What Is Strategic Innovation?

August 22, 2021/in Blog/by Adam Kingl

When I talk to executives about innovation, they generally go right to products and services. In other words, their default is to explore those innovation questions that everyone asks themselves. But what questions are neglected as a result?

If you are a senior executive, what are the things that you can affect, that you can change, that no one else in your organisation can change? And generally the answer to that question ultimately is strategic or business model innovation, challenging assumptions implicit in the questions: who are your customers, what are you offering them and how are you offering it.

If you can change the assumptions in those questions you are playing a different game from your competitors and you are giving yourself an inimitable competitive advantage.

Take for example Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Enterprise decided to play in a completely different sphere. Rather than primarily trying to serve air travellers, they served customers who were suffering from car breakdowns. Now, that implied that they would be putting their depots and their offices in residential areas rather than in expensive airports, so now all of a sudden, they were competing in an area that for a long time had no competitors and offered them cost advantages.

So do consider, when you can think about innovation and if you are a senior leader, what are the business model innovation questions that you can ask yourself so that you can claim advantages that would take many, many years for your competitors to imitate? And in so doing, you truly become a game-changing innovator in your industry.

Adam Kingl is Adjunct Faculty at the UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge International Business School, an Associate of the Moller Institute at Cambridge University, and the author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins 2020). www.adamkingl.com

Transitioning from hierarchical to a network-based organisational structure: 4 key points for leaders

June 23, 2021/in Articles/by Adam Kingl

Networks are powerful systems. While the networked-based structure seems to be the way forward to many teams, leaders need to be aware of issues related to the flow of decision making, talent retention and purpose.

Thiago Kiwi

Jun 23, 2021

The covid-19 pandemic and subsequent acceleration of digital transformation have forced organisations to innovate rapidly, change their products and services, and remain flexible to adapt to an ever-changing landscape. These significant changes have prompted a resurgence of the debate about the optimal organisational structure.

Over the past few years, there has been a welcome shift toward client-centricity with organisations adopting more agile structures – centred on products, teams, and projects – and forming both internal and external networks of teams that are generally empowered to communicate, coordinate, and make decisions.

Yet, given the volatility of our times and challenges related to digital communications and employee wellbeing, there are certain limitations to the model. A recent study, for example, found that “network centric organisation does not necessarily lead to higher perceived situation awareness or better understanding of the situation”.

We asked three experts from our global educator network to share their advice on the key points to be aware of when adopting a new organisational structure. Their answers reveal that while the networked-based structure seems to be the way forward to many teams, leaders need to be aware of issues related to the flow of decision making, talent retention and purpose.

1. The rise of ‘extreme teaming’

The move towards network-based structures is a recent evolution, according to author and thought leader Peter Fisk. “A decade ago, around 80 percent of employees had functional roles, the rest seconded to ad-hoc projects. Today, that ratio is reversed. Few employees now have fixed roles. Formal job titles in outdated organisational charts have given way to a more fluid deployment of talent, by project, to manage constant change”, says Fisk.

In a recent article, Fisk states: “Networks, whether organisational or social, are powerful systems. “Every additional participant creates new connections, capable of driving the exponential growth of today’s network-based start-ups.”

At the heart of these network structures is the concept of “extreme teaming”, Fisk continues. “They assemble the best people for the job, energised by customers not managers, building psychological safety, and a collective commitment to deliver excellent, innovative results.”

In his recent book Next Generation Leadership, business educator and adviser Adam Kingl explores how organisations can enable younger talent to thrive. He sees the shift toward networked structures as a competitive advantage:

“Companies that reimagine how work is organised around projects and freelance experts will be sailing on a rising tide”, said Kingl. “The volume and strategic importance of projects is growing. About one-fifth of the world’s economic activity per year – $12 trillion – is now organised around projects.”

Over the next decade, Kingl says, “companies are expected to experience over two-thirds’ increase in project work”. “As the operating environment becomes more volatile and complex, businesses need a new playbook to seize opportunities faster, an adaptive approach to talent and the skillsets that one might need at any point in time. Organising company structure around project work may make more sense.”

