Leadership Excellence
Digital disruption is straining traditional leadership. Agile organizations need distributed decision-making, simple rules, truth, and the elimination of fear.
By Burns Phillips
In the 21st century, workplace discontinuity caused by the exponential growth of digital technology is changing organizational reality and straining the skills and behaviors of traditional leadership. Our system guides you in shaping managers and employees into an agile organization that can thrive in a world of digital disruption.
Despite decades of books, blogs, seminars, conferences, and TED talks about leadership, few employees trust their leaders. Employee engagement continues to shrink, too many supervisors manage through fear, and a primary reason people quit is the poor management under which they work.
Leadership is growing more difficult as the exponential growth of technology changes not only the workplace but the nature of work itself — and challenges the future existence of traditional hierarchical organizations. In a time when the workplace asks more of employees, leaders in government and business often find themselves in cultures of mediocrity: little innovation, no sense of urgency, and practically no accountability.
A new kind of leadership
Amid rapid technical and social change, traditional organizations find it difficult to keep up. That difficulty becomes existential for organizations that fail to evolve from seeing the organization as a machine seeking stability in a predictable world, to seeing it as a living organism — non-hierarchical, open, and inclusive. What is often called *agile*.
Successful evolution to an agile organization requires leadership that moves away from structural hierarchy and linear control toward creativity and innovation, and embraces:
- An unequivocal expectation that every person treats every person at work with dignity and respect
- Simple rules
- Trust
- Truth, always
- Eliminating fear
- Empowering employees at the edges of the organization
- Autonomy and freedom
- Building from the bottom up
- Collective intelligence
- Distributed leadership and distributed decision-making
- Self-management and self-organization
- Continuous communication
- The expectation that new ideas will be forthcoming
- Continual small-scale experimentation ("If it's legal and won't kill anybody, give it a go™")
- Tools and real-time information needed to make timely, informed decisions
- Accountability
The simple essence of leadership excellence
Technological disruption is an irresistible force. Digital transformation is not something an organization can delay — or worse, decline. It requires a significant, intentional, strategic shift in the mindset of leaders and managers. Without that shift, digital transformation fails.
Our philosophy of leadership excellence is structured on the principle of common sense, and it sees leadership as coming from the middle of an organization, not the top — a leadership-centric organization. We have accomplished this and would enjoy helping your organization do the same. If you are a business, we can help you move into the digital world. If you are a government organization, SATRDÉ™ can help you deliver "Service Uncharacteristic of Government™."
