Lengthy reigns at the top may be the next thing to get disrupted.
Carol Ryan – Wall Street Journal Writer
What’s the CEOs role in VUCA time? What do you think? According to the Wall Street Journal. “Point people to the light at the end of the tunnel” (Crash Course in Crisis Management, Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2020)
Story: The challenge: some CEOs are unfit for VUCA duty. In other words, they are not ‘VUCA or future-ready’. Take a look at what investors say in the Self Disruptive Leader survey from Korn Ferry (BTW: Pre-COVID:
• “78 percent (of investors) insist the CEO is critically important when deciding in which companies to invest.”
• “83 percent (of investors) cite an exceptional CEO as critical to an organization’s success in disruptive times.”
• Bottom Line: “Fewer than two in ten corporate leaders have the skills required to take their companies into the future: according to investors.”(Failing the Grade: Investors World-Wide Say Current Corporate Leadership Is ‘Unfit’ for Future, A Major Korn Ferry Study Finds’, Korn Ferry, March 12, 2019.)
COVID is a great opportunity to reinvent companies. A critical result of the above survey is executives can’t solve uncertain problems and make smart decisions quickly. Think Risk Based, Problem Solving and Risk Based Decision Making. In VUCA time, leadership decision making and management problem solving seem to be lacking.
The same can be said of political decision making. Got doubts? Think Washington. Think China.
Story: Let’s look at GE again. GE was the world’s most valuable company 20 years ago. It had the ‘best and brightest’ leaders and managers. It invented a lot of the third industrial revolution. But things happened. Bad adaptation. Bad decisions. Bad timing. Its value tanked along with weak profits. GE CEO reported in the Wall Street Journal (pre-COVID):
“I’m not going to put the company’s reputation at further risk … We are going to come up with guidance when we can walk people through it where the math adds up, and we can be very clear on how we are going to go about delivering on those numbers.”
Work Lesson Earned: So, what’s the role of a leader and job of a manager when everyone’s working remotely? How does a manager gage performance or provide Zoom feedback in a digitally remote workplace? There are lots of new questions in COVID time.
Something to think about is how do executives in your organization solve problems and make decisions in COVID time? How do executives manage risks? What makes them successful?
Do you like your boss? If you’re an individual contributor, do you want to be a supervisor or manager in your organization? Why? Why not?
Leadership in VUCA time can be hard to come by
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