2. Leaders become decision aggregators

Joe DiVanna is a Cambridge-based management consultant and author. As well as working regularly with Headspring clients on custom programmes, he runs his own innovation think-tank providing research and advisory services to the financial services industry. He says that the transition from a hierarchical to a network-based structure is essentially a change in how decisions are made. More traditional structures were based on the assumption that upper levels had “more collective knowledge and experience than the level beneath it” and therefore decision-making flowed up and down the pyramid. In network-based structures, this changes completely.

“This evolution strives to push decision making close to the action where the decision is needed”, says DiVanna. “As each node on the network becomes more and more empowered the entire role of senior leadership changes from a control point to approve or disapprove issues to a consultative resource to be consumed by the organisation”.

Yet, he argues, this change in organisational structure does not relinquish decision making of the senior leadership to the business unit: “What has changed is the parameters of what decisions can be used to empower people at all levels of the organisation”, he said.

As organisations go through this transition, DiVanna continues, “decision making often becomes fragmented. Not all decisions can be handled by the business unit. As a result, exceptions which need decisions become the underlying challenge (which is also an opportunity) for senior management to act as a decision aggregator.”

3. Mind the generational gap

While the network-based structure can help organisations move faster, Kingl warns that there is a significant generational gap when it comes to the acceptance of change and the adoption of networked structures.

“When I ask audiences to consider a world where companies comprise just a dozen or so executives and hundreds of freelance project directors and contractors under them – the gig economy writ large – Baby Boomers and older Gen Xs in the room appear ashen-faced and horrified, while the Gen Ys beam with optimism”, Kingl said.

In Kingl’s opinion, employers will have three possible responses to the inconstant tides of their younger workforce:

Fight it and do everything in one’s power, spending whatever money is necessary, to keep talent,
Embrace it and create the twenty-first century community of (mostly) freelancers,
Select a hybrid path, distinguishing between talent that the company must keep at all costs and employees who one is prepared to let go, because their knowledge or expertise is replicable, or their functions may be completed more efficiently by contractors or business partners.

4. Your structure defines your culture

“Organisation structures define companies – culturally and innovatively, revealing both opportunities and limitations”, concludes Peter Fisk. “Henry Ford’s hierarchical business model that produced low-cost cars a century ago no longer reflects today’s organisational needs: to be fast and agile, human and technological, collaborative and creative, personal and global.”

According to Kingl, as the operating environment becomes more volatile and complex, “enterprises may choose to organise themselves differently, to be able to deliver more and more complex projects and initiatives in this dynamic operating environment.”

Thiago Kiwi

Head of Marketing & Communications at Headspring

Thiago is an award-winning marketing and communications leader with over 10 years of experience in the global higher and executive education sector. He holds a Bachelors in Communications and a Masters in Political Communications & Marketing from the University of London, as well as multiple executive and leadership development certifications. When he’s not busy studying for a new course, he’s growing vegetables in his allotment or training for his next marathon.

Considering the End of Lockdown

June 22, 2021/in Blog/by Adam Kingl

What should companies be thinking about regarding their talent as we (possibly?) near the end of lockdown?

First, think about the physical space of your company office. A lot of organisations are shedding commercial real estate. The implication is that employees returning to the office are going to be smooshed together in ever more constricted open plans. Well, that may work for some people but not for others, so do consider also providing flexible, private space. You have introverts; you have neurodiverse colleagues. They will, at some points in the workday, need time to themselves.

Second, think about how you may extend flexible work, giving people the opportunity to continue to work from home at least part of the time. For many industries and functions, an option to work from home is never going to go away now and in fact will be expected from many if not most employees. For example, over half of the U.S. workforce was already working from home at least part of the time before lockdown happened. Most companies have already demonstrated that it can and does work.

Third, when your colleagues are back in the workplace, you now have the opportunity to socialise again. You probably have many employees (hundreds or thousands in some cases) who joined your company during lockdown and have never yet had the opportunity really to get to know their colleagues in social situations. To do so build trust, and that helps to reinforce culture.

