As leaders move up to the enterprise level, they become responsible for designing and altering the architecture of their organisation – its strategy, structure, processes and skill bases.To be effective organisational architects, they need to think in terms of systems.
Enterprise leaders need to know the principles of organisational change and change management, including the mechanics of organisational design, business process improvement and transition management. Yet few rising executives get any formal training in these domains, leaving most of them ill equipped to be the architects of their organisations – or even to be educated consumers of the work of organisational development professionals.
Many managers are promoted to senior levels on the strength of their ability to fix problems. When they become enterprise leaders, however, they must focus less on solving problems and more on defining which problems the organisation should be tackling.
In his previous roles, Harald had focused primarily on marshalling the troops to defeat the competition. Now he found himself devoting a surprising amount of time to influencing a host of external constituencies, including regulators, the media, investors and NGOs. Little of Harald’s previous experience prepared him for the challenges of being a corporate diplomat.
What do effective corporate diplomats do? They use the tools of diplomacy – negotiation, persuasion, conflict management and alliance building – to shape the external business environment to support their strategic objectives. In the process they often find themselves collaborating with people with whom they compete aggressively in the market every day.
Finally, becoming an enterprise leader means moving to centre stage under the bright lights. In part, this shift is about having a much greater impact as a role model. Managers at all levels are role models to some degree. But at the enterprise level, their influence is magnified, as everyone looks to them for vision, inspiration and cues about the “right” behaviours and attitudes. For good or ill, the personal styles and quirks of senior leaders are infectious, whether they are observed directly by employees or indirectly transmitted from their reports to the level below and on down through the organisation. This effect can’t really be avoided, but enterprise leaders can make it less inadvertent by cultivating more self-awareness and taking the time to develop empathy with subordinates’ viewpoints. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that they were the subordinates, drawing these kinds of inferences from their own bosses’ behaviour.
Michael D. Watkins is a co-founder of Genesis Advisers, a leadership development firm specialising in on-boarding and transition acceleration, and a professor at IMD. He is the author of “The First 90 Days” and “Your Next Move”.
© Harvard Business Review.
This article first appeared on LeadingCompany.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
