The last decade we see a trend from moving away from hierarchical management towards more empowerment of employees and making them responsible and accountable. This has, besides impact on how you formulate your company’s strategy, also consequences for leadership styles in organisations. It is important that, as a leader, you are able to grow, develop and maximise the potential of your team members.
The challenge is, that a lot of today’s managers are “accidental managers”; they grow into a position that require them to manage people, while they don’t necessarily have the right skillset yet. How do you as a business owner invest in your leaders to enable them to unlock this essential skillset?
The shift in leadership requirementsrequires different skills and competences from you as a leader. Such as:
- Being able to listen and be open to ideas and suggestions from your team members, so you capture and build on input for improvements (because as a manager you don’t have to come up with all the solutions yourself…);
- Stimulate autonomy, creativity and innovation within the team, so that employee engagement is unlocked while creating business benefits;
- Being able to look forward, so that you can anticipate the future and its consequences;
- Stimulate personal development, whereby you can identify and unlock the ambitions and talents of your employees and match these with organisational needs, so that you can create a win-win for both employee and organisation;
- Being emotional intelligent, so you are aware of how you team members are feeling, so that you can have an open dialogue about factors outside of work that might influence their productivity and happiness on the job.
Example: An insurance company decides on a new strategy. This has consequences for E-commerce. The Manager E-commerce gets the assignment to assess the impact of the new strategy in his area. He decides to organise a strategy day for the team and explain the strategy, so that he can explain the strategy and answer the questions. After that he poses his team the question: “ What do you see as the main consequences of this new strategic direction for our website?”. Without any framework or further direction. By doing this he empowers the autonomy of the team and think the new strategy through. He observes which role is taken on by which team member and of this is consistent with the identified developmental skill for that specific employee. So Eve, who has the ambition to grow her presentation skills and to be more visible, gets responsibility to facilitate workshops with other departments to specify the content of the new website. Peter, who wants to be more aware of trends and developments in the market, will collect best practices to formulate feasible innovative suggestions to incorporate in the new website. In this way every team member gets a role that stretches his/her comfort zone and development.
In this way you trigger the intrinsic motivation of team members and you empower the employees to develop themselves and contribute to the strategy at the same time.
Interested in the first ingredient, strategic consensus or second one?
For more detailed insights in essential managers’ behaviours for strategy execution read this article.