Article by FESBC
Before the coronavirus struck, it was already clear that winning the ‘20s would require approaches to Eswatini MSMEs and business fundamentally different from those of the past. Becoming a bionic company, one that unleashes the full potential of people and technology, was already becoming an imperative in our Kingdom and the region. The COVID-19 pandemic seems only to have accelerated the need for this transformation. In order to survive, thrive, and compete successfully, MSMEs and companies now have only two years (or less) to get to where they might otherwise have hoped to be in five.
Of the many pressing demands on business leaders, transforming their companies to adopt a new, “bionic” operating model may be the most urgent and will require them to lead in new ways. A lot will change in the Kingdom and beyond and so must our business CEOs and MSME leaders.
What do business leaders really need to do—what really needs to change—as they transform their companies to become bionic in the post-COVID world? At FESBC we see four imperatives. (1) Leaders must rethink the art of the possible, (2) they must move from managing to enabling, (3) they must harness the full power of technology, and (4) they must translate purpose into action.
Rethink the Art of the Possible
Technology creates new possibilities. With the exponential changes that surround us, it is imperative for a MSME and company to embrace these new possibilities, not just as a cost lever but as a means of breaking compromises. It is critical that business leaders direct their teams to really re-imagine the future.
Set an imaginative aspiration and bold direction.
To develop truly bionic Eswatini MSMEs and companies, our business leaders must envision new and ambitious operating models with technology at the core. That means reimagining how work gets done and what gets delivered. For example, Netflix and Amazon were very early example of this, envisioning a digital future for entertainment and home shopping that the rest of the industry looked down upon, (and that some companies eventually paid a steep price for dismissing) and then setting a bold course toward that goal.
Similarly, bionic companies start from (future) tomorrow and work (past) backward, not from today forward. One It’s not about tech replacing people. At FESBC we encourage the leadership team to think of new questions and new problems that we can now solve with people and tech together. That is the game. That is our job as Executive Leadership Coach at FESBC.
Fail fast, scale fast
Business leaders need to create an environment in which it makes sense not just for individual teams but for the company as a whole to fail fast and learn. The idea of failing fast has been fashionable for some time. What many business leaders miss is the idea of (expanding) scaling fast.
Once ideas or products start to gain (momentum) traction, business leaders need to make sure that they move beyond pilots and are (grow) scaled so they can have an impact on the market. That means making a decision based on imperfect information and investing boldly behind it, taking a portfolio approach on a few significant bets. At FESBC we have codified this bias toward action in one of our business leadership principles for executives—“We value calculated risk taking”
Win with others
Business is often conceived as a zero-sum war against competitors, but for bionic companies it is much more valuable tofocus on finding win-win scenarios and opportunities for (going backwards and forwards) reciprocity. Understand not only what your company can deliver to customers, but what it could deliver to other members of an ecosystem as a partner, supplier, source of talent, or convener. In some cases, even direct competitors can create such arrangements, as one South African company done in their shared bid to promote conservation. One of our FESBC leaders cleverly put it:
“It is incumbent on me to have a view to lift my whole industry and all our partners. I can’t win in a barren desert.”
Move from Managing to Enabling
In a bionic company, where technology performs many routine tasks, the most important human contributions will be creativity, cooperation, ethical and business judgment, and an understanding of context. In order for employees to bring these skills and contributions to their work, they will need to be engaged very differently. It won’t be enough to just direct them to perform the narrow tasks in their job descriptions. Business leaders must work to enable their people to bring their full potential to the job.
Push for the right behaviours
Culture and behaviours that align with that culture are critical in any MSMEs and company. Often this alignment requires the use of traditional levers like ($) compensation, the allocation of scarce resources, and the selection of people to fill specific roles. But in a bionic MSME company, it also means leveraging technology and behavioural science to strengthen the needed behaviours. Our business leaders must use real-time reminders, role plays, gamification, rapid feedback loops, and other (push) nudge tools at scale to transform culture and individual behaviours in order to cement desired habits over time.
Lead by doing
The idea that “business leaders lead, managers review, doers do” no longer applies in a bionic company. Today, business leaders need to be involved with the teams driving innovation and with the people interacting with customers so that they can play a firsthand role in shaping and speeding up the change journey.
In one Eswatini leading insurance company, senior leaders stopped holding their traditional monthly reviews. Instead, they started visiting team rooms, sitting in on morning meetings, and talking directly with customers, which energized the staff and significantly reduced communication overhead: As the CEO told our FESBC researcher:
“I don’t wait for the review where it’s backward looking. I get out there with the team so I can share my vision where the work is happening”
Hire for character, train for mastery
In a bionic MSME company, it’s especially important to hire for the (invisible) intangibles: integrity, good judgment, creativity, and entrepreneurialism. “Apart from some core skills, I look for the integrators, the disruptors, the innovators, the steadfast deliverers. We need all of them,” said the CEO of an Eswatini insurance company. At the same time, the bionic company must learn to reskill at scale and build T-shaped skills: a broad base with one deep area of expertise.
