Introduction

Leaders have to be strategists, negotiators, and visionaries. This collection of articles from MIT Sloan Management Review looks at the particular challenges of keeping an organization’s vision on track across business units when there’s dissent among the ranks and when momentum starts to flag.

From “Protect Your Project From Escalating Doubts”:

• Many big projects start off well but then lose momentum and spiral downward as skeptical stakeholders withdraw support. This self-perpetuating downward spiral can cause contributors to distance themselves from an effort that is losing support, cannot overcome inertia, or becomes derailed.
• Executives need to identify common triggers that spark stakeholder concerns and take action to avert the “cycle of doubt” that can ensue.
• This article includes a chart of 15 triggers that contribute to the cycle of doubt.
• The article also includes eight action steps that project leaders can take to stabilize or recover a project’s momentum.

From “Developing the Next Generation of Enterprise Leaders”:

• Aspiring corporate leaders first learn to build and implement visions for their individual business units. But as they advance in their careers, executives also must learn how to lead with an enterprise perspective.
• The essence of enterprise leadership lies in the need to combine two often incompatible roles by being both an advocacy-oriented builder who can develop a unit’s vision and an integration-minded broker who can incorporate the unit’s vision into the wider enterprise vision.
• In a survey of top business executives from major international organizations, 79% of the respondents said it was extremely important to have leaders who act on behalf of the entire organization and not just their units. Nearly 65% said they expected at least half of senior and midlevel managers to behave as enterprise leaders.
• The biggest obstacles to developing enterprise leaders are organizational barriers.

From “A New Era of Corporate Conversation”:

• Social media technology is changing how managers and employees communicate, breaking down traditional corporate hierarchies.
• Companies are utilizing wikis, microblogs, multichannel platforms such as Yammer, Slack, and HipChat, and employee feedback tools such as TinyPulse to build what the author calls “conversational firms.”
• To gain advantage from this trend, employees need to know that their leaders won’t punish them for expressing dissenting opinions.
• Executives need patience and a thick skin.

From “Combining Purpose With Profits”:

• Leaders must ensure that their company has a sense of purpose if they want to build an organization that truly motivates employees.
• To sustain both a sense of purpose and a solid level of profitability over time, companies need to pay attention to several fundamental organizing principles, including the need for support systems that reinforce goals.
• This article includes three mini case studies of Sweden’s Svenska Handelsbanken, India’s Tata Group, and India’s HCL Technologies.
• This article was awarded the 2015 Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize for outstanding MIT SMR article on planned change and organizational development

From “Improving the Performance of Top Management Teams”:

• Even the most knowledgeable senior managers can have strongly opposing views about the wisest course of action for an organization, particularly when they come from different backgrounds or corporate cultures.
• Differences in organizational values within a top management team can impair how the group functions, with perceived differences having much larger repercussions than real ones.
• When organizational values are perceived to be at odds with a person’s own beliefs, the incongruity can lead to both task conflict and relationship conflict.
• To prevent unproductive conflicts, team members need to believe that the group will not marginalize them for challenging prevailing views.