This brings me to my fourth point. If you want to build a stronger culture post-lockdown, create opportunities for your people to observe important meetings with important clients and customers. And in that way, they start to understand how you work when it really matters, which is the true test of organisational authenticity. This initiative can be easier when you are physically co-located, so seize the opportunity to demonstrate that being the office does have its advantages. Get people together to observe the behaviours you desire and need for a culture that wins and has fun together, where people would not wish to be anywhere else.

Adam Kingl is Adjunct Faculty at the UCL School of Management, Ashridge-Hult International Business School, an Associate of the Moller Institute at Cambridge University, and the author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins 2020). www.adamkingl.com

How to Fail Successfully

April 29, 2021/in Blog/by Adam Kingl

I think you will agree with me that when we come together in these social constructs called companies we tend not to be as innovative, adaptable or inspirational as any one of the human beings in those organisations. Why is that?

These companies tend to perpetuate this fear of failure. As a result, we only innovate around tiny, incremental ideas that we’re almost one hundred percent certain are going to succeed because it’s a reputational hazard if we do otherwise. As a result, companies usually don’t invest in big, supernova ideas that are going to leapfrog the competition and achieve exponential returns. It is contingent on the leadership community in organisations to rethink their attitude toward failure and how they communicate failure as a learning opportunity.

Of course you have to control the risk when you are innovating, but you have to consider your innovation pipeline as a portfolio with a collective return rather than as individual opportunities that represent lots of chances for embarrassing failures. If you have one supernova idea out of a hundred that you try over the course of a year, it doesn’t matter if the other ninety-nine were unsuccessful. And I’ll go even further! You never could have had that one supernova idea unless you also tried the hundred ideas.

How many of us in our companies try a hundred new things in a given year? Very few! U.S. Poet Laureate Maya Angelou once reflected, ‘People will forget what you said…but people will never forget how you made them feel.’ As leaders, therefore, let’s think about how we make our people feel about failure. Change that attitude and we may find that our organisations are much more innovative than they ever could have been in the past.

Adam Kingl is the author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins) and is a keynote speaker, educator and adviser. www.adamkingl.com

Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash

How our brains hinder creativity

March 23, 2021/in Articles/by Adam Kingl

Written by
Adam Kingl, author, keynote speaker and advisor

Published
22 Mar 2021

Our brains have learnt to sabotage our creative thinking efforts. Adam Kingl explains why taking the time for creativity can help address this issue.
Too many schools minimise or ignore creativity, too many parents discourage it, and too many companies devalue it. Our firms sometimes abrogate responsibility for innovation to a select fraction of the employee population, often someone with a lofty title like Chief Creative Officer, which of course communicates to the rest of the company that they should ‘leave creativity to the experts’.

If we observe how our leaders spend their time, and by extension how we should spend ours, too many are tacitly telling us that creativity is relegated to possibly a few minutes a week and ideally in one’s free time, not when we’re on the clock. In my advisory work to global corporations, I usually find this last condition, lack of time, to be the most common and pernicious.

Why we should make creative thinking a priority
The problem is that if we budget very little time in our lives to innovating or adapting to try new ideas, we typically incur a double deficit in our creative capacity.

First, we never make the time because creativity is always at the bottom of our priority list. Inevitably, we can never plan on all the firefighting and pop-up meetings that will occur in the week, so our real week is much more full of dealing with the day to day than our diaries suggested on Monday morning.

Allowing time for creativity is the only way to yield results
Second, if we do keep and honour a tiny fraction of our week or month to creative thinking, brainstorming and the like, we find our attention span is constantly distracted. We never seem to produce anything worthwhile as a result, and so we face each new window of opportunity for innovation with an ever growing, soul-sucking impression of dread or, at the least, resignation.

What we’re learning now is that we’re unfortunately training our brains to deliver this depressing result. Recent neuroscientific research has revealed how we repress and invigorate creativity. These hurried, captured moments of precious time for innovation yield paltry results. Our brains can’t turn on the magic for such short, unsustainable periods of time.

