Maybe it’s time for you to leave your comfort zone

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always achieve what you’ve always achieved.” HAYNES

I know that you are convinced that everything is going well and that you have a bright future… How can it be otherwise, if so far you have received nothing but congratulations for your management and the last performance assessment you have received has been very positive? But the truth is, important things are happening around you. The world is changing, and maybe you should ask yourself: How do these changes affect my customers? What impact will they have on the competitiveness of my products and services? How does all of this affect me personally? How will these changes affect my future employability? Well, our conversation today is going to deal precisely with these issues; About the need we have to We ask ourselves what the leadership of the future will be like, how we can move towards new models of collective intelligence management in the Age of Collaboration, and what the models of value creation through people will be like in the new era.

You’ll find it hard to imagine that management is going to change. It’s normal. It is always difficult to imagine that something that has changed so little in recent decades can do so in a short period of time. Moreover, after decades of orthodox management in hierarchical organizations, with a high level of bureaucracy and a management system capable of killing the passion of the most loyal of our employees, we can be sure that the changes that are required are neither obvious nor will be easy. These changes are particularly difficult to anticipate if you have already reached your “comfort zone”, and you are convinced that management is a tool for managing the status quo. That is to say, it will be very difficult for you to change if you think that this management thing consists of things continuing to work well, as always, and that if the client or the “smart” person on duty discovers that there is a problem, the only thing you have to do is solve it and that’s it.

Gary Hamel
argues in his latest book,
“The Future of Management”
, that management as we know it today – that is, the management practices we know and that are the guarantee of our future employability – is a mature technology and as such incapable of solving the new challenges that organizations will face in the new millennium. The leadership model we all know and inherited from the industrial age was designed to solicit obedience and diligence, and to develop the talent of our employees. But it was not a model designed to create work environments that promoted the initiative, creativity and passion of our collaborators

This should come as no surprise. As I have mentioned in previous conversations, most of the tools and techniques of modern management come from the first half of the 20th century, and were invented by management pioneers born in the previous century, in the 19th century. Today, in an environment marked by accelerated change, permanent innovation and the globalization of markets, we need to create organizations that are transparent, agile as change itself, and in which innovation and leadership is everyone’s job. The reality is that we can command obedience, diligence and work, but we cannot command initiative, imagination, creativity or passion. These are gifts that only our employees can decide whether or not they want to bring to their organizations every day.

Gary’s message is clear: “At some point over the next decade our companies will be faced with the need to change in a way that is unprecedented.” To face these challenges, companies necessarily have to change their management model, innovating in management, which implies innovating in strategic planning processes, budget management, project management, talent attraction and retention, performance evaluation, promotion and development of their executives and, In short, all those processes and rituals that translate the principles of management into daily action of governance of organizations. Given the magnitude of the changes, it is also possible that organizations may decide to change managers themselves. That’s why my suggestion is that the time has come for you to leave your “comfort zone”.

Innovation in management has to do with management processes. In short, it is about facing innovation in management with the same creativity and passion that we put into other areas, for example, in the innovation of products and services.

Some reasons to innovate

1. In the new Age of Collaboration, organizations are going to face challenges that are simply outside the realm of traditional management competencies and their legacy. In a new environment that emphasizes collaboration and talent, the old hierarchies and management structures are an impediment to creativity and innovation in our organizations, which must also adapt to change at a speed they have never faced before. It will become increasingly difficult for many companies to stay ahead of the curve of change. In this environment, we must seek a balance between the new emerging management practices and experimentation in order to find new and innovative management models, models that allow us to create the strategic competencies necessary in the new Era of Collaboration.
2. The hierarchical organizations we have created in the last century place the emphasis on labor and capital as the basis of value creation processes. And in doing so, not only do they fail to respond to the current needs of companies – collaboration and human capital management – but they have also created a model of employee participation that does not allow them to unleash their creativity. As if that were not enough, this model has generated a very high level of complexity that makes it impossible for organizations to respond adequately to market changes.
3. The idea that mobilizing human effort requires a legion of supervisors and bureaucrats is an anachronism that, like any “legacy,” refuses to disappear. The reality is that most “hierarchy” doesn’t add any value to organizations; Rather, it acts as a “passion killer”, preventing our employees from bringing their inner creativity and passion, and preventing their involvement and commitment in the work they do.
4. We need to create organizations capable of attracting and retaining new digital talent. Valuation and compensation that, instead of taking into account the added value to the organization and the contribution to results, is carried out according to the hierarchies, titles or privileges of the past, is simply another anachronism. Young people who are coming to companies today for the first time – the Digital Natives – have radically different values, motivations and expectations, and we must be able to offer them a new leadership model if we want to attract and retain their talent.
5. Crowdsourcing has a radical impact on the transparency of organizations. Similar to what has happened with the Internet in markets – we have seen that it has created more efficient markets – transparency in organizations creates more flexible and efficient organizations. In many cases, the organizations we have created – both in the public and private spheres – are largely based on the opacity of their structures and the ignorance of the reality of the organization on the part of its members.

Where to start?

The starting point, then, may be what the title of the post suggests: to get out of our “comfort zone” and start exploring the realities of the new age. We have already advanced some of the keys in previous conversations: The Era of Collaboration, Leadership 2.0, Digital Natives, Immigrant Bosses, Liquid Borders, etc. And others we will continue to explore in future posts. We just need a little humility to recognize that, perhaps, the management practices that have given us so much success in the past are not necessarily going to serve us in the future. None of the suggestions I mention below require attending a new management course. All we have to do is open our minds and make our thinking patterns more flexible:

1. Start with your personal schedule. It’s very simple: if you don’t have a personal agenda, it’s highly likely that you’re part of someone else’s agenda. It’s about having your own vision of the leadership of the future, and establishing a personal action plan to transform yourself and introduce a new practice into your day-to-day work as a manager. Remember that “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always achieve what you’ve always achieved.”

2. Be an innovative leader. Create a culture that questions the status quo and tackles organizational challenges in an unusual way, looking for new ways to address them. Explore new avenues and avoid easy answers to the problem. Build a low-risk experimentation capability that allows you to launch new management innovation initiatives with a limited number of people and resources, so you can validate the level of commitment to potential changes. In other words, it gives new ideas a chance without paralyzing the organization’s ability to achieve its results on a day-to-day basis.

3. Learn the new language of collaboration with the same zeal with which you learned English back in the day to ensure a future in any multinational. Digital natives have taken advantage of the collaboration platform – web 2.0 – to create innovative forms of communication that we, digital immigrants, are not yet familiar with. Exceed the Digital Immigrant Syndrome (Not Touched!), actively participate in the most relevant blogs and social networks for your profession or sector and, when you feel the time has come, publish your own and create your own brand (Personal Branding) to make you known and establish your network of contacts.

4. It questions old ways of working that only made sense in the past and emerged to solve a problem that is no longer relevant to the organization. A frequent example of a management process of dubious value is the preparation of the annual budget of companies: it usually involves a huge waste of time and effort. Another clear example can be that of the endless operations meetings, in which it is not very clear what real value we are providing.

My invitation could not be more sincere. It is clear that the invention of modern management in the industrial age is one of the greatest achievements of mankind, and to this invention we owe our material prosperity in large measure. But the time has come to “abandon the comfort” typical of inflexible organizations with the imagination, passion and creativity of people; The time has come to renegotiate some of the terms of our employment contract and to reinvent ourselves as leaders and people. It is really important that we start building organizations that are ready to attract and develop the unique talent of the new generations of digital natives, in order to make the most of the enormous opportunities that the new Era of Collaboration brings, across the board.

*You can see the content of this post summarized in the following presentation: