The role of leadership in enabling companies and the people within them to adapt faster than the world around them.

In their article titled ‘The art of 21st leadership’, McKinsey state that complicated times demand great leaders and that in todays fragmented world, leading is perhaps more difficult than ever before. 

Leading businesses in today’s complex and constantly changing world certainly is hard, and for business leaders looking to create and sustain high performance across their entire business, being able to look, and stay ahead is critical. Along with the need to have a deep bench of leaders throughout the business, the challenge of adapting at pace is only getting harder. 

In the same article, McKinsey estimate that the number of critical issues CEO’s and their top teams are having to focus on are double what they were 10 years’ ago, up from 4 to 5. Resulting in less time to think and plan ahead, this increased volume clearly has an impact on performance, but this changing dynamic can unfortunately be critical to the business itself. 

We saw the effects of this during the Covid-19 pandemic. Those businesses that were unable to adapt fast enough to the changing environment struggled to survive. Although some firms managed to stay afloat, the long-term effects of the crisis were evident with the Office for National Statistics reporting a dramatic rise in businesses going into administration rising from 82,905 per quarter in 2020 to 105,811 in 2021. 

So how do companies, especially those with limited resources manage to adapt fast enough to ensure they remain competitive in the face of this ever-changing landscape. 

Understanding where your business sits in terms of its ability to adapt is a sensible place to start. Businesses that operate in a control and command fashion often have a mechanical approach to their processes and where structure is based on hierarchy (where the dominant attributes tend to be order, rules and regulations and uniformity), the ability to adapt at the required pace can be greatly diminished.  

The same however, cannot be said of adhocratic businesses where the focus is on a less formal structure that can change more easily than it’s more formal counterpart. The leadership style of these businesses is often in stark contrast too, with a focus on, entrepreneurship, risk-taking and flexibility. These businesses are far better placed to adapt and primed for growth, obtaining competitive advantage through innovation and the creation of new resources. 

It’s not just enough to have one person at the top pulling all the strings, to be truly effective leaders must be present across the entire business. 

As mentioned earlier, to be truly effective you need to have layers of leadership across the entire business, all empowered to make decisions that can affect the outcome of the business. This takes strong leadership and a commitment to trust, two things that can set the culture of the business apart from the competition. 

The importance for truth is emphasised by The Centre for Creative Leadership stating that leadership trust creates the stable foundation for employees and their organisations to flex, adapt and thrive. Trust also leads to new ideas and the ability to try and fail without fear of retribution, as Robert C.Solomon, the distinguished philosopher and business ethicist puts it, ‘trust opens up new and unimagined possibilities’. 

How to move to a culture that allows the business and the people within it to adapt at pace. 

Of course, finding out where your business is on the adaptability scale is just the start. For businesses serious about investing in the long-term growth of their business and the people within it, moving from where they are, to where they need to be can be quite a daunting task.

That being said, following a tried-and-tested method that moves a business and its people through the various stages can certainly help. True, it’s not a journey to be taken up lightly, but building something that’s resilient to change is a worthwhile task that has lasting and positive effects for the people involved, and, in this day and age, that might just make all the difference.

Orca Intelligence

Enabling business to adapt faster than the word around them.