The five brain states explained
There are several brain states from deep sleep to deep focus and peak performance. The higher the performing brain, the greater the frequency of brain waves, hence Hertz is the degree of measurement:

Delta – deep sleep: 1-3 Hz
Theta – deep meditation, light sleep: 4-8 Hz
Alpha – relaxed, calm consciousness: 9-12 Hz
Beta – normal, alert consciousness: 13-30 Hz
Gamma – super-focused mind, increased brain power, peak state of consciousness and performance: 31-70 Hz.
Which of these do you think is our typical brain state during a normal work day?

I imagine many of you are thinking Theta! Sad but true – light sleep can be our normal work state. That’s rather depressing if that’s your normal. But Beta is probably our usual state, right? This is what we require of our brains to accomplish our normal tasks of answering emails, solving our workaday problems…and possibly Theta state when we’re in committee meetings.

Typical business routines encourage us to work in a state where the Beta waves (business as usual) in our brains are dominant, though we now know that maximum innovation and insight occurs when we are in Gamma state.

How to remain in Gamma state for longer
Neuroscientific research has also revealed that our brains can stay in Beta for a long time, and in fact are conditioned to stay there. As a result, if we crank the mental engine to get up to Gamma, the brain through habit easily and proactively often drags us back to Beta.

Therefore, if we need our brains to be in Gamma in order to be truly creative, genuinely adding previously unheard-of insight and exponentially big ideas, our brains would struggle to do that in, say, a one-hour meeting once a week. Beta state is like a constant and familiar noise, the ever-present static of our work lives that can block Gamma state. I liken this to how I find it hard to think when I’m eating an apple because I have this magnified, crunching noise in the echo chamber of my skull.

Mundane and creative – why getting the balance right is important
We can’t easily shut off this Beta activity, the laundry list of actions and decisions we have to make, even if we’re completely confident in our ability to make them. Beta is our habit, our rhythm, our tyranny.

Because we don’t have balance between the mundane and the creative, we can’t achieve creativity even if we give ourselves those fleeting thirty minutes a week to do so. We must change our routines so that we give our brains more time to marinate in Gamma and increase the frequency of those marinades. Like any muscle, the creative function in our brains requires exercise in order to improve, but as importantly, to be receptive to create in the first place.

The point is not that we denude all traditional routine from our organisations. We need some of that. But most of companies that I’ve experienced usually operate at a ratio of about 99% business as usual to 1% creative time…on a good week! So if you’re feeling uncomfortable that I’m suggesting something like a fifty-fifty balance, I’m not saying that. But the better ratio surely has to be closer to eighty-twenty at least? I’m merely entreating us to ask ourselves honestly, ‘Is the balance right?’

Adam Kingl is the author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins) and is a keynote speaker, educator and advisor. www.adamkingl.com

What Should Senior Executives Focus On When Pursuing Innovation?

March 1, 2021/in Blog/by Adam Kingl

A lot of executives say they want to enhance innovation in their organisations. I tell senior executives not to focus on products, services or processes because they have many colleagues who can focus on those. Senior executives should be focusing on strategic innovation, answering three fundamental questions: ‘Who, what, how?’ : Who is my customer? What am I offering that customer? How am I offering it?

This is also known as business model innovation, challenging the assumptions implicit in the answers to those three questions. If you can innovate around your strategy, you can develop an inimitable competitive advantage. To improve the quality of internal conversations in an organisation, leaders have to encourage that their assumptions be questioned. They should be asking their colleagues, including those more junior, ‘Based on what you’ve just heard me say, what assumptions do you think I’m making?’

Once those assumptions are surfaced, then ask, ‘OK, which of those assumptions may not be true or may no longer be true? Maybe some of the ways I look at the world were fit for purpose five or ten years ago, but they aren’t so today.’ That’s a really simple hack to make yourself automatically a more innovative executive. Of course, in a COVID and post-COVID world, the relevance of one’s perspective may be limited to months rather than years!