A leading consumer goods Eswatini company redefined its career paths so that every step helps build the critical skills needed for future business leadership. To accelerate learning, the company ensures that leaders are regularly given new roles in new settings with new teams. It has also partnered with several learning providers and curates a learning offer for leaders using technology to enable the adequate scale and personalization.
Harness the Full Power of Technology
Eswatini business leaders of a bionic company need to get beneath the surface of buzzwords like “digital” and “technology,” not necessarily as technologists but as navigators and advanced users. They need to know how to make bold decisions and use the power of technology to reshape their leadership models.
Insist on tech fluency
Eswatini business leaders also need to build credibility through action, which means experimenting with cutting-edge tools and ways of working instead of traditional analogue older methods because they are more comfortable. Business leaders who do this will set a standard for tech fluency that will help the MSME business attract young talent, retain senior experts, and move their MSME business forward.
Unleash transparency by using technology
Business leaders mustleverage technology to build systems of information and transparency. When a lot of information is easily available, the bar can be raised on how much teams are expected to use it on a regular basis. For instance, they can use information to course correct more frequently, to identify a broader (specialist group) cohort of people to help find creative solutions to tough problems, and to increase people’s confidence that the MSME or company is making ethical, data-based decisions.
For example, when an institution published salary levels, issues of pay equity were exposed that the MSME Company was then able to address, increasing employee confidence in its commitment to fairness. In the past, transparency involved significant cost and needed to be traded off against the work of codifying and disseminating information. That tradeoff has been broken, providing business leaders with a significant potential advantage.
Understand the balance between humans and technology
New technologies hold tremendous promise, but they are not a panacea and they do not function on their own. They have no ethical bounds or common sense, and they can turn small mistakes into colossal collapses owing to their scale and efficiency. It is a must that business leaders retain their responsibility to understand what technology can and cannot do. Business leaders need to take advantage of what technology has to offer and complement it with human judgment, so that both are used to their fullest potential.
Translate Purpose into Action
In the transition to the bionic MSME Company, purpose matters more than ever. It is the glue that helps integrate all the elements described in this article. As employees grapple with uncertainty and adjust to major change, business leaders are called upon to communicate with clarity, to provide continuity, and to empower the organization with a sense of purpose. And they must translate that purpose into action.
Be the purpose champion
Business leaders must speak loudly and often aboutwhy the MSME or company exists and why employees should dedicate their professional lives to its success. They give voice to the choices that can and should be made in order to live the company’s purpose—such as the uncomfortable tradeoffsinvolved in valuing quality over speed or environmental friendliness over ease of execution.
Bring your humanity to work
It’s important that business leaders leave behind such leadership stereotypes as the “confident decision maker” and the “leader from the front.” What employees and others are looking for is an authentic and fully accessible human being. This means sharing much more of yourself—and not just your successes—with many more people. Business leaders must engage with their teams and act with compassion, empathy and understanding. They must make themselves more visible, available, and accessible through (practical) demo days with teams, joint working efforts, and live brainstorming sessions. Most business leaders see an opportunity in the current pandemic challenges. As one executive explained to FESBC experts:
“Technology and new ways of working can be an advantage here—leverage technology to have more two-way conversations, more direct outreaches, seeking and acting on feedback from a much larger population than was practical previously.”
Personalize purpose for your people
Only if purpose is authentic and directly affects employees’ roles and teams on a daily basis will they connect to it emotionally and want to live and advocate for it every day. That requires making purpose real through commitments that are (visible) tangible, trackable, and felt by employees at work and in their personal lives. One South African based company in Eswatini in this respect, tracks not only its own progress against purpose but also how connected people feel to that purpose and its impact on their performance. The company’s CEO recently revealed to FESBC Experts that 92% of employees who say that they’re able to live their purpose at the company also say that they are inspired to go the extra mile for the company.
Becoming a bionic company is a multiyear journey. Especially in our post-COVID Kingdom and the world, such MSMEs and companies will be highly advantaged, but they require a new kind of business leadership and a significant leap beyond the old paradigms. Fortunately, new beliefs and behaviours are often forged in crisis. However, business leaders and CEOs who approach the post-crisis world with an eye toward developing these new attitudes and habits will not only be better able to successfully navigate the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, they will also be better set up for a (technology and people) bionic future.
For comments: write to info@fesbc.net
Discussion about this post