Turbulent business landscapes are today’s reality
The digital age has presented a host of new challenges for leaders as well as a sharp decline in their success rates. Through over six years of research, we’ve identified several leadership behaviors that provide the greatest chance for a company to survive and thrive in these turbulent times.
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Leading in the Digital Age: Challenges and Solutions
Watch these two videos from our CEO Scott Bohannon to learn more about Leading in the Digital Age.
The first video goes into depth about pace, uncertainty, and the knowledge workplace that have created many challenges leaders face today. It highlights the limits and failures of leadership development today to overcome them.
The second video introduces our Leading in the Digital Age suite of solutions: Influence, Co-Creation, Discovery, and Trust.
Our research and most of our clients tell us the workplace is a challenging place, and it’s being felt at all levels.
ALL Employees
Change fatigue, a lack of clarity, and nearly constant stress
Fear of speaking up about quality, safety, and compliance issues
Fear of sharing opportunities and risks to the business
Too hard (and risky) to get things done
Wage and opportunity discrimination for women and minorities
Front-Line Managers
Frustration with millennials and retention of them
Difficulty getting employees to behave as desired
Mid-Level Managers
Teams aren’t adapting and innovating enough
Senior Most Managers
Frequent surprise
Struggle in making their strategic and operating plans
Short shelf life of strategic and operating plans
Acquisitions don’t yield the promised benefits
Workplace challenges have real impacts to business. Research shows all of these factors matters to the bottom line.
$1 trillion
higher care costs, lost productivity, and missed opportunites
75%
lack an adequate pool of ready successors
38%-50%
executives fail in their first 18 months
50%-74%
transformations are unsuccessful
Factors impacting leadership success
We’ve spent more than six years researching why leadership success looks different in the digital age.
Three important factors are at the center:
The pace of change is dramatically higher. In fact, it’s essentially constant.
Work has become much more uncertain. Our probability models and expectations don’t paint a very accurate picture in many cases and we can large surprises far more often.
The very nature of work has changed. Specialization of labor and manufacturing practices have been replaced with collaborative, co-creative work that is different almost every day.
When you put those three forces together you get the shift you see from left to right in this image. Leadership success requires shifting from engaging millennials to teaching them to lead, from coping with stress to building resilience, from building alignment to building trust. And so on. Embrace experimentation, focus on team, influence behavior, foster co-creating, and apply discovery-based planning.
- Engage Millennials
- Cope
- Build Alignment
- Get it Right
- Focus on Manager+Individual
- Change Behavior
- Foster Coordination+Cooperation
- Use Strategic Planning
- Teach Millennials to Lead
- Build Resilience
- Build Trust
- Embrace Experimentation
- Focus on Team
- Influence Behavior
- Foster Co-Creation
- Apply Discovery-based Planning
New tools for digital success
The Leading in the Digital Age Suite of offerings is designed specifically to support leadership success in the digital age. To help leaders make the shifts needed, we’re building solutions with three main parts:
A focus on content appropriate for the Digital Age capabilities we’ve identified
Pre-designed, ready to use learning journeys, with content, built around those capabilities
Application contexts which provide additional tools and advice for applying these skills to common, important large-scale organizational needs
Supporting the entire suite of programs and included in every learning journey are programs about Building Trust. Trust is a crucial factor as the world of work becomes even faster and more confusing. Fast-paced adapting requires an environment where people can jump in and try new things, without the fear of failure. For that reason, all the key leadership practices for the digital age have at their foundation continuously building and rebuilding trust.
7 Learning Journeys
Leading in the Digital Matrix
Coming SoonInfluencing Behavior Change
Coming SoonBuilding High Performing Teams
Coming SoonBuilding Next Gen Leadership
Coming SoonLeading Co-Creation
Coming SoonLeading Discovery
Coming Soon
4 Application Contexts
Leading Virtually
Leading through Mergers and Acquisitions.
Next Generation Inclusion
High Performing Finance Leaders