This approach to encourage questioning is rather antithetical to the old paradigms of the leader as the font of wisdom. Experience is sometimes an ally and sometimes a professional hazard. So do consider encouraging others to identify and then question your assumptions in order to progress on the road to enjoying an innovative environment in your team or company.

The three things millennials want if they are going to work for you

January 27, 2021/in Articles/by Adam Kingl

The three things millennials want if they are going to work for you

Leadership expert Adam Kingl believes a new way of thinking is needed to retain and attract Generation Y talent.

byCHRIS SLOLEYPosted27 JANUARY, 2021 AT 09:23

City Wire Selector

Generation Y – or millennials – are likely to have between 15 or 16 employers during their career, as the dynamics of the working world changes rapidly.

But, how can employers make themselves attractive to this fast-growing cohort and, perhaps more importantly, how can they retain and develop new talent once they get it?

Speaking in the closing session of Citywire World of Boutiques Europe, Adam Kingl, a leadership expert and author, said there are three key components that any Gen Y candidate is looking for in a job.

‘I have asked them two important questions: what do you want from an employer, and what are the factors that would attract you? I gave them a bunch of options with a weighted ranking and there were tangible benefits and intangible benefits,’ he said.

Counting down his list, the third most attractive aspect, Kingl said, was development opportunities. He said many companies have complained about development being stymied by the lockdown, but Kingl refused to accept that excuse.

‘There is organic development in allowing people to join senior meetings, for example. I would also recommend coaching or mentoring – it doesn’t have to be any of your direct reports. Also consider reverse mentoring – if they are giving you something back.

‘When we come out of lockdown there are things like secondment, shadowing and international placements. Development can be anything as long as it involves constant growing.’

The second most important thing, he said, was that millennials want to know about the organisation’s culture. Kingl said they need to see what it takes and what it means to be successful within an organisation.

‘Allowing people to sit in on calls which show what success is. The best definition of culture is just two words “shared behaviours”, but you need to be involved to allow that to happen. When I asked people what one question they want to be asked, they said – I want to meet my team and see where my team would sit – so that isn’t macro, it is micro. It is culture.’

The leading demand, according to Kingl’s research, was work-life balance. He said this was a contentious issue, as Baby-boomers, those born between 1943 and 1960, tend to prioritise work against everything else and any demands to change this dynamic are viewed as selfish.

‘This was the most stunning finding I had, as there is semantic discord around this phrase, as different generations have different meanings when they talk about this statement.

‘Baby-boomers believe it refers to a “when statement” and it becomes something about the hours they put in. For Gen Ys it is a “where statement”, don’t chain me to my desk or only allow me to leave when the boss leaves, that’s face-time culture. This pandemic has shown we don’t need that.’

The fact many millennials change jobs multiple times does not mean that they may not return to an employer, Kingl said. ‘People think it is a closed door but it is not. If you can bring them back with more experience and more understanding, then surely that is a good thing?’

How to Develop Your Young People in Lockdown

January 25, 2021/in Blog/by Adam Kingl

How to Develop Your Young People in Lockdown

One of the main conclusions I came to in researching my book, Next Generation Leadership, is that Generation Ys (Millennials) crave development more than almost anything else from their organisations. But the question I hear now that we are in lockdown under Covid is: How can we recreate the development that would have happened organically by our youngest colleagues’ observing how senior people go about doing business?

There are still at least a couple of things that we can do. First, even under lockdown, we can invite our young team members to senior stakeholder meetings, senior customers or strategic conversations, even if they are just observing. If we want to enhance a culture of development, one way to do that is to help our people observe desired behaviours. The best definition I’ve ever heard of ‘culture’ is so good because it is so simple. It’s just two words: ‘shared behaviours’. That’s it! But that definition implies that you have to give your people the opportunity to observe behaviours in action, and you can certainly still do that under lockdown.

The second piece of advice I would give is to consider mentoring your youngest employees. These don’t have to be your direct reports, but also make that a reverse mentoring opportunity. You can teach them about how to navigate your organization, advance their careers, serve more sophisticated customers, and they help you with issues such as leveraging social media, identifying new customer segments, and using skills and tools they have acquired which many of their older colleagues have not. It’s also an opportunity to find out for yourself what younger generations want from life, their career and their leaders. I think you’ll find it illuminating!

