Executive
For every hundred of you senior leaders, data/evidence confirms that only fifteen of you are advanced to an Interdependent stage and state of thinking and acting at a sustained strategic level, capable of facing complexity. Stages are like climbing a mountain, each stage up lends greater perspective. There are many false summits along the way. False summits are always good, they increase perspective and provide more options than before, but they are not yet a 360 degree vision.
Of course you are successful now, so far. In this century, more than half of Fortune 1000 companies fail in less than ten years. Management consultants mostly tell you it is about speed—to do it faster. But is the Leadership Culture of your team even capable of facing the challenges successfully at any speed? If you’ve got a Level 1 culture of technical expertise and your strategy requires a Level 3 culture of complex collaboration, then your strategy execution is “setting sail for harm’s way”.
Complexity IS in the driver’s seat in the twenty first century. Are you and your team ready? Effective change starts at the top. Change and transformation comes when entrenched unconscious beliefs shift to beliefs relevant to the challenges of today and tomorrow. Much of yesterday’s Leadership Culture often dooms tomorrow’s organization. Effective change creates Bigger Minds. Our maxim for facing complex change is: Slow Down to Speed Up, and do it interdependently first with your team.
Over half of your competition, fifty five out of every hundred senior leaders function mostly at the dependent-conformer level and only thirty out of a hundred are Independent-Achiever level leaders. This means that eighty five percent of leaders mostly cannot do Both/And thinking, and are not yet in the territory where high-end complex challenges play out:
1) Not Capable—Don’t Start:
First make better, informed and fully conscious decisions about the team and organization’s technical AND cultural capabilities, and what change is feasible
2) You are the Culture:
Executives cannot delegate culture change; if you need them to transform their beliefs and practices then change yours first
3) Have the Real Conversations:
If you can manage the tough conversations then you have a shot at successful change—if you cannot have those tough conversations then our action research tells us that you will likely fail.
The probability of successful change increases over 50% when executives make sound decision about change is feasible first, and then proceed with changing and developing the Leadership Culture In-Sync with developing the technical operational systems—and all starting in the senior team, and all at the same time. This change method works because it is based in reality, the reality of both human systems and beliefs that drive behaviors not easily seen, and technical operational systems practices/behaviors required for change, working together interdependently.