Leadership

Many people in the boardroom are still on the sidelines about social media. What will it take to get your board ready to tackle their willingness to learn what is happening on the internet? Will it take seeing your company's name in the news before you add digital literacy to your director's education?

It's hard enough to get a business started on a sound foundation; it's oftentimes much more challenging to continue operating and transitioning into an adult/mature business. The key to success is establishing and maintaining a "trust-centric leadership" model.

If a family business is committed to perpetuation, now is the time to transfer ownership to the next generation, but be careful. Transferring ownership to the next generation without considering governance and management succession issues is like giving your children a Ferrari when they have been driving a VW, a catastrophe waiting to happen.

One of the most significant challenges to senior executives is to keep the pressure on the organization to continually be looking for ways to improve. This falls under the heading of change management.

Evaluating enterprise performance from the perspective of process management is receiving increasing executive attention. Delivering ultimate value to customers is dependent on advancing the effort to define, improve and manage the end-to-end, enterprise processes. The side benefits include gaining clarity on strategic direction, achieving better alignment and installing more operating discipline.

A key component of a high performance oriented culture is the development of a core ideology - core values and sense of purpose beyond just making money that guides and inspires people throughout the organization and remains relatively fixed for long periods of time. The real difference between success and failure in a corporation can very often be traced to the core ideology of how well the organization brings out the great energies and talents of its people.

The complexities of business are leading to a greater acceptance and use of empowered leadership teams to run the business. The difficulty seems to stem from not knowing exactly how to go about it. And that is understandable. There are definite steps involved in getting a group of executive managers to function as a team for the good of the business.

Building an organization committed to the highest performance standards demands more than just good intentions: it also requires fostering practices that create an environment of clarity, commitment, and accountability. Without healthy accountability, an enterprise loses one of the key elements of management - predictability.