Chapter 11

Next steps

In this chapter you can reflect on the various elements of connected leadership and consider the next steps on your journey. You can also reflect on how the connected leadership framework is relevant not only to your business but also to our society as a whole. It’s time to pull it all together.

Reflection

Now is the time to reflect on where you and your organisation are, and where you want to go, in relation to becoming a more connected company. It is also a time to consider your priorities for developing more connected leadership capability for yourself and for your colleagues.

If you have been making notes based on the questions at the end of the chapters, please read back through them and take a while to consider what they are telling you. Also reflect on the answers you gave to the connected company survey at the end of the previous chapter. What is it telling you about your priorities?

It may be helpful to consider next steps based on the three levels of connection: self, team and organisation. Think about and perhaps write down your views on where you are strongest and weakest currently at each level. Where are you personally most and least comfortable in terms of the connected leadership factors? Similarly, where is your leadership team most and least competent and confident? Discuss it with them and decide on your priorities together. And as a business, where is your organisation currently most and least capable? In all three categories you may find it helpful to use the connected company survey to develop clear priorities for change. You can chart your analysis using the RAG, table in Figure 11.1, marking each cell with either red, amber or green to indicate relative strengths (green) and weaknesses (red) across the levels and factors.

figure 11.1 Status report for connected leadership

If we explore the example RAG table in Figure 11.1, if you had green, amber and red across the top row, it would mean that you are clear about purpose and direction, your team is sort of aware and the rest of the business doesn’t really get it. This might suggest that you need to engage your leadership team in a more fundamental discussion about your purpose in the business. There is also an issue more widely across the business about where you are going and why what you do is so important. There would be benefit in engaging the rest of the business in a process of making sense of your purpose and the direction in which you are all moving. The consequent improvements in alignment and motivation would be highly beneficial to the business and make it a better place to work. This in turn would help attract the best talent for future growth and succession. And so on – you can see the way this can play out.

If you can expand this analysis to include your leadership team and then the whole company, you will have an important piece of diagnosis which can help with planning for change. The survey tool can help provide a mechanism for the analysis, and I encourage you to supplement its use with more qualitative research using interviews, listening groups and team-based discussions across the organisation. In this way the shared nature of the output will have already started to engage your colleagues on the journey.

I would also encourage you to listen to the voices of the customers, through existing research reports or by conducting specific research into their views on how you could better meet their evolving needs and what agility would look like from their perspective. At Zara it is about affordable access to fashion with rapid changes of lines to reflect changing fashion and taste both locally and internationally. What do your customers think?

Planning for action

Following this diagnosis comes planning for action. In Chapter 10 the type of activities that can help to build momentum for strategic change across your business were discussed. You may find it helpful to draw on these as you plan with your colleagues for the journey towards being truly connected.

Again, I would encourage you to make the planning a connected activity, one where people from across your business are involved, engaged and able to influence the outcome. Feed the customer insight into your thinking as the focus for prioritising investment and action. Remember the image of Mr Ortega with five fingers on the factory and five fingers on the customer. This level of focus on the customer has driven results for Zara for many years.

Connected society

Connected leadership is intended to be a leadership framework for organisations in the 21st century. But it also resonates with society as a whole, which is not surprising as it is based in part on what is going on around us with the changes to consumer behaviour, the upsurge in social networks and the exponential increase in technology and what it brings to us in terms of ubiquitous connectivity and distributed intelligence (the Internet of Things). In line with the discussion in Chapter 2 about the increasingly uncertain and unpredictable networked society in which we live and work, we see accelerating generational changes, religious conflicts and the movement of economic power from West to East all creating an ‘edge of chaos’ environment where events are increasingly unpredictable and outcomes from our actions less certain.

So connected leadership also has benefit as a framework for social and political leaders to use to consider how to lead effectively in this complex environment. If you were a political leader, how would you use the connected leadership framework to create a more connected society? Here are my suggestions.

Purpose and direction

There is a great opportunity in my view to create a stronger sense of purpose at the country level in many open societies. The Scottish independence referendum in 2014, for example, surfaced a deeply felt Scottish identity that carried forward into the nationalists’ success in the Westminster general election in 2015. The Scots rediscovered why they were proud to be Scottish, and this higher-order calling led to an exceptionally high turnout in the referendum of 84.5 per cent. Whether Scots believed in independence or in the union of the United Kingdom, they were motivated to express a view, to get involved, to seek to influence their shared direction in a way that had not been seen in UK politics for decades.

As a political leader your first job in my view is to ignite a sense of purpose and shared direction among the population. This engenders the will to participate, to care about the outcomes for the nation and therefore to care about one’s role in achieving them. This sense of personal responsibility provides a powerful motivation to contribute rather than being a passive observer, which too often has been the case in more recent elections in the UK at least.

The uprising of IS in Syria and Iraq in 2014 and 2015 has demonstrated the power of a sense of shared purpose, with highly motivated fighters from around the world joining in this religious and political movement. If we had a similar sense of higher purpose in the ‘free world’ we might be providing a stronger pull for young militants who are turning instead to the extremism of the IS ‘cause’. I believe democracy, peace, education and shared prosperity are reasons to get up in the morning, a mission worthy of our energetic and passionate support. Political leaders need to engage with the population effectively to engender passionate commitment to the type of society we enjoy.

