Leadership is an influence, influence comes from insightful understanding and dedicated efforts to make a difference.
Uncertainty and frequent change is the new normal; to thrive in the “VUCA” digital era, the challenge of managing change today is tough, business leaders must see possibilities before others; they can tackle great challenges with grand consequences over long time spans.
Recognizing and valuing differences: Corporate boards oversee business strategy and catalyze innovation. The management generates and shares ideas that stimulate debate among directors who are there to make invaluable contributions to criticize strategy and monitor performance effectively. Criticism shows portrayal of ideas, concerns, directions, and attitudes. Asking good questions to management can help to clarify the vision and bring new insight about how to steer the company in the right direction.
In addition, business leaders including BoDs need to understand the value of harnessing the differences and proactively build inclusive teams and organizations. Inclusive leaders facilitate a variety of differences such as cognitive differences, value differences, knowledge difference, cultural differences; embrace complementary perspectives and personalities, as well as cultivate a collective insight to appreciate the delight of inclusion.
Reducing ambiguity and uncertainty: In the past, many business leaders believed their organizations’ long-term goals could wait until they had dealt with the current crisis. In the current “VUCA” business environment, this is no longer the case. Business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy; but BoDs can enforce a healthy information based feedback-feedforward cycle to reduce ambiguity and manage uncertainty. They are able to contribute unique viewpoints as the business outlier to scrutinize strategy management, and make appropriate adjustments because they don’t evolve in everyday business.
In today’s global economy, the rate of change has accelerated, indicating that business leaders must learn how to strike a balance between managing complex issues today and predicting the uncertain issues of tomorrow. The value of managing ambiguity and risk could be in better management decisions. The potential impact of these uncertainties allows for a better-informed decision process and determination as to whether the uncertainty is within the risk tolerance. Thus, leadership plays an important role in dealing with uncertainty, enhancing resilience, improving reputation, and increasing flexibility. Effective uncertainty management allows for the establishment of metrics and “early warning” triggers for downside risks, for which there might be contingency plans established.
Raising concerns to enforce governance: With overwhelming growth of information and continuous business disruptions, organizations simply just can’t stand still. In today’s business dynamic, governance shouldn’t add a heavy layer of control which causes a high degree of bureaucracy. The BoDs need to check up: What are the substances in today’s governance body? What are the perspectives for the future of governance? What’re thought-provoking questions to enhance GRC disciplines? To avoid micromanagement, corporate boards need to be insightful problem-definers and they often delegate the well-defined problems to management for implementing solutions
The shift to digital cuts across sectors, geographies, and leadership roles, effective governance facilitates the successful functioning of an organization while ensuring there are adequate controls in place to operate responsibly in accordance with its values. There are governance practices to enforce accountability at every level of the organization. And there are varying BoD governance activities such as delegation of authority, culture reinvention, potential discovery, or performance monitoring, etc to improve business effectiveness and competency.
Leadership is an influence, influence comes from insightful understanding and dedicated efforts to make a difference. Corporate board directors as top directorship roles are supposed to be the guiding force in the enterprise, help the top management sense growth opportunities, identify blind spots, clarify priorities, predict risks and avoid pitfalls on the way, with the goal to unlock business performance and improve overall organizational agility and maturity.
