Against the backdrop of an ever-changing global business environment and unstable economic conditions, it's no longer sufficient for leaders to embrace the status quo. Today's executives need to use a more holistic approach to build a business.
Organizations used to rely on the knowledge, experience and expertise of their leaders to provide a competitive advantage. In today's fast-paced business environment, however, leaders must possess the wherewithal to deal with more dynamic scenarios.
"The organization has to lead change, rapid change. The environment is changing - someone's inventing something before you expect it or something is collapsing in front of your eyes: How do you respond?" said Pontish Yeramyan, founder and CEO of Gap International, a global management consulting company.
"It's becoming much more important to deal with change and creativity and innovation and speed and nimbleness," she said. "Those are part of producing the results; you have to pay attention to those factors."
Certain factors have required the role of the executive to evolve over time, Yeramyan explained.
"The role [of an executive leader] - as in always having to produce results, performing superbly, that kind of thing - hasn't changed," she said. "[However,] the environment is changing; therefore obviously it is adding more complexity and other things to take into account and therefore forcing evolution."
For one, today's leaders have to contend with an increasingly competitive global environment.
"Internally, organizations are a lot more complex, a lot more not just matrix, they're multi-matrix, " she said. For instance, Yeramyan said recently she read how an individual was expected to report to not one, but five bosses and found it challenging to align the objectives of all five.
Another quality required of the 21st-century business leader is the ability to think more strategically and to be able to look at the big picture.
"A strategy that is designed [with the big picture in mind] must be holistic, touching every aspect of the organization, including employees, customers, [and] consumers, and integrate all internal and external stakeholders, " Yeramyan said. "Viewing the strategy of the organization in a way that covers the entire enterprise gives richer and ultimately quicker decisions that impact the current performance of the business."
Leaders also need to be more authentic and to show their authenticity because this will enable them to more easily institutionalize organizational changes.
"The more real and vulnerable leaders are about what they see, the changes they want to make and the challenges they face, the more people will identify themselves with the leader and the more willing they will be to adopt change," she said.
Leaders also must foster a genuine commitment to develop others.
"[This is] internally creating the environment where people can grow, so there's the whole well-being [aspect] rather than buying expertise [or just] using people for their experience and expertise," she said.
Further, in the current economic environment, it's commonplace for employees to work harder and longer hours than they normally would, and leaders can help make it more meaningful.
"If they're working hard, they might as well have it make a bigger difference [than] just producing more money and making people rich," she said. "It's not just enough to be [concerned] about the stakeholders and being profitable and making the bottom line bigger - that's just the ticket to the dance. It's bigger than that - caring about the environment, having a larger purpose so the company makes a difference."
[About the Author: Deanna Hartley is an associate editor for Talent Management magazine.]
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