Senior Executive Excellence

I have been invited to give a presentation on “Leading Knowledge Workers: Enhancing the UK’s Capabilities in Innovation, Productivity and Business Performance” at the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (http://www.berr.gov.uk/) on 2 April 2009. In my presentation, I emphasised the importance of knowledge workers for increasing a competitive edge of the UK economy and explained why traditional command-and-control based management and leadership paradigms do not work in contemporary complex business environments. I have then presented the main features of the most popular emerging leadership paradigms and explained how these new approaches can lead to emergence of more creativity, innovation and productivity amongst knowledge workers. I am delighted that my talk was very well received and has initiated a lot of interest in the audience. I hope that some action would follow as a result of this talk and more managers would become aware of the limitations and ineffectiveness of the traditional leadership approaches.

In my previous blog posted on 16 March I summarised some of my findings that emerged from my research into leadership in downturn emphasising the importance of investing into training and development during recession. Interestingly, the UK Government shares this view. On the UK Commission for Employment and Skills web site http://www.ukces.org.uk/Default.aspx?page=4767 it is stated that the new campaign has been launched to encourage employers to invest in training to help survive the recession.
Various ministers have signed an open letter (to be published in the national press this week) providing details of the new ‘Now is the Time’ National Training Award developed by UK Skills. The letter urges employers not to cut training to save costs but to invest in training and development in order to re-skill and build workforce talent and gain competitive advantage for when recovery comes.  This initiative encourages employers, who have invested in skills during the recession, to share their experiences and get public recognition for their commitment to training and re-skilling.

Chris Humphries, CEO of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills said: “Cutting training budgets can be seen as a quick way to save money during a recession, but now is precisely the time to keep investing in the skills and talents of people.  The skills of an organisation’s workforce are its best guarantee of future prosperity and the best investment a business can make in these challenging times.”

At Senior Executive Excellence, we provide leading-edge training (e.g. EMERGENT Leadership Programme http://www.seniorexecutiveexcellence.com/emergent-leadership-programme/) focused on improving personal and professional performance that can help companies to deal with the recession and grow stronger in this challenging time.

With the deepening economic crisis, it seems obvious that traditional management and leadership models do not work anymore in these turbulent, complex and global business environments. Newtonian mechanistic paradigm used in business and management for decades does not work anymore and we need new paradigms and ways of thinking to transform current economic problems into business opportunities.

          Having researched management and leadership approaches and models for many years, I came to the conclusion that I need to develop a new approach for leadership mastery suitable for the current business environments and economic circumstances. This is how I started developing an EMERGENT Leadership Model, a leading edge paradigm for honing the leaders of the future using the power of energy, emotions, beliefs and social network interactions. The keywords for this model are:

E -  Emotions

M – Mastery

E – Energy

R – Rooted in Core

G – Great Performance

E – Emerging Leaders

N – New paradigm

T - Transformation vertically

More information about this model as well as details of the EMERGENT Leadership Model training programmes available for individuals and corporations will be provided at the SEE website soon.

As expected, the Academy of Management Conference was an amazing experience. Over 8000 leading management thinkers and practitioners got together, and more than 1000 presentations were made in 5 days. I have expanded my professional network significantly and obtained a large amount of new leading edge research material in business and management (especially leadership) from the top USA and European business schools. I also acquired various on-line educational tools including a virtual reality simulator for developing leadership skills and emotional intelligence. Last but not least, I have connected with several leading academics researching complexity leadership and we plan to establish research collaboration.

Our workshop on “How to Manage Employees When We Cannot Use Authority: Turning Management Paradigms into Practice” was received very well. The room was full and some members of the audience were sitting on the floor or standing during our 2-hour presentation. We were later interviewed and filmed by managers from one of the Dutch hospitals as they wanted to see if they could also apply emerging leadership paradigms we were advocating. We are now in the process of writing up the material presented in this workshop.

In short, the Academy of Management Conferences are not to be missed in our profession, so I have already started making plans for the next one in Chicago!

I am delighted to announce that my co-authors and I will be presenting a Personal Development Workshop at Academy of Management Annual Conference “The Questions We Ask” (Program Session #: 368, Submission: 10347, Sponsor(s): (ODC, MC, HCM), on Sunday, 10 August 2008, 10:00AM – 12:00PM at Anaheim Marriott in Los Angeles, USA).

The title of our presentation is: “How To Manage Employees When We Cannot Use Authority: Turning Management Paradigms into Practice”. In this presentation, we will present the emerging management and leadership paradigms for leading knowledge workers and provide practical examples from two companies how these approaches work in practice.

My co-authors are Professor A. D. Amar (Stillman School, Seton Hall University, USA), Dr Bami Bastani (President & CEO, ANADIGICS, Inc., USA) and Mr Carsten Hentrich, (Division Director, CSC Deutschland Solutions GmbH, Germany).

Academy of Management is one of the largest and most prestigious professional organizations for academics and practitioners working in business and management. According to the published statistics, AOM Conference 2008 will have 8,477 participants from 83 countries – so this is an event not to be missed!