I'm a great fan of Prof. Micheal Watkins. Prof Watkins is a Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at
IMD, co-founder of
Genesis Advisers, and author of
The First 90 Days. At IMD, I co-direct
Transition to Business Leadership,
a program designed for experienced functional managers who either have
recently transitioned or will soon transition into enterprise leadership
positions. #First90.
He is absolutely a brilliant Professor On Organisational Change Management and Leadership.
In my opinion Prof. Watkins writing and thought process are absolutely excellent and mind blowing.
His recent writing I found in LinkedIn is very much relevant to the changing dynamics of any organisation.
Becoming an Enterprise Leader: The Seven Seismic Shifts.
"Too many rising stars stumble when they move from managing a function
to leading an enterprise and take responsibility for a P&L and
oversight of leaders across functions. It truly is different at the top.
To find out how, I took an in-depth look at this critical career
transition point, conducting an extensive series of interviews with more
than 40 executives, including managers who had developed high-potential
talent, senior HR professionals, and individuals who had recently made
the move to enterprise leadership for the first time.
What I found is that to make the move to enterprise leader
successfully, executives must navigate a challenging set of changes in
their focus and skills, which I call the Seven Seismic Shifts."
Shift #1: From specialist to generalist.
A company's business functions are managerial subcultures with their
own rules, values, and languages. Managers transitioning to enterprise
leadership roles must therefore work hard to achieve "cross-functional
fluency." Someone who grew up in marketing obviously cannot become a
native speaker of operations or R&D, but he or she can become
fluent—comfortable with the central terms, tools, and ideas employed by
the various functions whose work he or she must integrate. Critically,
enterprise leaders must know enough to be able to evaluate and recruit
the right people to lead functional areas in which they are not
experts.
Shift #2: From analyst to integrator.
The primary responsibility of function heads is to develop and manage
their people to achieve analytical depth in focused domains. By
contrast, enterprise leaders manage cross-functional teams with the goal
of integrating the collective knowledge and using it to solve important
organizational problems. As you might imagine, then, it's important for
new enterprise leaders to make the shift to managing integrative
decision-making and problem-solving and, even more important, to learn
how to make appropriate trade-offs. Enterprise leaders must also manage
in the "white spaces"—accepting responsibility for issues that don't
fall neatly into any one function but are still important to the
business.
Shift #3: From tactician to strategist.
More so than functional heads, enterprise leaders establish and
communicate strategic direction for their organizations. So they must be
able to define and clearly communicate the mission and goals (what),
the core capabilities (who), the strategy (how), and the vision (why)
for their businesses. Additionally, they must be able to switch gears
with ease, seamlessly shifting between tactical focus (the trees) and
strategic focus (the forest). Critically, they must learn to think
strategically, which means honing their ability to (1) perceive
important patterns in complex environments, (2) crystallize and
communicate those patterns to others in the organization in powerful
ways, and (3) use these insights to anticipate and shape the reactions
of other key "players," including customers and competitors.
Shift #4. From bricklayer to architect.
As leaders move up in the hierarchy, they become increasingly
responsible for laying the foundation for superior performance—creating
the organizational context in which business breakthroughs can happen.
To be effective in this regard, enterprise leaders must understand how
strategy, structure, systems, processes, and skill bases interact. They
must also be expert in the principles of organizational design, business
process improvement, and human capital management. Few high-potential
leaders get any formal training in organizational development theory and
practice, leaving them ill-equipped to be the architects of their
organizations or to be educated consumers of the work of organizational
development consultants.
Shfit #5. From problem-solver to agenda-setter.
Many leaders are promoted on the strength of their problem-solving
skills. But when they reach the enterprise leader level, they must focus
less on fixing problems and more on setting the agenda for what the
organization should focus on doing. Being an agenda-setter means
identifying and prioritizing emerging threats, and communicating them in
ways that the organization can respond to. The rest of the task calls
for mobilizing preventive action and driving organizational change. And
it ultimately means creating a learning organization that responds
effectively to shifts in its environment and can generate surprises for
its competitors.
Shift #6. From warrior to diplomat.
Effective enterprise leaders see the benefits in actively shaping the
external environment and managing critical relationships with powerful
outside constituencies, including governments, NGOs, the media, and
investors. They identify opportunities for cross-company collaboration,
reaching out to rivals to help shape the rules of the game. Functional
managers, by contrast, tend to be more focused on developing and
deploying internal capabilities to contend more effectively with key
competitors.
Shift #7. From supporting cast to lead role.
Finally, people in the business look first to enterprise leaders for
cues about the "right" behaviors and attitudes, and for vision and
inspiration. At the functional leader level, it can be acceptable just
to be an efficient, effective manager, a member of the "supporting cast"
if you will. Enterprise leaders, by contrast, are constantly "at center
stage," being held to a higher standard—that of exemplary role model.
For good or ill, the senior leadership of every organization is
infectious; leaders' behaviors tend to be transmitted to their direct
reports, who pass them on to the next level, and so on down through
their organizations. Over time, they permeate the organization from top
to bottom, influencing activity at all levels. Eventually they become
embodied in the organizational culture, influencing the types of people
who get promoted and hired into the organization, creating a
self-reinforcing feedback loop—either positive or negative.
Making the Transition
These seven shifts in moving from functional management to enterprise
leadership are crucial to the success of the transition. But, important
to keep in mind that the biggest reasons why leaders fail in such
transitions are because they don't go back into a learning mode. Nothing
fully prepares someone for becoming an enterprise leader for the first
time but there is a lot that can be done in preparation and by knowing
what the shifts entail, leaders will be better prepared to undergo
transition.
The above management mantras are absolutely priceless and should get into the DNA of all organisational leaders.
