CEO Leadership Innovation For Enduring Results At Your 21st Century Organization
CEO leadership innovation is a must for enduring results at your 21st Century firm. It is about your continuous leadership upgrading. Simply put, the Management and Leadership approaches used nowadays are century old and no longer fit for this Century. That is why Ivy League educational institutions such as Harvard University, and top consulting firms such as McKinsey, are urging for change and are investing in the upgrading of their programs and of the advice they are offering to their clients. Have you refreshed your leadership lately? If not, it is urgent that you make it your top priority.
According to study, in ten years, over 40% of Fortune 500 companies will no longer be here. Although this could sound alarmist, think about it for a moment: where will your institution be ten years from now? More than you might think, the success or failure of your institution to get results, grow, become the high high-performance company of your dream, rests on the shoulders of the CEO.
Even though we live in an era of exponential change and unprecedented technological disruption, problems and successes always rise or fall with the CEO, including corporate bankruptcies such as Kodak's and industry crisis such as the 2008 financial crisis of which Lehman Brothers has become the symbol. So, organizational success or failure can always be traced back to failure or lack of leadership.
Great leaders take responsibility for what happens under their leadership and yet, when things go wrong, many high-profile CEOs develop the habit to blame it on some senior executive or on employees. Because the world is changing fast, Top Leader need to take responsibility and keep improving their leadership concepts, tools and practices, if they are to keep their institutions successful.
Problems Solved and Benefits of Leadership Innovation
CEO Leadership Innovation done the right way allows for ongoing upgrading and growth of the leader ahead of her or his company and industry. The key benefit of innovative leadership is greater agility that allows the leader to anticipate internal and external problems, mitigate them before tehy happen, or to resolve them effectively if they surface unexpectedly.
This allows the company to remain agile and to keep growing, serving its clients like no other competitor. Ultimately, the CEO and his or her institution will keep reaping the rewards of innovative leadership for both short-term and long-term results in perpetuity, no matter the economic or regulatory environment they serve in.
Highly performing institutions such as Berkshire Hathaway, P&G and GE, are run by innovative leaders that have created a culture of innovation and are continuously evolving, using empowering approaches that insite engagement and therefore, motivation of their leaders and employees alike to keep their creative genius flowing for the benefit of their companies and their stakeholders.
The Challenges of Leadership Innovation
The key challenge of leadership innovation is the lack of understanding of unsuspecting CEOs that do not realize that they must be in constant engagement with and nurturing of innovation until it becomes an institutional culture. In most institutions, Top Leaders that do not grow are not aware or don't take time to deal with innovation; and committed Top Leaders can face resistance to change and don't stay long enough for the innovation culture to take hold.
Another common difficulty is that CEOs get their middle management and employees trained with new ideas and don't expose themselves and their C-Level executives to the same training. This creates major problems as the untrained leaders become a bottle neck: their subordinates learn new ways and are eager to implement them, but unfortunately the Top Leaders and their senior management are not. Therefore, they keep running the old routines and making decisions the old ways in a counter-productive manner. Their good decision for innovation ends up costing money, time, causing frustration and chaos to the organization, with no outcome.
Where Do You Go From Here?
If you were to value leadership innovation in a dynamic way, you and your institution would reap the many great benefits: agility, continued growth, profitability and stability in times of crisis, while your competitors experience chaos, desperation, and ultimately, failure.
The first step for leadership innovation is for the Top Leader to embrace it first, and embody the innovation he or she wants to see in his/her company. To be successful in the 21st Century, it is imperative that Top Leaders take charge to grow and to help their team and their company to grow constantly if they are to be able to predict change - or better still - initiate change that is favorable to their institution and win in their competitive environment.
About the Author
Jean-Baptiste Sawadogo, MBA, B.A. Spec. Finance, CPC, CIBA, is the Founder & CEO of Leader One Inc; he is "the trusted confidant for CEOs and C-Level executives" on Leadership Innovation and How To Raise Abunant Capital for enduring results, growth and flexibility. To attend F.R.E.E. webinars and get support to grow to market supremacy visit and register: http://ResultsForTopLeaders.com.
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