Strategic leadership
Beyond business as usual: Leading in a changing world
The digital revolution, increased media and public scrutiny, economic and regulatory uncertainty, the sustainability movement and the changing expectations of shareholders and stakeholders have created a tough – some would say unprecedented – set of challenges for organisations.
Are you ready to meet them?
To succeed in the new environment, organisations need to develop strategic change programmes – and to implement them effectively. They need leaders and managers who are capable of taking organisations beyond business as usual – to new ways of thinking and behaving, new models.
But there’s a critical skills gaps at the top of organisations: most strategic change initiatives fail during the implementation phase. In a 2008 global survey, only 30% of executives said they’d rate their change programmes as ‘completely/mostly’ successful. In addition our research has found that leadership, and leader’s failure to execute strategic or operational plans, is the number one cause for the failure of organisational transformations – with around 70% of initiatives failing as a result of this.
A 70% chance of failure is unacceptable for any organisation.
How can you mitigate the risks inherent in strategy execution?
Leadership sits at the heart of strategy execution and therefore the answer begins with a fundamental review of leadership education.
It’s clear that increased investment in leadership education is not being matched by results. In a 2011 survey, only 7.9% of organisations told us their leadership was ‘very effective’ – and only 4.3% said their leadership development was ‘very effective’.
Leadership development is broken. How can it be fixed?
Working closely with adult education professors and both executive and non-executive development practitioners, we’ve identified the approaches most likely to work – and achieve results over the long-term.
Building on a major research project begun by Deloitte in 2008, we’re asking what conditions leaders need to put in place to drive business performance and what tasks they therefore need to undertake as a result.
We’re asking not only what skills leaders need but what they’ll be required to do in the real world of work. In addition, our research has shown that leadership development in isolation is wholly ineffective – instead it’s also about impacting the wider leadership system such as the organisation’s infrastructure, relationships and motivators that support leaders to perform against what they’ll be required to do.
We’re crafting programmes that address fundamental questions of leadership:
- Do your people understand what they’re trying to do and why – are you driving the corporate will and commitment necessary for your strategy to succeed?
- Do your people have a personal investment in making the strategy work – have you created the conditions whereby people identify closely with the organisation or the part of the organisation responsible for implementing change?
- Have you developed a common understanding of the way tasks will need to be performed across the organisation?
- Have you put in place the right skills, resources and infrastructure – as well as mission and vision – to succeed?
Leadership capability is the primary asset of an organisation: 79% of financial analysts would value a company with particularly effective leadership at a premium, and early findings of our research suggest that many would levy a discount for ineffective leadership, To protect your organisation’s most valuable asset – and to find out how to manage the risk that your strategy will fail – talk to us.
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