Systematic Leadership for Sustainable Value

Creating strategic change is thrilling, daunting, painful, and rewarding. Business leaders with the courage to lead change must develop and apply a systematic approach to managing and leading. Building a Visible Organization, a leadership process developed by CEO Support Systems, Inc., provides the essential skills and tools to get this job done – without sacrificing the responsiveness, agility, innovation, and other assets of the underlying organization.

Leaders don't have a choice about whether or not to manage the complexity they face, but they do have a choice about how they manage it. In view of this complexity, a substantial challenge facing the business leader is getting and maintaining a big picture view of the company. That's why it's so important to build a healthy, visible organization. One that's vital, responsive, supportive – in short, an organization of people who have the desire and the means to grow and endure for the long haul – is the ultimate reward. Yet, there has been a scarcity of pragmatic leadership models and management tools that can be deployed quickly and yield positive results fast.

The key to building a healthy company lies in taking a balanced approach to management and a systematic approach to leadership. It lies in creating a structure that both informs the leader and directs the team. A structure that drives awareness of and accountability for results, at the strategic, tactical, CEO, and staff levels, is imperative.

Building a Visible Organization is a methodology that creates just such a structure. It accommodates the vast array of subjective factors – organizational, intellectual, procedural, cultural, political, emotional, and others – and, the objective factors – financial, technical, and others -- that form the “terra unfirma" beneath leaders’ feet. Within the structure, these factors are harnessed as crucial indicators of, and ingredients for, success. Yet, the structure is flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of leadership styles and philosophies, organizational cultures, and business challenges.

A Closer Look

Building a Visible Organization means building value for customers, employees, owners, and suppliers. Potential value is related to the quality of the solution being presented to a market opportunity, the quality of the team engaged in the effort, the size of the market opportunity, the sufficiency of capital available for the challenge, and the systematic use of knowledge. Optimizing each of these elements is the very essence of the business leader's challenge, and is inherently very complex.

A balanced management approach insures that attention is paid to all of the organizational functions most responsible for maximizing each of these value elements. For example, sales and marketing manages the market opportunity while production is responsible for the solution, and so on. The central requirement, however, is that the business leader consistently invest time, thought, and resources into each of these core function areas.

Systematic leadership provides the foundation for communication, accountability, motivation, and other essential ingredients that harness the collective energy of a team in pursuit of the goals of the business. After boiling down some of the keenest insights, refining some of the most powerful models, and distilling some of the most telling accounts of success and failure in business, a seven-step leadership model has emerged.

Systematic Leadership -- Seven Fundamentals

• Principles: "Laws" which govern how your business operates. Laws may be common to the business world and/or specific to an industry, business, or leader.
• Plans: Strategic and tactical sets of actions needed to accomplish goals while maintaining support of chosen principles.
• People: Ensuring that proper jobs are filled by qualified people who are trained and supported adequately.
• Processes: Procedures that are committed in writing and that identify necessary steps for people to follow for effective performance in each area.
• Metrics: Key measurements that effectively track progress on key issues.
• Improvers: Feedback loops to harness metrics to monitor processes and people for greater results with plans.
• Rewards: Benefits derived from achievement of plans, designed to motivate and reward all stakeholders.