Leading in Disruptive Times - CEE Global

Leading in Disruptive Times

“Disruption is happening everywhere and in every aspect of our lives. It is happening at a scale and speed that is unprecedented in modern history, impacting diverse industries, from financial services to retail, media, logistics and supply chain, manufacturing, education, professional services, and life sciences. Leaders are finding it challenging to navigate the near-insurmountable challenges resulting from the impact of these disruptive events on their organizations.

 The right leadership is critical for organizations to thrive in a disruptive business environment. How should we define leadership in such an environment? Are the current leadership practices and competencies still relevant in the face of such disruption? What are the attributes of a “disruptive digital leader”? How can leaders set themselves up not only to survive but also to thrive in navigating the challenges of disruptive events and crises?”

Sattar Bawany (2020), Leadership in Disruptive Times. ISBN-13: 978-1-95253-836-0, Business Expert Press (BEP) LLC, New York, NY (July 2020)

Introduction

Today’s businesses face unprecedented challenges operating in a global environment that is highly disruptive and increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA).

Disruption has impacted in a significant manner the way the world works, as many of us have experienced today and in recent years. Today’s businesses, government and individuals are responding to shifts that would have seemed unimaginable even a few years ago.

The current wave of disruption, including the recent coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the known forces of Industry 4.0 (such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and blockchain technologies), globalization, and demographic change, are reinventing the workforce. Internet technologies have enabled drones and driverless cars, which are transforming supply chains, logistics, healthcare and even in defense and security, such as the war against terrorism.

These disruptive forces have significantly impacted businesses, economies, industries, societies, families and individual lives.

The Disruptive Impact of COVIS-19 Pandemic

Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 pandemic has been highly disruptive for business across all industries, irrespective of whether it is airline business, retail, restaurant, or manufacturing. The coronavirus has and will continue to impact many businesses’ sustainability due to their inability to generate revenue in 2020, which could very likely result in their demise.

Many leaders have commented that they had déjà vu — that feeling that they are experiencing and doing what that has already happened or event, referring to another past disruptive activity of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008/2009. The COVID-19 crisis is also different where both business and human resource leaders have been tested in their ability to manage their businesses successfully by finding new ways in leading and engaging their teams in the ‘new normal’ including leveraging on new technologies and communication tools and policies such as “Work-From-Home” (WFH) to keep their employees due to mandated “social distancing” measures and closure of offices as imposed by local governments.

The Disruptive Impact of the Digital Revolution

The impact of digital technology on businesses is the other disruptive force that is featured in this book. The explosion of data and unprecedented advances in computer processing power globally have dramatically increased the capacity to support decision making within various functional operations in organizations across industries. The world has moved well beyond basic and enhanced process automation and is entering an era of cognitive automation leveraging on artificial intelligence and robotics. The World Economic Forum is calling this the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

The impact of advanced technologies touches virtually every industry and organization on many levels, from strategic planning and marketing to supply chain management and customer service.  Today, many individuals and organizations across the globe are exploiting this change to disrupt every industry. Uber, Alibaba, Airbnb, Netflix, and Tesla are just a few famous examples of companies that have transformed lifestyles, including the way people travel, shop, and stay, and there are many more.

Developing a Digital-Driven Organizational Culture

Leaders in organizations are continually being confronted with increased competition, globalization, demand for growing social responsibilities, and a stream of technological revolution disrupting the marketplace. Hence leaders need to challenge their mental models in their efforts to build and sustain a high-performance digital-driven organization culture. Effective leadership is the process of impacting and influencing people to achieve the desired results and prepare for the future. Leading in today’s highly disruptive and increasingly VUCA-driven world is becoming much more challenging. As a result, there is no easy path to becoming a highly effective leader and the challenge of being one in such an environment seems almost impossible.

One of the biggest challenges facing organizations today is that they are facing more significant pressure to develop the future or next generation of leaders faster in response to dramatically changing the digital and highly disruptive business landscape:

• Who is the next generation of disruptive digital leaders?
• What would it take to lead in disruptive times?
• What do business and human resource leaders need to know about developing identifying, assessing, selecting and developing the next generation of disruptive digital leaders?
• How can leaders leverage the relevant best practices tools and frameworks to lead and engage their teams in today’s fast-paced, highly disruptive, digital and VUCA-driven business environment?

