Is your business ‘honest’ with itself when decision making?
Talk about ‘agile’ and other software development methodologies that can be (and arguably should be) adopted by the broader functional areas of a business to manage/accelerate productivity and decision making is common place in a tech firm or SW development environment. However, the majority of non tech organisations, small and large, are still overly sensitive about change and non-critical risk taking when it comes to making decisions to move their business forward.
From international enterprises to smaller SMEs, we see confrontation, denial and ‘cultural’ barriers stopping senior business leaders from making necessary decisions for the best of their customer, organisation and the employee. There are a broad range of issues, a primary one we often come across is a lack of a real sense of responsibility. More often than not, many company directors and members of a Senior Leadership Team (SLT), act as employees rather than business owners, overly conscious of not disturbing the status quo. While in reality they may not ‘own’ the business, their lack of putting the business first and not focusing on growth, intelligently looking at external and internal factors that can be changed to accelerate the business, leads to a ‘politically’ correct approach to decision by consensus. These businesses are so transparent when looking from the outside in, and the internal focus holding them back and lack of challenge in the management team almost painful to watch.
So, how to address this issue and energise a leadership team? Change, it’s often the best motivator and many of us will have experienced some basic but real-world evidence of this in an office environment. Moving desks around and changing seating arrangements was a big favourite in the 80’s (a change is as good as a rest), and today we see people moving around regularly in and out of the office to coffee shops and break out areas. The same principle applies with management.
Board room and SLT leadership and development programmes apply simple but effective change and education agendas to achieve similar results. We’ve seen clients benefit hugely from moving SLT members into functional areas outside of their comfort zone as an ‘internal tour of duty’ in departments to utilise their business experience differently and also open their eyes to what other SLT members have to deal with. If your senior management have a positive ‘glass half full’ attitude this works well.
Where you have resistance to change, personal development and functional fluidity among your leadership team, bringing in a new hire, or use of an interim often helps drive transformation or bring in constructive challenge to the business norms. It can be necessary to have the difficult conversation, even if someone has been in the business for many years, “we think your role is holding you back in your own personal development and think you should consider a move into something that will stretch you”, “we’d like to invest more time and energy into helping your career move forward”(It’s best to get your HR Director involved and/or external advice to word this correctly!).
It’s not always the ‘fault’ of the individual. Many legacy processes, outdated IT systems and ‘love’ of the existing work culture embed themselves into every day workload, leaving SLT members too ‘busy’ to look outside of their duties and responsibilities. To give these valued team members the time and space, coupled with some coaching to think differently and step back to look at ways to continually improve the business, evolve customer experience and reembark on their own ‘ongoing’ personal development isn’t a big investment. The most critical element is giving them scope, time and the responsibility to evolve. Based on numerous case studies, it’s proven that a small investment of time on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule to encourage an individual to free up time to do things differently and look at the business and their own role in a removed way will provide significant moral, cultural and commercial improvement.
If you’d like to share your experiences or learn more about learning and development in the board room, please get in touch. Between our collective experiences in HR, Leadership Development and Running tech businesses, we’d be happy to help.
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Founder of TAaaS and CEO of the tech/SW firm www.Airgap-Partners.com
