What we take in visually accounts for over 80 percent of external information reaching our brains. Although sight isn’t our only sense, it functions as a meta tool for us, as humans and as leaders. Whatever helps us see better is worth our investment and care. Lenses help us see more clearly by bringing distant objects closer and helping us focus. They expand a field of vision, take away shadows, and illuminate details. From a management perspective, the concept of lens is important as a framework to help leaders filter out distractions and concentrate on what’s truly important. For leaders to be effective in the digital business environment, Right Management believes five lenses have particular value: adaptive focus, paradox, collaboration, diversification, and transformation.
ADAPTIVE FOCUS
The ability to create and actively adjust a vision for the organization
In the fast-changing digital environment, successful leaders bring agility to vision-setting while still making the goals tangible and aspirational. In the past, conventional business visioning was more internally focused and less of an ongoing process. Visions were often set without holistic stakeholder considerations and then updated every few years as part of a stable strategic planning process.
Vision carries greater weight than ever today. Today’s vision lens for leaders requires:
- Broader horizons and fewer internal-only concerns
- Ongoing and continuous fine-tuning, using data to inform and differentiate between short term adjustments and longer-term revolutions
- Active engagement and continuous sensing and adapting—it can’t be a “set and forget’ practice.
Leadership vision includes the foresight to morph products to services that set up long-term relationships, and lead collaborations of new types between people, machines, and data. Leaders must be able to motivate the workforce to move through ambiguity to reach unfamiliar destinations. They have to accentuate the positives while still being mindful of the perils. They have to promote experimentation, assess and adapt to unintended consequences, and remove the barriers and concerns that naturally occur in times of fundamental change.
Leaders succeed when they keep their vision lens open and active, working to focus on the horizon as the dynamic environment continuously changes.
PARADOX
The ability to lead through seeming contradictions
The digital era brings challenges that require leaders to suspend automatic responses and adopt new mindsets that allow them to embrace seeming contradictions. As a leader in the digital era you are asking your organization to work within multiple paradoxes such as:
- More technology and automation, but also exponentially more human connection through collaboration
- More data to accelerate decision-making but more time needed to analyze and interpret it
- Greater focus on innovation yet increased attention to the details of operation, such as efficiency and cost management
- More shared data, yet increased security, protection and boundaries
- More employee-centric work cultures yet increased stress about future employability
- More hardware and electronics yet the need to improve our connection with nature
- Leveraging what was good about legacy while transforming the organization.
Through the paradox lens, a patient leader can see new possibilities within contrasting states and find growth and harmony in digital business situations where no playbook exists.
COLLABORATION
The ability to partner and integrate
No business goes on the digital journey alone. Collaboration is the new default for how to share information, be innovative, and accelerate performance. Business today requires policy and regulatory relationships, partner networks, customer communities, and employee groups. As companies move through transformation, leaders need a high degree of empathy, communication, and internal and external feedback loops about innovation, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction. As digitally native companies become mature, they enter into more collaborations in order to scale the business.
Collaboration has significant organizational and business implications; it needs structures and management well beyond open cubicle designs and social platforms. While digital era work arrangements seem less physical at times, they are actually changing the structures of working relationships. There are more ways to collaborate and fewer excuses not to. The collaboration lens sees value in fewer solo acts, fewer silos, and more connections and points of integration. This is a lens of granting permission for new connections and new relationships; it requires increased trust of your teams and rethinking of conventional control and focus preferences.
DIVERSIFICATION
The ability to be/do multiple things at any point in time
Diversification is the life force of healthy ecosystems. Differentiating and branching out, sharing responsibilities and opportunities, flexing and modularizing can uncover new capabilities, spread risk, and improve performance. This digital era demands that leaders foster diverse, creative ideas about products, services, and the teams that make them happen.
Considering different ways of structuring, managing and operating teams and programs is one of the hallmarks of a culture of innovation, setting the stage for increased trust and inclusion, as well as greater experimentation and learning. The diversification and collaboration lenses are complementary and used together are a powerful tool to help organizations take full advantage of the new possibilities and connections possible in the digital era.
TRANSFORMATION
The ability to enable significant, whole-scale change
Transformation as a leadership lens implies seeing connections across the enterprise and working simultaneously on multiple parts of the business or organizational system. This includes strategies, business models, structures, roles, culture, technologies, systems and platforms and more. Fundamental shifts occurring at the same time in multiple areas require an emphasis on people and culture transformation even more than technical and data transformation. Developing new methods of working, as well as upskilling and reskilling talent are critical. This lens requires the ability to execute while being in experimentation and fast-fail mode and to be comfortable with cyclic processes and shifts in equilibrium. These leadership lenses comprise a good starting toolkit regardless of where your organization or business is on the digital journey. Using these lenses can get you organized for digital era leadership and understand what it takes to be successful.
