“In most companies, managers are selected, trained, and rewarded for their capacity to deliver more of the same, more efficiently. No one expects managers to be innovators. Rather, they are expected to turn other people’s ideas into growth and profits.” -Gary Hamel The Future of Management
While we know the importance of the overlap necessary in today’s organization to hire those with both leadership and management skills, far too often we see that organizations are hiring for leaders and then only expecting managers.
While we profess the need for risk-taking, change, even organizational transformation from our leaders, it is supported only as far as it does not upset or cause disequilibrium to the current safety and stability of the organization.
Very often, the expectation of today’s leaders is founded in their ability and willingness to strive for constant organizational equilibrium.
In a time where change is served up in a constant, accelerated, frenetic, and even turbulent pace, we need leaders who can explore the unknown, and yet, far too often we hire and promote leaders only on their ability to exploit the known and do little to disturb the status quo and avoid disrupting our current mental models.
Too often we hire people on a platform of continuous creativity and innovation, and then engage them with expectations that fall more towards the roteness and standardization of compliance and implementation.
And yet, we can no longer have leaders that are selected only for their ability to support status quo. We need leaders that see their work as creating and infusing the systems and processes that allow our individuals and organizations to become much more adaptable and agile, especially in a world that is moving at a much more exponential clip.
Leaders who can not only disrupt the individual and organizational mental models that we drag from the past into the present and future, but have the personal awareness and self-reflection to be able to disrupt their own mental models of what they determine as possible for the future.
We can no longer select leaders for stability and their willingness to uphold the status quo, without thinking or believing that we won’t entrench our organizations in sameness and future irrelevance.
When leaders lack connection to networks that provide ongoing idea flows, when leaders fail to engage in experimentation and discovery learning, when leaders fail to see the need for new learning that allows for greater adaptability and agility, when leaders fail to create and design the organizational environments that allow for the divergent thinking that leads to more creativity and innovation, they eventually mire themselves and their organization in stasis and static ways of thinking, doing and working.
They insulate in the known.
Today’s organizations can no longer hire leaders on their ability and willingness to only provide a sense of safety and stability. We can ill-afford to focus only on efficiency, in a time when effectiveness is vital to an organization’s focus and ongoing relevance.
As Beth Comstock shares in Imagine It Forward, “It’s easier to keep your nose to the grindstone, do what you are doing and do it well, than it is to lift your head up and figure out where you or your organization is going and what the future may bring. It’s usually not until an organization is engulfed by chaos or, more simply, wakes up to a stark reality that it has been left behind, that it begins to seek a new way forward.”
For which she adds, “The research says 75 percent of people in advanced economies feel that they are not meeting their creative potential. We’ve created legions of managers afraid to absorb new perspectives, unable to work without a script or respond quickly by letting go of strategies that no longer work and embracing new ones that do.”
As is shared in the Changing Face of Modern Leadership, “The shelf life of our ideas, skills, skillsets, frameworks, and systems now deteriorate at a much more advanced rate. Under this new societal ecosystem, change and innovation has become the new fast and furious of our modern world.”
We need leaders who can move past status quo ways of thinking and doing and prepare our individuals and organizations to be much more agile and adaptable to a world in the throes of accelerated change.
Everyday, both managers and leaders have an opportunity for impact, a chance to influence the future. The choice can be made to play it safe and work our way into irrelevance, or to choose to break down the current walls of obstacles and mental models that keep us from determining a whole new idea of possible.
In the end, for better or worse, the choice is ours…
“Most managers see themselves as pragmatic doers, not starry-eyed dreamers. In their experience, management progress is accretive rather than revolutionary – and they have little reason to believe it could ever be otherwise. But as we’ll see, it can be otherwise, and it must be – the future demands it.” -Gary Hamel The Future of Management
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