaders are facing mounting pressure to transform their organizational cultures to embed creativity, alignment, problem solving, agility, collaboration, innovation, and networking.
We have to understand of what is required to lead a successful organization in today’s uncertain business world. Of course, the development of leadership capacity to achieve all of these is integral to this.
Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become leader, success is all about growing others. – Jack Welch
Key Points
1- Increasing pressure on leadership capability to enhance productivity, innovation and sustainability.
2- The main barriers are organizational culture,  short-term focusing, low investment in long-term strategies that include the development of people in the organization and  focusing only on individual development of the leadership without consideration of the collective leadership capability.
3- Better understanding of the commitment to developing leadership capability and evolving organizational structure and systems to remain competitive.
I have to say that technological changes are increasing and these changes are making organizations more susceptible to disruptive changes.
4- According to a study made by McKinsey in 2013 detected that 79% of the executives and board members told that they had a pressure to deliver financial results in two years or less.  This short-term approach results in an increased focus on quarterly earnings rather than long-term value creation.
5- I believe that people create a competitive edge for an organization. They create the processes, technologies, services and other innovations to achieve a competitive success in local and global business environment.  Therefore, working with innovative leaders, making regular leadership development and  building leader selfawareness and working with the right individuals who use their own workplaces as the center of their learning to improve the productivity and capacity to innovate.
Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations. – Peter Drucker
6- In today’s conditions, consumers evaluate the companies for their concept of corporate governance, adaptability to the changing conditions, ethical practices, applying regulatory rules, recognizing their people, credibility of leaders and managers, auditing and accounting principles, customer satisfaction, social and environmental responsibility and also health and safety concerns. Of course, business efficiency is related to the attitudes and values and management practices of the organization.
7- A study showed that if an organization perceive their managers and/or leaders as ineffective; only 8 percent of the employees are highly engaged. If an organization perceives their managers and/or leaders as effective, 72 percent of the employees are highly engaged.
 Barriers and Solutions

• Leadership capability

The Ernst Young, Australian Productivity study in 2013 showed that employees can increase the productivity at least 21 percent if they don’t have “poor motivation” and “lack of motivation” in their companies. This study also showed that leadership is a crucial factor in contributing to innovation through influencing business culture and collaborative approach, acceptance of risk and attitude towards failure, improvements to operations, organizational structures and systems, new business models, design thinking, competitive intelligence and people development through strongly focusing to the consumers.
Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes. – Peter Drucker

• Misaligned organizational culture, structure and systems

Great leadership requires well developed people management capability that should contain a more collaborative and innovative culture.  This capability should include candor effect, knowledge sharing, participatory decision-making, empowering people, encouraging creativity, more searching, practice, experimentation and learning, reduced management control, increasing networking, regular sector analysis, competitive intelligence for today and future, courage for disengagement and increased tolerance for risk.
The use of power, authority and hierarchy can be unique obstacles to the workplace innovation.

• Low investment in leadership and people development

I know that in industry, many supervisors and managers are promoted due to their technical expertise yet many of them received little or no leader development because leadership development is viewed as a cost to the organization. Therefore, they make low investment in leadership and people development. This is related to the excessive focusing on the short-term financial performance.
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led and how much you get it. - Steve Jobs

• A short-term approach

I see that shareholders have big pressure on company executives to deliver short-term financial performance. This is also preferred by the executives to earn more compensation and benefits in a short period. This situation is disregarded by the shareholders and they think that they are successful. When the company has difficulties in growth and profitability in the long-term, the executives are leaving the company and shareholders face with the business failure. Such short-term approaches contribute to the low investment in human capital that includes leadership, talent and employee development, failure to develop transient competitive advantages through new products, services and markets, failure to lead competitive intelligence and sector analysis, the failure to manage social and environmental risks and the failure to manage customer loyalty. I believe that leaders should apply a balance between short and long-term approaches to keep the business growth and profitability. They have to be authentic and demonstrate ethics as part of their decision-making framework and remove toxic people from the organization.
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. – Steve Jobs

• Difficulties in the current management and leadership development applications

I know that many leadership and management programs fail due to the their context.  The main reasons are;

1. Lack of the organization specific context. Every organization has the specific marketing and innovation agenda for the short and long-term. Therefore, each learning concept should cover the firm’s specific goals and how they can achieve them.
2. Misuse of the 70/20/10 framework. I know that the majority of the learning occur in the real daily operations in any business. 70 percent of the learning and development occur on the job, 20 percent through working with and learning from other people and 10 percent through formal training, coaching and/or mentoring programs. I have to say that after university study, people are starting to the “workplace university”. They have to have great performance in the “workplace university” if they want to be successful.
3. Lack of focus on developing leadership capability. I believe that this is a main issue in the organizations due to the lack of the entire business strategy of the organization and how the leadership should manage the organizational structure, people, customers, systems, processes and operations.

Our future growth relies on competitiveness and innovation, skills and productivity… and these in turn rely on the education of our people. – Julia Gillard
Conclusion

1. The future of the any organization or a nation depends on the level of the uptake and ongoing competitiveness and sustainability to produce more and more transient competitive advantages, an innovative culture and innovations in the industry and services. This is fully linked to the capability of the leadership. Therefore, working with the right leaders and the development of the leadership and people capability should be a priority for the business companies and nations.
2. A strong focus on sustainability, supply chain optimization, consumer wellbeing, boosting product and service commercialisation and engagement with the technology-enabled customers are the crucial parameters of the industrial development and competitiveness in today’s complex and globalized business conditions.
3. Organizations must have a global outlook and global vision. They must be getting the system to move through faster through collaboration, innovation, value creation, competitive intelligence, sector analysis and learning.
4. Organizations should bear in mind that competitive people capability, digital immersion and technology-enabled innovation are linked together if they want to create excellence in business and innovation performance.
5. Organizations and leadership have to support, develop and incentivise their people to take commercial and scientific risk, tolerate positive failure and promote a learning culture and develop an innovation capable workforce.

Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may take you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.  - Barack Obama
Please share this article in Linkedin, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook!
Please write your comments!
Thank you very much!
Yusuf Tokdemir is a business advisor, entrepreneur, innovation consultant, growth strategist, keynote speaker, founder of Chocolat Garden Chocolatier and Innovation Turkey. 
He has a proven track record of success in multi-industry.
Innovation Turkey is an Innovation Management Consulting and People Development Company. It collaborates with the companies for people and leadership development, new product design, new service design, new business design and organizes seminars and workshops on innovation management and productivity to achieve competitive commercial outcomes.
Chocolat Garden is an artisan chocolatier that produces highest quality chocolates for chocolate lovers in Çayyolu, Ankara.
Innovation Turkey  olarak şirketleri acil ihtiyacı olan verimlilik, büyüme, karlılık, yeni ürün geliştirme, yeni iş geliştirme, personel geliştirme, yönetici koçluğu vb alanlarda ihtiyaçlarına yönelik çözümler üretiyoruz. Ticari kazançlarını artırıyoruz. İlgili konularda seminer ve workshop düzenliyoruz.
Chocolat Garden artisan butik çikolata üretmektedir. Kişisel yada kurumsal el yapımı taze premium çikolata ihtiyaçlarını karşılıyoruz.  ​

---