Senior Executive Excellence

With the deepening economic crisis, growing bankruptcies and falling share prices, it is obvious that traditional management and leadership paradigms and models do not work in these turbulent, complex and global business environments.

At Senior Executive Excellence, we have recently conducted a survey on 15 senior executives to investigate which are the most important challenges that corporations are facing today. The main issues identified include:

·        Increased volatility, uncertainly, complexity and pace of change,

·        Decreasing profits and market share or stagnation of growth,

·        Falling productivity, motivation, creativity and innovation potential of employees,

·        Ineffective leadership, lack of vision, effective strategy and collaboration amongst employees

·        Need to move away from command-and-control management, need for more self-awareness, need for re-establishing trust.

·        Need for more stable and trusted relationships with customers and suppliers

·        Need to find more meaning and value in work,

·        Need for more freedom to do creative work,

·        Need to be more proactive and create partnerships with customers.

All these challenges require emerging, new ways of leading and managing so that they could be addressed and transformed into business opportunities.

Management paradigms have been traditionally based on scientific paradigms, and since the time of the Newton’s theory and Taylor’s principles, machine metaphor has been predominant. According to this metaphor, organisations are viewed as machines and people are like cogs in these machines which need to be directed and controlled. This paradigm is considering parts in isolation, specifying changes in detail and reducing variation. It is also focused on the need for certainty, control and prediction, which prevents creativity and innovation. It is apparent that this metaphor does not work for modern organizations which are increasingly complex, dynamic and nonlinear driven by globalization, interconnectivity and technological revolution, predominantly comprising of knowledge workers who are highly skilled, mobile, motivated, do not want to be led and ignore corporate hierarchy.

In bureaucratic systems top-down control and restrictions hampers creativity and emergence. One of the emerging paradigms in business and management is based on complexity theory which views organisations as complex adaptive systems (CAS). In  CAS interactions among heterogeneous agents and across agent networks lead to creative emergence and leaders should provide linkages to emergent structures without the control of a central coordinator. The new complexity leadership focuses on the dynamics of leadership as it emerges over time in all arenas of an organizational system, where each interchange and interaction provide opportunities for leading, learning, growing and change. No one can hope to lead any organisation by ignoring the web of relationships through which all work is accomplished, and effective leadership is about learning to capitalize on interactive dynamics (correlation, randomness and interaction) among and within organizational work groups.

In a complex system, it is impossible to have absolute control, at least beyond some very general parameters. In this context, leaders need to change, give up the illusion of control and concentrate instead on setting a larger vision for their organisations so that the creativity of employees can emerge. Differences between leaders and followers are blurred and leadership itself emerges from interactions Leadership occurs in emergent, informal adaptive dynamics throughout organization, and in the conditions of adaptive challenges that require new learning, innovation, exploration, new patterns of behaviour and adjustments. Key for organizational effectiveness is in speed, adaptability, knowledge and learning rather than efficiency and control suitable for manufacturing.  

These requirements for modern leadership are in contrast with the dominant paradigm in leadership theory focused on how leaders influence others towards desired objectives within frameworks of hierarchical organisational structures, where visionary approach is cascaded from top to lower levels. However, when leaders loosen the control, more creativity and a culture of care will emerge that will lead to better productivity. Leaders in complex adaptive systems should be accessible, respond to the needs of others, acknowledge and value people’s contributions at all levels, create opportunities for people and take the time to build trusting relationships. They should also be strong and have vision, but they should also be comfortable leading with a hands-off approach.

A change in perspective on leadership is required as the context in which leaders now operate is radically different and diverse. It is interesting to note that complexity leadership is related to a number of other emerging leadership approaches, from distributed to shared or distributed leadership and they all have common threads such as emergence, interactions and sharing of power that lead to creative emergence, enhanced creativity and innovation and general positive changes within organisations.

The leaders of the future will have to deal with even more globalisation, constant interruptions and change, they will have to have even greater collaboration skills, they will have to adopt more flexible leadership styles, eschew formal power and accept knowledge-based power as well as to accept positive disobedience. At personal level, leaders will have to ensure their own longevity, stress resilience and improved mental, physical and emotional capacities in order to meet the increasing demand for top performance and excellence.

EMERGENT Leadership Training Programme, provided by Senior Executive Excellence (www.seniorexecutiveexcellence.com/EMERGENTLeadershipProgramme), is a leading edge transformational programme enabling leaders and organisations to achieve extraordinary performance in these turbulent times, and to move away from traditional leadership approaches that do not work anymore. The programme is based on the latest scientific insights into organisational behaviour, social neuroscience and psychology of change. Organisations and individuals are transformed by changing their collective and individual self limiting belief systems, harnessing the power of social intelligence and informal networks and mastering the new leadership skills based on emerging paradigms such as complexity leadership, energy leadership or positive leadership.

The main principles of the EMERGENT Leadership Programme have been successfully implemented in numerous organisations and are well documented in the scientific management literature. We have helped various organisations using these principles to achieve top performance. For example, an European division of a global IT consulting company has experienced a 1700% increase in its profit margin after implementing the emerging leadership style based on complexity leadership and managing and transforming energetic changes from within for its employees. In this organisation, the outer circumstances have actually not changed significantly and no similar non-linear impact has been observed during the years before the change in leadership style was implemented. The latest figures from this company show continuous profit growth way above expectations and a 20% increase in staff headcount.

For further information on emerging leadership paradigms or EMERGENT Leadership Programme, contact Professor Vlatka Hlupic on enquiries@seniorexecutiveexcellence.com.

There are many approaches and models used for executive coaching. For example, Cooperrider (1995) has developed an Appreciative Inquiry model focussed on the co- evolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. The Leaderplex Model of Leadership (Hooijberg et al, 1997) integrates cognitive, social, and behavioural aspects of leadership development and coaching. The Servant Leadership Model (Russell and Stone, 2002) is based on increasingly popular concept of servant leadership. Egan (1982) has developed a ‘Helping Skills’ model based on three stages: The Current Scenario, Preferred Scenario and Action Strategies. Greene and Grant (2003) applied Solution Focussed Therapy to coaching developing Solution Focused Model for executive coaching. The Ontological Coaching Model (Sieler, 2003) is an interrelated model of human “way of being” that identifies the core constructs of language, emotion and physiology as the means by which human reality is constructed and maintained. Flaherty (1999) proposes the Domains of Competence Model, which posits that there are three domains of reality in the world: the individual (I), the collective (We) and the external or objective world (It). In order to be effective, a person needs to develop competencies in all three of these domains.

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The popularity of executive coaching is increasing continuously. Executive coaching may no longer be considered just as the latest trend in management. In ever increasing complexity of business environments and increasing pressures on executive performance, executive coaching is becoming necessity for reformulating values and goals and reaching solutions. Most importantly, it is evolving as a natural form of leadership facilitating leadership development (Volckman, 2005), retention of top staff, management succession planning or ensuring success after promotion or new hires (Zeus and Skiffington, 2005).

Executives have to provide top performance in complex and dynamic situations, solve ill-structured problems and effectively lead people in the context of continuous and turbulent changes. They also need to satisfy demands from shareholders, achieve employee satisfaction and maintain accountability for strategic decisions (Greene and Grant, 2003; Flaherty, 1999). This requires an excellent level of physical, mental and emotional strength that may not be easy to sustain over longer time span (Sieler, 2003), (Berman and Bradt, 2006). Executive coaching cannot only help high achievers to sustain high performance, it is also crucial to achieve a higher level of performance and excellence (Birchall, 2004).

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