So how do you still organically develop your Millennial colleagues under lockdown, in ways that don’t cost you anything? First, invite them to senior virtual meetings, and ask them to observe and note behaviours. And second, consider mentoring and asking for reverse mentoring.

How Best To Manage Millennials

November 19, 2020/in Articles/by Adam Kingl

How best to manage Millennials

Gen Y is poised to transform the future of work, management and leadership. Enabling them to thrive and deliver value takes serious thought

AINE DORIS

For generations gone by, the only way to get on in work was to pay your dues. Promotion, reward, the steady ascent up the corporate ladder were all earned and paid for by commitment to the job, loyalty to the company and – perhaps more than anything else – by putting in the time. It took time – several years usually – to really learn the ropes and to demonstrate readiness for more responsibility.

Then Generation Y (aka Millennials) arrived in the workplace and turned much of this on its head. HR leaders and managers of Gen Y were shocked by a new wave of workers who are prone to leave their jobs with frightening rapidity. This is a generation that stays around for two to five years before moving onto the next opportunity; a cohort that cleaves more to purpose than to material reward, that demands to know why as much as what they are required to contribute or accomplish, and whose primary allegiance is not to the organisation but to the immediate team and the individuals who surround them.

Generation Y are, of course, the leaders of tomorrow. And they are starting to accede to positions of influence today. They are also causing friction with incumbent leaders who don’t know how to manage them.

So says Adam Kingl MBA2004 in his book, Next Generation Leadership: How to Ensure Young Talent Will Thrive With Your Organization. An educator, author, advisor, keynote speaker and alumnus of London Business School, Kingl had plenty of opportunity to observe Generation Y, as well as the organisations who hire them: ‘I directed, then supervised that is now titled the Leading Teams for Emerging Leaders programme at LBS for several years, working with young, high potential participants. Since they were nominated by their organisations to attend, they are, more likely than a random selection of Gen Ys, the CEOs and leaders of the future. But their bosses just don’t know how to deal with them.’

The core issue, says Kingl, is a shift in priorities, expectations and values – a sea-change in the paradigms of work and leadership that set the upcoming generation apart from (and very often at odds with) the incumbents. And it’s not Gen Y’s fault.

“You have to remember that this is a generation that won’t have the security of retiring on a defined benefit (final salary) pension,” he says “The golden handcuffs and a job for life simply don’t exist for them. They’re also the first generation whose majority will experience the 100-year life, as explained by Professors Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott.

Longer life, shifted expectations

“Now, as we live longer, the expectation is that we’ll also have to work longer; the luxury of retiring at 65 will be replaced by the necessity in many cases of working into our 80s. Millennials will be spending probably 60 years of their life working, and that has shifted expectations and driven a feeling of optionality and greater flexibility in terms of where they work, who they work for and how long they choose to stay.”

Gen-Y workers are also demonstrably less materialistic than their forebears, argues Kingl. Salary, bonuses and promotions, while important, compete with concepts like purpose, development, culture and work-life balance. Capitalism, for Millennials, is a fungible concept, and as these emerging leaders assume influence, we are likely to see a swing in focus from outcomes to outputs: from bottom line and share prices to impact and value for customers, employees, communities and the world.

To manage this new generation more effectively, says Kingl, and to ensure that they thrive, organisations need to start thinking differently: “I believe there’s an onus on today’s leaders to recalibrate their own ideas and expectations when it comes to managing the leaders of tomorrow. There are things that the Boomer and X generations have to let go: the idea that young talent will stick around forever, that investment in things like development and training are tied to tenure, or that emerging leaders must be 100% dedicated to their job at the expense of all other interests or activities. We need to embrace their agility and recognise that the workforce can be a little more fluid without damaging our long-term prospects.”

But how do we enact this kind of shift in thinking?

