Extra-condensed knowledge
Leading in late 2020 means carving a new path through an epic disruption precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Navigating the Next Normal: Leadership Matters Now More Than Ever.
- Agile leadership matters now more than ever — it is about leveraging, not reacting to, the turbulence around you.
- These crises represent opportunity, too. This is a period in which you will discover how resilient your organization is and whether you have what it takes to rise to the challenge of agile leadership.
- Even when certain aspects of the global health and economic situation become clearer, many unknowns will remain.
Condensed knowledge
- Through three decades of research, consulting, and teaching, I have found that there are three imperatives of great leadership: managing your team — creating a high-performing “we” out of all the “I’s” over whom you have formal authority; managing your network — building partnerships with key stakeholders both inside and outside your organization; and managing yourself — using yourself as an instrument to get things done. When your ambition is to prepare your organization for the “next normal,” neglecting even one of these responsibilities jeopardizes the capacity of your organization to act, learn, pivot, and forge ahead.
- Managing Your Team: Focus on Purpose and Learning. Your primary role as an agile leader is to create an environment that empowers everyone to be an innovative problem-solver. Doing so requires that you champion a shared sense of purpose and build a capacity for rapid learning.
- Managing Your Network: Look Outward, Forge Ties. Never before in modern times have we been more aware of global interdependence and the cost associated with growing inequality both within and across countries.
- You need to look out in order to learn — to search for new sources of information to check your assumptions — and you must also cultivate mutually beneficial relationships with those outside your organization on whom your success depends.
- Think about your key internal stakeholders.
- Next, consider your external stakeholders.
- Finally, we all need to rethink how we are reaching out to our customers.
- Managing Yourself: Be Prepared to Learn and Adapt. Being an agile leader in times of crisis requires a continued commitment to your own well-being and development. Leadership begins with you: Your values, beliefs, strengths, and weaknesses drive your decisions and actions and demonstrate your true character. All of these factors affect your capacity to connect with and influence others.
- Navigating the Next Normal: Leadership Matters Now More Than Ever. To be sure, the challenges of leading through the unknowns of the coronavirus pandemic, economic distress, and social change are going to be with us for some time. Many companies are struggling to survive financially, and a lot of them will not make it.
Authors of the genioux fact
References
Being the Agile Boss, Linda A. Hill, August 11, 2020, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2020, Vol 62, No 1.
Extracted from Harvard Business School
Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and chair of the Leadership Initiative. Hill is regarded as one of the top experts on leadership and innovation. Hill is the co-author of Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press 2014), co-founder of Paradox Strategies, and co-creator of the Innovation Quotient and re:Route. She was named by Thinkers50 as one of the top ten management thinkers in the world in 2013 and received the Thinkers50 Innovation Award in 2015.