People often regard leadership team members as experienced leaders who possess extensive knowledge and abilities. They have a clear vision of the future and a sharp sense of business. However, this assurance can sometimes turn against them by preventing them from hearing about management and governance innovations that might benefit them.
If they do not recognize the importance of dialogue between the various stakeholders involved (employees, customers, existing or potential suppliers), they risk missing important opportunities to lead their organization to better overall performance.
Listening and corporate / managerial veil
When management is too confident in its ability to understand the market or to make the right decisions, it risks not listening to what its employees or business partners say about their experiences and views. An over-certainty attitude often prevents managerial teams from rapidly adopting major changes related not only to digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), or blockchain, which all offer great potential for significantly increasing productivity and/or fully optimizing existing internal processes. It can also, and unfortunately, even more often, underestimate the importance of managerial innovations and their positive effects on company performance.
It deprives itself of the opportunity to explore innovative solutions to the problems it encounters.
Effective Leadership
Effective leadership is based on a constant shift between confidence and humility: listening carefully to what others say in order to be able to learn continuously; constantly exploring innovative ideas from outside (combating “Not Invented Here” syndrome); encouraging cultural diversity within staff; adopting a collaborative approach to bringing together different points of view; and fearing less change as it is essential for sustainable growth.
It is important that leadership teams be aware that they must remain open to new technologies that further increase operational efficiency through better analytical follow-up and prompt data incorporation in strategic decisions. Leaders must therefore be prepared to explore new approaches or tools to enhance their ability to respond quickly to unpredictable external changes.
In conclusion,while management tends to think that they are mastering their subject, they should rather actively look at how to integrate managerial innovations, responsible governance, modern technologies, etc. in order to maximize overall performance.
Only a humble attitude towards external knowledge will enable leaders to achieve lasting success.