Kingl’s work at LBS with emerging leaders and their companies has yielded key insights. For five years, he surveyed Generation Y participants, then interviewed them, their employers and other organisations across 44 countries, complementing the quantitative evidence with qualitative analysis across a sample that spans highly diverse industries and sectors.

His findings, which are shared in the book, point to a broad homogeneity in Millennial priorities – a generational “tightening” that stems from having much in common. They are the first truly global generation, the first to be digitally connected from the start, and a generation who will live – and work – longer than their predecessors by a considerable margin. Kingl believes that this consistency or homogeneity makes it possible to see Gen Y as a more coherent group, while recognising that to discuss generations does force one to generalise. But he urges not to dismiss the findings merely because one can find an exception: “If we can better understand patterns and trends that are more true than not, then this can only benefit our ability to manage and empathise with our youngest colleagues.”

And this, in turn, makes it possible to distil insights about them into actionable ideas for their managers: practical frameworks, strategies and tools that he shares to ensure that young talent can thrive within today’s organisations.

Six ways to manage Millennials

The following are six tips from Kingl’s book to help manage Millennials.

#1: Articulate and live your purpose

Be proactive in terms of articulating your purpose and help your people connect their own purpose to that of your organisation. An impactful and cost-effective means of doing this may include putting together a workshop built around two central ideas: Why should talent work here versus anywhere else? Why should customers come to us versus anyone else?

#2: Hold one another to account

Organisational culture is something that needs to be engineered versus emerging organically. Aim for transparency, responsibility and accountability as a rule, and be clear about the kinds of behaviour that model your organisation’s ethos. Consider what behaviours, if shared among your bellwethers, should become new norms.

#3: Be fluid about development

Understand that development opportunities should not be tied to tenure. There are a host of cost-effective measures your organisation can take to weave training and development into everyday life, from shadowing to coaching to international placements to secondments. Aim to think more dynamically about this theme.

#4: Re-consider what work-life balance means

The number one thing that Gen Y asks for from their employers is work-life balance. Too many organisations have resisted this request, but we all are now confronted with the necessity of remote working because of Covid. Even when we exit the pandemic, our global, digitally connected workforce will inevitably have to get a lot better, and a lot more comfortable, with managing virtual teams. We will not go back wholly to the way things were.

Before lockdown, the term “work-life balance” was often a contentious topic. Kingl discovered semantic discord between the generations when it came to having a common definition of work-life balance. For Baby Boomers and Generation X, asking for work-life balance sounds like a “when” request, concluding incorrectly that young people requesting work-life balance just want to work less than their seniors when they were paying their dues, leading to the common misconception that Gen Y must be lazy.

Work-life balance: when, not where

For Generation Y, work-life balance is a “where” request: they see the 9-to-5, chained to the desk, face-time model as archaic when technology makes it possible to have constant access to work. Emerging leaders want greater flexibility and a higher degree of agency or autonomy – some margin to choose where and how they work. Be sure that you are all on the same page and that you aren’t talking about terms that mean different things to different people. Our current world environment amidst self-isolation is a good time to practice working remotely yet effectively.

One insight that Kingl discovered after running an experiment with his London Business School programme cohorts is that some types of activities will yield better results if they are conducted virtually instead of face to face. For example, brainstorming innovations or solutions to intractable challenges require as many insights as possible and reducing the noise of the usual voices who dominate the conversation. An asynchronous virtual discussion board to solicit and respond to ideas can disintermediate a lot of the dysfunctions of dominating voices due to factors such as status, gender, culture or personality.

#5: See the value in side-hustles (activities that employees pursue outside work)

Talented young people often have interests that go beyond their role or the organisation. Whether those are charity work, personal websites or projects that leverage professional skills, try to reframe these activities as sources of dynamism and opportunities for intra- and entrepreneurial development. Encourage your employees to pursue opportunities to learn and to share that learning.

#5: Be flexible about people leaving

After all, they might well come back. Encourage a sense of fluidity that leaves the door open so that after your leavers build new skills and knowledge outside your company, they might bring that back to your organisation should they choose to return further down the line. Embrace this fluidity and find ways to make it work to your advantage. Many professional services firms are world-class at cultivating an alumni network of former colleagues, even hosting reunions!

