Becoming a great leader is an evolutionary process. Being customer centric is often cited by business leaders as a goal. It requires leadership that is based on the principles of the customer centric approach to business, and then on the leadership imperatives that these principles demand.
The best leaders are lifelong learners and take total ownership over their continuous improvement. And while many high-performing organizations out there have droves of solid managers, many still lack great leaders at every level.
Leadership in today’s modern business landscape requires different skills than organizations of the past. The environment and workforce have evolved – and will continue to do so – which means we as leaders must be in a constant state of self-awareness and improvement.
What is a strategic imperative?
So one needs strategic imperatives to fulfill ones vision. So what is a strategic imperative? A strategic imperative is an initiative, key project, or major objective that is high leverage and systemic (strategic) and a must-do (imperative) over the next 6 – 12 months to significantly move a team/organization toward its vision and desired culture.
Strategic imperatives for leadership
It’s not uncommon that people in management positions have been promoted or hired based on track record, subject matter expertise or tenure. Sometimes all of the above. Often, they have been a top performer within a certain division, so the obvious move was to place them in charge of that division. What is frequently overlooked however is their actual ability to lead, coach, mentor and inspire others to take action and achieve results.
Today’s manager has to have the ability to lead. Why? Because it has a direct impact on their team’s level of engagement. While its nice to think that all employees in an organization emotionally connect to the overall culture, values and vision, its more typical that they more closely associate with the sub-culture and tone their direct manager sets. Which means one of the organizational imperatives is coaching. This leadership imperative can be learned by investing in their own coaching, mentoring and leadership development.
Adaptation
The ability to adapt is critical on the battlefields of both combat and business. Great leaders create alignment around the vision and mission and only course correct when the data and external factors require it. Everyone knows why the change is happening and buy-in has been created. This eliminates the chaos and confusion factors and increases engagement and action.
Lead with purpose
George Bernard Shaw, “The true joy in life is being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.”
Leading with purpose provides the north star to organizational transformation by creating relationships between individual purpose, the changing nature and purpose of human work, and organizational purpose. Effective leaders clarify their individual purpose and put it to work in a way that inspires everyone within the organization to find meaning in their daily tasks. Business purpose begins with good intentions but is revealed by how the company operates and the decisions it makes.
Form social engine
Meaning redesign to maximize technology by eliminating routine tasks, using algorithms to automate decisions, and providing metrics and learnings to guide decision-making. Through culture and awareness of environmental, social, and governmental prerogatives, a company can drive continuous innovation, superior customer service, human-centered design, and business models that are in synch with ESG priorities. Putting the right people in place means combining highly diverse values, behaviors, talents, and skills.
Personal touch
Thirdly, the Digital Workplace must become the strategic “Human Hub” in the business-digital ecosystem. In other words, a personalized ‘front door’ to the people, places, and things that workers need the most. A seamless digital workplace not only empowers dynamic teams to share, collaborate and connect from anywhere, is ideal for surfacing content from multiple sources in a cohesive, human whole.
Culture of inclusion
The fourth strategic imperative involves building horizontal capabilities and alliances that align with organizational strategy, purpose, and values. Here, we are looking at a future of work experience by building a digital workplace platform that reinforces a culture of inclusion and inspires innovation. Fostering the adoption of common work practices and a remote work model
Scalable organizational model
The fifth strategic imperative involves learning on fast-acting computerized timescales, which leverages these assets in combination with slower-acting human learning to create a scalable organizational model that reorganizes tasks and roles to maximize the productivity of humans and machines working together.
Create digital ecosystems
The sixth strategic imperative involves the design of business-digital ecosystems that emanate from a digital workplace whose core attributes include content management, targeting and variability, intelligent dashboards, attention management, experience content, and sophisticated search capabilities. The surrounding ecosystem includes learning, case management, workforce data management, time management, and extensive collaboration facilities, coupled with knowledge bases, ESS and MSS transactions and data, and other systematically enabled sources that facilitate a high-value working environment.
In concert, these strategic imperatives framework form the nucleus of accelerating human performance and advancing human capability. These leadership imperatives are the key to enabling workers to create new value through a combination of ingenuity and adaptation.
The above strategic imperatives examples are necessity for business leaders to adapt to new rules of competition while simultaneously pursuing meaningful organizational and cultural systems.
