Leadership Memo 2023-1
Happy New Year! I hope you all had a refreshing break and are recharged to dive into 2023!
As I look back on 2022, I am very thankful for the opportunities that I had. I met many people around the world and made a lot of new friends. I learned new things. I’m fortunate enough to talk to many of you through different events, conferences, and 1-on-1 afterwards. I’m thankful to all who read and commented on my blogs & newsletters and listened to my podcast. I’m also thankful to those who came to my talks as well as SFBABAM’s (San Francisco Bay Area Business Agility Meetup) events. I appreciate all of you who helped me with global market research and those who joined my first pilots. I’m thankful and grateful to my collaboration partners. I enjoyed the time that we had to share, discuss, and work with each other. I have grown and learned from our interactions. Thank you! I look forward to having many more interactions with you in this new year!
When I conclude my global market research, I have a hypothesis. In order to respond and thrive in this complex and rapidly changing world, not just react and survive, organizations need to be flexible and nimble. For organizations to be flexible and nimble, we need a workforce that is happy, empowered, engaged, and high performing. Do you agree?
So, how do we get a workforce that is happy, engaged, and high performing? It starts with the leaders. It is a 21st-century leader’s job to create and maintain an environment that allows the workers to work at their natural best, where employees feel safe and motivated to contribute to their fullest. When your workers work at their natural best and contribute to their fullest, you are releasing their potential. And when you release the potential of your workers, they will release the potential of the business.
When I say “leaders”, I’m not talking about rank. It is a choice to become a leader. Simply getting a promotion doesn’t make you a leader. It just means you have authority and you’re given more authority. Leadership is not about being in charge. It’s about taking care of those in our charge. The choice to become a leader means you now undertake the care of the human beings that are in your charge: the people around you, the ones whom you work with every day, whose faces you recognize, and whose names you know. That’s how leadership occurs at all levels.
Next time, we’ll talk about one of the myths of management.
p.s. If you want to know how to be a 21st-century leader, if you want a happy, empowered, engaged, and high-performing workforce regardless of how the world changes (or how fast it changes), you may want to join the 2nd pilot of my latest program: cultivate happy, engaged, and high-performing employees. I’m running two pilots – One for executives, and the other for managers or people at similar levels. For the management pilot, I have 2 different times, one friendly to EMEA timezones, and the other, APAC timezones. Both are friendly to the Americas. The one friendly to the EMEA timezone starts on January 23. Since we are friends, I’m giving you a friend discount (discount code: FRIENDS). Hope to see you there.
p.p.s. If you want to thrive, instead of just survive, in this complex and rapidly changing world, make an appointment with me and we can discuss which program fits your needs, whether it be a packaged program or a custom program designed for your context.
Latest happenings:
I’m so excited that Jurgen Appelo is helping SFBABAM (San Francisco Bay Area Business Agility Meetup) kick off 2023. He’ll be talking about versatile organization design with the unFIX model. You don’t want to miss it! RSVP here!
When: January 17 at 11:30am Pacific, 2:30pm Eastern, 20:30 CET | 18 January, 8:30am NZDT.
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