In today's dynamic world change has become a constant in business. The business environment changes, the technology evolves, the customer preferences change and so do many more factors that directly or indirectly impact business.
These changes require adaptability as a trait to succeed. Business leaders need to own up both success as well as failures resulting from any of these changes. Leaders cannot get away if business fails due to changes in environment, technology, consumer preferences or any other factor. Adaptability today is the biggest determinant of success for any business.
Another change that is very common today in businesses and impacts the business more than everything else is the change in people and more specifically the change of leadership. The way a new leader starts will make early impression of the leader in the organisation. It also is a way of defining the way change will be embraced in the organization under the new leadership. Often, we see leaders going overboard and make sweeping statements which are then not followed by any concrete actions. As a new leader comes in, even before he starts doing things needs to first understand the as is scenario, then figure out what changes need to be made and how? This requires not just understanding of business but also people. The adaptability here is both ways for business as well as leader. Having said this, there will always be comparison of any leader with the earlier leader and the same needs to be handled deftly. Leaders should not get carried away by this rather try to stay away from this. Neutrality is the characteristic the organisation wants to see and so the biggest mistake a new leader can do it to put responsibility of failures or issues on earlier leaders as it shows lack of ownership, solution orientation and positive thinking. One needs to understand that employees work for their leaders and it takes time to be accepted as leader in a new set up, hence not being neutral will just make that path much more difficult for a new leader.
When an incoming leader starts putting things on what the earlier leaders did then the impression you create for leadership is as follows.
- Judgemental Leader: Leader looks at problems with lens of whose time period rather than the severity and solution to it, leading employees to feel they will also be judged at a later date. Environment changes so fast what is best thing to be done today may be sub optimal tomorrow and so as they say don’t judge in hindsight but do a wisdom test. Judgemental leaders will never have teams working for them but only employees.
- Solutions will be harder to get: Leaders thought process is not of ownership and solution finding but individualistic, defensive, regressive and only of problem finding. Such leaders will never create a culture of collective ownership and so you will see organisations struggling with unresolved issues across the verticals. Employees want solutions and not genesis of problem to be discussed. With discussion around genesis of problem employees feel solutions are difficult to come by. The solutions approach taken will be of taking easy routes rather than right routes.
- Decision making becomes pass the buck: By questioning predecessors, the questions on leadership in general start getting raised. The confidence is shaken for the entire leadership old as well as new, hence the leadership stability is low and none of the leaders would want to take a decision as they fear getting targeted in future. Decision making becomes a trivia with no one wanting to take a lead and just passing the buck.
- Disengaged Employees: The engagement levels of employees take a hit when such things happen in any organisation. With this the leadership becomes distanced from employees as the communication channels break down. The organization tends to become passive with no real zeal in employees as there is a complete disengagement.
Hence, the change of leadership actually brings in not just the element of adaptability but also of ownership to the fore. For leaders who own up and work at solutions will find acceptability and support which will further help them manoeuvre and move ahead, while leaders who blame it on others find themselves wriggled in the same issues. That is why I say "True leaders don't put blame but put the flame and lead ahead."
