AWAKENING THE LEADER WITHIN YOU
(Enjoy Your Everyday Leadership)
Leadership and Self-Enrichment series …

“If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.”
Robert Fritz

In recent years, many business owners, entrepreneurs, and managerial personnel has come forward to tell me of the challenges they faced in business, with employees, and stagnation of their sales turnover.

I love the quotation which I have selected for this article from Robert Fritz, because many individuals has limit their choices to what seems possible and reasonable, thus, they have actually disconnect themselves from what they truly want, and ended up with a compromise to the situation or circumstance.

The Crux of Business

The modern world is characterized by change. Every day we hear of shifts in political orders, developments in economic relationships and new technological advancements. These changes feed off each other and they are global. As a result, businesses have to become more responsive. In order to keep your place in the market you have to innovate more quickly. In order to compete, you need to become more agile.

The root cause of most business challenges is not that things are being done poorly. It is not even that the wrong things are being done. Indeed, most cases, the right things are being done – but fruitlessly. What accounts for this apparent paradox? The assumptions on which the business or organization has been built and is being run no longer fit reality.

These are the assumptions that shape any organization’s behavior, dictate its decisions about what to do and what not to do, and define what the organization considers meaningful results.

Effectiveness is getting the right things done. Efficiency is ensuring that things are done rightly. Most businesses are efficient but may not be effective. Likewise, most managers are efficient in their area of expertise but may not be effective in the overview of the business.

In the absence of ‘wake-up calls’, many of us never really confront the critical issues we are facing. Instead of looking for deep chronic causes and opportunities, we look for quick-fix Band-Aids and pain-killer to treat the acute pain. Fortified by temporary relief, we get busier and busier doing ‘good’ things and never even stop to ask ourselves if what we’re doing really matters most.

The way we see (our paradigm) leads to what we do (our attitudes and behaviors), and what we do leads to the results we get. So, if we want to create significant change in the results, we can’t just change attitudes and behaviors, methods or techniques; we have to change the basic paradigms out of which they grow.

The basic paradigm of Organizational Effectiveness has three strategic pillars, which is an integrated, extensive, and long-term way of thinking, decision-making, and acting that produces viable results for your organization.

The Three Strategic Pillars

“He who has a thorough knowledge of himself and the enemy is bound to win in all battles. He, who knows himself but not the enemy, has only an even chance of winning. He who knows not himself and the enemy is bound to perish in all battles. Know your enemy, know yourself, and your victory will not be threatened. Know the terrain, know the weather, and your victory will be complete.”
Sun Tzu

Business managers do not make a great many decisions. They concentrate on what is important. They try to make the few important decisions on the highest level of conceptual understanding. They try to find the constraints in a situation, to think through what is strategic and generic rather than to merely ‘solve problems’. They want to know what the decision is all about and what the underlying realities are which it has to satisfy. They want impact rather than busyness.

The Three Strategic Pillars to focus on are: Human Resource Utilization; Productivity; and Entrepreneurship-style Management.

Human Resource Utilization (Potentials Development and Talent Retention):
A staggering number of people who work for organizations are no longer traditional employees, the new workforce cherish freedom. Organizations cannot survive management styles that restrict, corrode, and destroy the freedom to think and act. Workers become quite excited when leaders have a wonderful way of making their people feel needed and valued.

Moving your management style to the highest level means that you must become quick to acknowledge the talents, experience, and uniqueness that everyone brings to the workplace. As a manager, you must work smart to ensure that your workers make fulfilling and significant contributions at their place of work; you must free up your people to allow them to contribute and take the lead. Leadership and learning at all levels are very closely connected. Your role is to help others make sense of their changes in thinking not through teaching or coaching but through enabling them to experience, reflect on, and practice in different contexts. A culture that allows people the freedom to take responsibility is most likely to encourage and support learning and leadership.

Productivity vs. Cost:
In most organizations, the budget bears little relation to the organization’s strategy, so management attention and actions are directed at short-term operational details, not implementation of the long-term strategy. Most organizations use the budget as their primary management system for establishing targets, allocating resources, and reviewing performance. Yet more than half of surveyed companies indicated that their budgeting and performance review processes were done separately from the strategic planning process. With budgets serving as the primary means used to exercise control in organizations, management attention becomes riveted on achieving short-term financial targets.

The easiest, but perhaps also the greatest, productivity gains in such work will come from defining their task and especially from eliminating what does not need to be done. Unless management constantly seeks to direct these costs into revenue-producing activities, they will tend to allocate themselves by drift into ‘nothing-producing’ activities.

Entrepreneurship Management Style (Critical Impact on Business Success):

Most of the time, departments focused so much on their respective chores and function that we dismiss the fact that an organization is make up of a sum of departments, that is – an organization is a system – not a structure with independent departments. The success of an organization is directly related to the amount of energy its people are willing to invest, and to its ability to harness and direct those energies toward a single, burning purpose – organizational success!

Innovation is a crucial part of the entrepreneurial process. However, we must be careful here with the idea of innovation. Innovation, in a business sense, can mean a lot more than just developing a new product or technology. The idea of innovation encompasses any new way of doing something so that value is created. Innovation can mean a new product or service, but it can also include a new way of delivering an existing product or service (so that it is cheaper or more convenient for the user, for example), new methods of informing the consumer about a product and promoting it to them, new ways of organizing the company, or even new approaches to managing relationships with other organizations. These are all sources of innovation which have been successfully exploited by entrepreneurs.

What It Take To Be A 21st Century Manager?

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
Charles Darwin

What is the manager’s job? It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds obvious, right? But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business have shown clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to ‘problems’ rather than to opportunities, and secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results.

What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. Yet our tools – especially our accounting concepts and data – all focus on efficiency. What we need is (a) to identify the areas of effectiveness – of possible significant results; and (b) a commitment to concentrate on achieving them.

Every manager today is a Business Manager. The first duty and the continuing responsibility of business manager are to strive for the best possible economic results from the resources currently employed or available.

In Conclusion

If the leadership dimension isn’t properly in place, a company simply can’t be successful. A company can have all the advantages in the world – strong financial resources, enviable market position, and state-of-the-art technology – but if leadership fails, all these advantages melt away and the organization – like the driverless car – runs downhill.

Inside you are a force, an energy that is unique to you. You are going to need courage, focus, and commitment: the outcome will be action. The will to act begins by accepting our humanity: we only grow from our own efforts while maintaining the will to act.

If you are a leader aspiring for greater things, the following questions should never be forgotten:
• Do you have the self-confidence to place others at center stage?
• Do you get pleasure from helping others learn and grow?
• Are you willing to learn yourself, accepting teaching not only from superiors but also from the up-and-comers in your organization?
• Are you able to keep an open-mind and prevent yourself from getting stuck in a psychic prison?
• Do you support continuous learning not only for yourself but the rest of the team members as well?

You can apply all these success lessons along with your own unique strategies to become successful leader in your own work/business – taking responsibility for your profession, embracing new roles and attitudes, and partnering with your organizations to truly “make it happen” from the management role.

The entrepreneurial disciplines are not just desirable; they are conditions for business survivals today!

Your Favorite Author & Speaker – Peter Ng