Features

Published March 2009

The Leadership Conundrum

Corinne Miller

Today’s market offers an intriguing problem for business leaders. Should they focus their resources on innovation or operational excellence? In today’s conditions, it’s not a choice. CLOs must prepare leaders to do both.

People talk about golf swings, bowling swings and tennis swings, but what’s truly intriguing are the pendulum-like swings that companies make across the operational excellence/innovation continuum as they seek that elusive balance between the two extremes.

Leaders often see balancing operational excellence and innovation as a choice: Companies that are successful in the long term see it as the way they do business.

From business leaders to researchers to day-to-day practitioners, there is a resounding message: Neither innovation nor operational excellence is an option. An organization must have both.

Sometimes the pendulum swings toward operational excellence. Sometimes it swings toward innovation. The question is, are both strategically planned, resourced, sponsored, supported and executed upon appropriately? When resources are limited, determining the best balance along the continuum can inadvertently move the leadership conundrum from a balancing act to a juggling act.

This conundrum presents learning leaders with an opportunity to start the discussion. Engage leaders in exploring where the organization has been on the operational excellence/innovation continuum, where it is today and why.

What’s the Best Balance?
Solving the conundrum requires “best” thinking vs. “right” thinking when making decisions about balance. While it involves how leaders at all levels in the organization think, it must start at the top, where strategic planning is done.

Leaders seeking the right balance may realize a number of unintended outcomes. Thinking about what is right may drive data and information to be sought to such an extreme that analysis paralysis could set in. Decisions might not be made in a timely manner or perhaps not made at all. Being “right” means you are taking a discrete and fixed position because there are only two possible positions in this game — and the other position is wrong. When you can’t be wrong, as is the reality in many corporate environments, right thinking may incite risk avoidance and increase politically based actions. When you’re right, you’re done thinking and stop looking for the answer.

Leaders seeking the best balance consider their decisions as the best they can be, based on the best information available in the time frame required. The time frame is considered as critical in the decision-making process as the decision itself. Best thinking doesn’t set an expectation that decisions are the right answers for perpetuity. Best-thinking leaders realize that decisions in today’s business world are complex and temporal in nature, and they keep an eye out. If things change in the future, previous decisions are allowed and even encouraged to be changed to keep the organization at the best balance point on the continuum.

1 2 3 Next Page »

blog comments powered by Disqus

Executive Search

Senior Manager, Global Learning & Talent Development
11/19/2009
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT) is an organization of member firms devoted to excellence in providing professional services and advice. We are focused on client service through a global strategy executed locally in nearly 150 countries.

Director, Leadership & Organizational Development Parkland Health & Hospital System
10/26/2009
Parkland Health & Hospital System (www.parklandhospital.com) located in Dallas, Texas has been voted one of "America's Best Hospitals" by U.S. News & World Report for 16 consecutive years and recently named one of the "Top 100 Hospitals to Work For" by Nursing Professionals Magazine.

The World Bank Knowledge and Learning Coordinator Washington, DC
12/22/2008
The Latin America & Caribbean Region (LCR) of the World Bank serves over 30 countries, mostly middle-income which, despite having middle-income economies, still struggle with pockets of poverty and high level of inequalities.