Five Habits and Best Practices for Today’s Managers and Executives

The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices

In this episode, I will cover five habits that you as a manager must adopt to stay competitive in today’s digital markets and economies. We know that competitive pressures have been building up in today’s marketplace and digital disruption has created a fast-paced environment that is challenging traditional business models and requiring organizations to transform in order for them to remain viable. Effective team leadership in this new business environment demands that managers find fresh ways to help create both business value and a rewarding experience for colleagues and team members. To do this, you as an executive and / or manager must adopting new habits to help your teams and groups achieve the flexibility required to tackle the headwinds of this new competitive climate.

Here are five of those habits:

Define Success in Terms of Business Outcomes

Whether overseeing large projects or smaller tasks, managers need to define their department’s work in the context of overall business outcomes. Examples of business outcomes are growth in sales, improved customer experience, increased productivity, and reduced process cycle times. A problem that some teams face is that they get so bogged down in addressing lower-level requirements that they lose sight of the company’s overall target outcomes. One way to fix this is to implement trace-ability mechanisms that will track the relationship of lower-level activities to larger business outcomes. This can help you to align your department or group to the organization’s overall objectives and keep your teams focused on delivering business value.

Many organizations use quantitative metrics such as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to help their departments and managers stay focused on delivering the desired end results. However, improperly defined KPIs can have the reverse effect by obscuring the team’s ability to attain business value that’s relevant to the company’s larger goals. In such cases, you as a manager need to bring your teams back into focus by putting business outcomes in the context of overall business value. Doing this will help team members to think on a larger scale.

Thinking and communicating in terms of business outcomes also brings managers closer to their customers and stakeholders, ensuring that the department’s delivery is in line with their expectations and preventing any surprises in the future.

Create a Healthy Culture for Optimal Performance

A healthy organizational culture is a prerequisite for achieving optimal organizational performance. An organization’s culture depends on the mindset and behaviors of its employees, who take their cues from the leadership’s core beliefs, values, and practices.

As a manager, your potential for building a strong cultural foundation for your department gives you considerable influence. Among the ways of inculcating a positive culture are improving communication between team members, communicating core values to employees and practicing them yourself in your daily work, appreciating and valuing your team members’ input and efforts, and encouraging risk taking. Investing in your department’s culture will help employees feel personally fulfilled and also build trust and respect, all of which lead to a more motivated and creative staff. The positive impact on the thinking and performance of your department can only benefit the company as a whole.

Foster an Agile Mindset

Demands for speedy delivery are pushing managers to reduce cycle times across all levels of the organization. Methods such as lean and agile have proven useful in software development, manufacturing, and other organizational functions. But effective managers recognize that, more than a methodology, agile is a shift in mindset that embodies principles of incremental and iterative development, better customer alignment, and the use of feedback loops to improve products and services.

Agility in today’s environment, for example, means preferring rapid and incremental delivery of products and services with limited functionality, rather than waiting longer for hefty feature releases. In the new paradigm, failing quickly and learning from your mistakes is at times considered more desirable than engaging in extended (and sometimes indefinite) planning and analysis cycles. Managers who embrace these principles understand that being agile can help not only with working around complexities, dependencies, and uncertainties but also with ensuring rapid delivery to the marketplace.

Encourage Your Team to Think Differently

Departmental processes certainly help an organization to meet various performance objectives, but standard processes and predefined scripts cannot guarantee the successful achievement of all performance goals. Many tasks and situations require out-of-the box thinking for generating innovative ideas and solutions. Effective managers establish systems at the departmental level that encourage creativity and innovation for the purpose of tackling challenging problems and situations. Organizations like Google are known for allowing their employees free time for projects and activities unrelated to their daily work. This helps to stimulate their creativity by giving employees an opportunity to step outside the “boxes” created by repetitive daily tasks that may have caused their thinking to become too restrained.

While the value of creative thinking is well known, it’s more commonly preached than practiced. To drive such new behaviors, managers must lead both through their own focus and consistency and by fostering team collaboration and creative thinking. By instituting practices that encourage people to step away from their usual thinking patterns, managers empower team members to bring forth new ideas. Also, to ensure all ideas are given an equal chance of evaluation, many managers and organizations are now instituting more structured approaches for capturing and vetting ideas before they get lost.

Build a Learning Organization

Effective managers also create a learning organization where employees collaborate and constantly learn from each other’s experiences, thus increasing the company’s collective wisdom. According to Peter Senge, who spearheaded the concept of the “learning organization” in his book The Fifth Discipline, instead of building pockets of expertise, effective managers strive to increase the overall capabilities of their organization. Knowledge creates more knowledge, and when shared with others, it has a compounding effect so that the acquired collective wisdom is more than the sum of its parts.

Cultivating and maintaining a strong learning environment requires setting up various forms of collaboration and communication such as meetings and workshops to facilitate sharing and dissemination of information. It also requires implementing a system capable of capturing large amounts of knowledge and experience. Specific methods vary, depending on the manager and the organization’s needs. For example, an organization where sales teams shared their learning experiences from the field would require a different setup from an engineering group with a focus on learning from product development experiences.

A collective learning environment puts both managers and organizations in a better position to meet the new and constantly changing requirements of today’s business climate. Companies with this type of environment use mistakes as learning tools by capturing the lessons they provide through feedback loops and then disseminating them across the organization. An organization that only focuses on providing periodic formal training for its employees is missing out on these types of opportunities and the rapid development and growth that they bring.

So again, the five proactive habits for you to adopt as a manager in today’s economy are

1. Tying the organization’s efforts to its larger business outcomes
2. Encouraging optimal performance through a healthy, supportive culture
3. Cultivating an agile approach
4. Empowering creative thinking
5. Fostering a collective learning environment

Finally – Remember, great managers know that change is the only constant and that a company’s greatest asset is its people. By encouraging creativity, transforming mistakes into wins, and fostering a healthy, cooperative learning environment, you can help accelerate your organization’s growth and create a rewarding experience for all involved.

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