Authenticity

Related to the importance of purpose in society are the cultural values that underpin it, whichever society we belong to. Some societies can be seen as fundamentally closed culturally, based on values such as secrecy, privilege and control, whereas societies I would want to belong to are fundamentally open, with values such as tolerance, respect for each individual and freedom of expression and care. Politicians need to be bold in defending these values and ensuring that they are maintained even when they are inconvenient. Freedom of expression, for example, can lead to dissent, which can be seen either as threatening (if you are in power) or as a signal of a healthy society.

Religious tolerance is particularly important at a time when there is evidence of increasing levels of intolerance in parts of the world. There has been a widespread reluctance to speak out on behalf of tolerance and respect due to political correctness and the fear of causing religious offence. We need stronger political leadership to protect the values of openness and to avoid endorsing intolerance in case it offends anyone. I respect the way the French, after the revolution, separated state from religion, enshrining the religious freedom of people but disassociating politics from any particular form of religion. This was a very helpful way to ensure religious tolerance and the principle of openness in their culture.

By defining (through consultation) and then standing up for the culture of a country, political leaders are more likely to get commitment to that culture. If it is based on the open values above then it is worth fighting for. We have seen such courage in various conflicts in the last 100 years, when ‘protecting freedom’ was sufficient reason for laying down one’s life in the Second World War to defeat fascist regimes in both Europe and the Pacific.

Devolved decision making

Democracy is the right of people to determine who governs them and to have a say in decisions that affect them. This is encoded in the constitution of many open societies, but interestingly, in companies there is no such obligation to accept or behave in line with any principles of democratic governance. Our colleagues have an expectation, however, at least in open societies, of a level of democratic influence which they sometimes have to give up when they walk into the office. As a connected leader you should ensure that your colleagues have no such sense of difference between the world outside and that inside the office.

As we have seen, when you increase involvement in decision making more widely across your business, you will see benefits such as increased agility and customer responsiveness. In the political context this equates to increasing devolution to regional and local government institutions with the intention to give people more say about local decisions that affect them directly. This is potentially a powerful force for good, but in practice it is not always so beneficial. When I see political devolution causing increased local bureaucracy I am concerned that the mechanisms of increasing devolved decision making are getting in the way of the potential benefits. If we see greater levels of political representation (i.e. more politicians) and the associated cost of bureaucratic administration without improved local decision making, I fear we are missing the point.

What we need are clear decision rights at local and national levels and a minimal level of bureaucracy. We need to orchestrate local decision making without the infrastructure that often seems to go with local democracy. The benign autocracy in Singapore operates with a level of direct decision making and massive local economic and social benefit without the encumbrance of local democratic infrastructure. The problem comes when the autocratic leader is less benign. We need to balance the need for business-like governance with accountability to the people.

Collaborative achievement

Collaboration is about working together to build a better society where we work with others rather than seek dominance over them. Just as in the corporate world, if you get the purpose, direction and values right, this creates a framework for freedom in which citizens can get on with achieving great outcomes. In societies around the world there are millions of people who devote discretionary effort to the greater good, whether it is through community work, caring for the less advantaged, fundraising for charities or working in charities. It would be great to grow this social movement by increasing the appeal to those who are currently less keen to take part in social collaboration, which takes us back to building a stronger sense of shared purpose, direction and values.

Agility

Agility in a political context is about education (learning), improvement and innovation for the benefit of all, not just for a few. It’s about using technology to benefit people around the world in areas such as pharmaceuticals and the availability of drugs for those who cannot afford them, and improving food production and sanitation in areas of significant poverty. It is fundamentally about sharing in a politics that is not parochial but appeals to a wider sense of global adaptability. It is about creating a learning and sustainable planet.

Creating a more connected society will lead to significant benefits, such as improved cooperation, reduced disparity in living standards and a fairer society. But it requires a shift in political mindset to an open frame of reference, one in which we realise that self-interest and shared interest can be mutually supportive. We are all connected as human beings and we share a responsibility for us all.

Conclusion

In the networked society in which we work, with the changing face of the multi-generational workforce and the effects of increasing levels of globalisation, the connected leadership approach gives us a way to build leadership capability that is in tune with these changes and leads to a connected organisation that can be responsive to the uncertain environment in which we work. As technology creates more opportunity and more uncertainty in our work and how we live our lives, we need to build stronger connections within and without our organisations, with our customers and with our supply chain. We need to build in the adaptive ability to operate well in semi-chaotic situations and to stay in touch with our customers when they are overloaded with information.

I hope that through reading this book you have been able to develop your own priorities about where to focus your development as a leader. I hope also that you have a sense of the need to build leadership capability across your organisation that will create a more agile and customer-driven business, and how to plan to make it real.

The five factors provide a clear framework for action. They are derived from extensive research, both my own and that of various other researchers and international leadership experts. The first two, purpose and direction and authenticity, create a freedom framework that gives clarity for everyone in your business on the mission and why it’s important. The next three lead to the level of agility and customer-centric working that we need to adapt to the volatile world around us. As technology drives exponential change, we need to respond in kind, embracing the changes in how we work which connected leadership represents. As you build more devolution, collaboration and agility into how your organisation works, you are better able to respond and stay ahead.

Don’t forget that a personal Connected Leadership Profile will be available for book owners from early 2016 via [email protected].

I would value receiving feedback from you, so if you have a moment please let me know what you thought of this book and the ideas within it. My email address is [email protected]. Your feedback will help to steer future research and writing about connected leadership. Please stay connected. Thank you.

Note

1 Catlin, T., Scanlan, J. and Willmott, P. (2015) ‘Raising your digital quotient’, McKinsey Quarterly, June, 1.