Attributes of Disruptive Digital Leaders

These include, but are not limited to, a combination of variables such as visionary and entrepreneurial skills, innovation-driven mindset and experimentation (disruptive mentality), cognitive readiness and critical thinking (mental agility), emotional resilience, empathy, and social skills (people agility), driving for success (results agility), and resilience and adaptability (change agility).

Disruptive digital leaders empower their employees to innovate and cocreate by developing and providing the pathways for these employees to quickly move concepts into experiments and learning or impact across the organization. Such leaders make innovation a priority and give employees and teams the time and space to collaborate, experiment, and learn with new digital tools like virtual reality, machine learning, and automation.

It also means allowing them to find creative ways to innovate and provide support amid the COVID-19 crisis, as we have seen with sev­eral distilleries and cosmetic companies worldwide that are innovating and pivoting to produce hand sanitizers for their communities.

In a digital-driven business environment, organizations must be able to innovate faster than their competitors. Disruptive digital leaders would encourage innovation at the needed velocity by establishing a culture of innovation and creativity. They visibly champion this belief at every level of the organization, actively role-modeling a culture that encourages risk-taking and discovery. They encourage speed and embrace learning from inevitable failures along the way, equipping themselves much better to succeed in the digital world.

These leaders are open to new ideas with cognitive readiness and crit­ical thinking skills and find ways to test theories, develop relationships with others who are known for their innovation, and challenge them­selves to view every problem from diverse perspectives. They are plugged into emerging technologies, bravely experimenting and rapidly learning through what works and, just as importantly, what doesn’t. Their innovative mindset is infectious, and they promote it throughout the organiza­tion’s culture.

Disruptive digital leaders are not afraid to take risks or fail; without such an attitude, innovation and progress are not possible. They create an environment in which employees are allowed to fail and make mistakes without repercussions. This encourages employees to experiment and to innovate and help the company grow.

These leaders don’t just experiment with technology but are also will­ing to try new management and leadership techniques. They realize that part of a digital strategy is to change management methods. The traditional hierarchical organizational structure, with the strict division between boss and employee, is often obstructive to digital transformation. Digital teams should have the freedom to make decisions and to organize themselves and their work independently.

Conclusion

 Organizations should have a sense of optimism (but grounded to reality) and should not have a bleak view of the business landscape characterized by the threat of new start-ups at every turn and the potential disruptive impact these start-ups would potentially have on their business. Digi­talization is shaping the way organization operates today and, to serve customers better, businesses must understand how to leverage digital technologies to innovate and better serve them.

Every business today needs to embark on digital transformation if they have not done so already. Digitalization is not just about how tech­nology is being incorporated into the organization but about how tech­nology can be leveraged to create new opportunities for the business and also ensuring the organization serves the customer of today and tomor­row. Digital transformation is for all sizes and types of organizations as it provides opportunities to innovate, retain, and capture more market share in the segments that they are currently serving or entering new ones. Digitalization would also be able to streamline the way the organization currently works by developing and implementing effective and efficient systems and processes that would result in increased productivity, profit­ability, and sustainable growth for the business.

Reference:

Sattar Bawany, (2020). Leadership in Disruptive Times. New York, NY: Business Express Press (BEP) Inc., LLC.

Sattar Bawany, (2020). “The Future Role of HR in the Aftermath of COVID-19 Crisis: Transformation of the Digital-driven Workplace in the ‘New Nor­mal’.” HR Strategy and Planning Excellence 8, no. 5, pp. 6–8.

Sattar Bawany, (2020). “Forum: Government Taking Decisive Action to Fight Pandemic.” The Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes.com/forum/forum-government-taking-decisive-action-to-fight-pandemic, (date accessed May 30, 2020).

Sattar Bawany, (2019). Transforming the Next Generation of Leaders: Developing Future Leaders for a Disruptive, Digital-Driven Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0). New York, NY: Business Express Press (BEP) Inc., LLC.

Sattar Bawany (2019). “Leadership 4.0: How Ready Are You to Be a Digital Leader?” Leadership Excellence Essentials 36, no. 2, pp. 28–30.

Douglas A. Ready, et al. (2020). “The New Leadership Playbook for the Digital Age. Findings from the 2020 Future of Leadership Global Executive Study and Research Project” MIT Sloan Management Review.