As Generation Y accedes to leadership, Kingl believes the world of work is set to become ‘more human’. The real challenge for today’s employers is to leverage this forward momentum to the advantage of the organisation – and the advantage of young people driving change.

“Research, polls and surveys repeatedly tell us that the majority of employees in today’s businesses are not engaged,” he says. “The management models that we have in place come from a time long past and are no longer truly fit for purpose. Generation Y feels this keenly, and this is the generation that feels the urgent need to fix it. It’s our responsibility as leaders and managers to empower them as they prepare to rehumanise the world of work.”

Making Adaptability A Habit

September 11, 2020/in Articles/by Adam Kingl

Adam Kingl

As published on Changeboard.com, 11 September 2020

We are living in an age of unprecedented rates of change. We’re well versed in narratives about shifts in landscape, industry, market needs, and redundant strategies. However, familiarity with the challenge does not necessarily create a solution. What do we have to do as leaders to navigate these waters? What skills do we require to keep our organisations relevant and successful in the 21st century? There are mindsets, tools and practices that you can use for yourself and in the development of others to make adaptability and agility a habit.

In my consulting and executive education practice, I consistently see three barriers to adaptability, no matter the size or industry of the company. First, the organisational culture punishes failure, or at least attaches a strong stigma to failure. As a result, the priority is for perfection and predictability. Generally, new practices, processes, products or services that we create are but tiny, incremental adjustments or improvements to what already exists. Such an enterprise rarely develops the sort of game changing, supernova innovations that create exponential rewards and disrupts its industry. So the first area to work on is the organisation’s attitude toward adaptability. After all, you can be error-free or your can be agile; you can’t be both.

Second, a huge reason that companies struggle to adapt is that their people don’t have clarity about what the change is supposed to look like. Too many of us are familiar with the scenario:

Boss: After the board meeting, we’ve all received a memo that we need to encourage agility and innovation.

Put-upon employee: OK. What should I be doing?

Boss: What do you mean?

Put-upon employee: What do I need to do that’s different to what I’m doing now that would demonstrate that I’m being agile and innovative?

Boss: You’ll work it out. You know – explore!

Since routines and habits are so difficult to disrupt at the best of times, it is incumbent on leaders not only to set direction but to suggest, not dictate, a vision for what a new direction could resemble, how it might impact the team’s day-to-day, and what behaviours are encouraged.

Third, I have found it immensely helpful to suggest lenses through which leaders and their teams can practice adaptability and innovation with a little more focus. For example, perhaps a team could run a 24-hour hackathon where they create experiments and then prototypes of innovations that they wish to develop. That activity automatically moves the organisational needle forward in terms of enhancing its creative capacity. Or a department could conduct some interviews with customers, suppliers and partners about what emerging trends they’re seeing in the marketplace. This exercise would by definition break that team out of its internal perspective. How many times do we try to adapt to a new world, but we only discuss the potential responses amongst a small set of colleagues? Yet at the same time, we decry that we keep coming up with the same solutions to any problem! It’s probably because we’re drawing from a toolkit that rarely refreshes.

Change usually feels like a difficult, drawn-out, top-down, military campaign instead of an organic, market-driven, exciting prospect. It can be the latter, but we have to question some of our long-held management paradigms about leading change that have fostered some our collective disabilities.

Adam Kingl, www.adamkingl.com, is the author of Next Generation Leadership (www.nextgenerationleadershipbook.com) and is a keynote speaker, educator and advisor. Adam was previously the Regional Managing Director, Europe, for Duke Corporate Education – Duke University, and the Executive Director of Thought Leadership and Learning Solutions at London Business School. He is a writer, keynote speaker, educator and advisor.

*First published in Michael Page and Future Talent Group, Adapting is Thriving in a Post-Pandemic World, 2020, p.9

https://view.joomag.com/michael-page-ebook-adapting-is-thriving/0887990001597657398?short&