RealTime Leadership

The Fourth annual Ethics and Workplace Survey published by Deloitte found that over one third of Americans will be looking for a new job in the coming year. And of this disgruntled group, the key issues that are driving turnover are a lack of trust and lack of transparency.   These results reinforce the value of building trust with your employees through transparent and open communication.  What employees are looking for, especially in times of change and turmoil, is senior leadership that they can trust. 

But what is trust? 

Trust is a bit like oxygen; when it is available things run smoothly and you hardly notice it, but when you remove it, you can’t get anything done.   At its most basic level, Trust is the confidence people have that you will predictably act in their best interest, never knowingly committing actions that might harm them.  There is no single activity that will build trust, rather you establish trust over time by consistently exhibiting a number of behaviors and values.  Here is my list of the top 10 trust-building behaviors for leaders:

1. Demonstrate integrity.
2. Act consistently with your words.
3. Communicate with truth and candor.
4. Hold yourself accountable
5. Provide honest feedback.
6. Listen to others with an open mind.
7. Be consistent, keep promises.
8. Encourage others to communicate openly.
9. Consider how your actions impact others.
10. Admit mistakes and take blame.

IBM interviewed over 1,000 CEOs and asked them what the enterprise of the future will look like.  What IBM discovered, and recently published in a study,  is that future organizations will be even more dependent on collaborative global teams to drive innovation.  In the opening letter, IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano says:

“A focus on innovation works. That is also evident in this year’s study results. Those of you who are making the boldest plays — pursuing the most global, collaborative and disruptive business model innovation — are outperforming your peers.”

The study identifies several key trends that will shape the enterprise of the future.  These trends are fascinating from a leadership development perspective because they give us insight into the skills and capabilities required of successful future leaders:

• Change is accelerating.  Technology is driving change, but the gap between the pace of change and the ability of the organization to manage change is accelerating even faster.  This means future leaders must not only embrace change, but recognize that change will increase throughout their careers.  For training departments, it is no longer enough to offer a series of courses or learning events.  Employees require learning environments where self-directed learning can occur throughout one’s career.

• Collaboration is driving innovation.  Forty percent (40%) of organizations are evolving their enterprise business models to be more collaborative.  The ability to collaborate with others, especially on global and virtual teams will drive future success for leaders.  This trend is increasing the importance of developing emotional intelligent leaders who can effectively work with others to achieve results.

• Global integration is increasing.  Businesses are reconfiguring around global integration.  Work is naturally migrating to the locales where it is most cost-effectively produced.  Successful organizations are taking advantage of this on a global scale by integrating their business across geographic and functional boundaries.  For leaders to be successful in this environment they must enhance their cultural and organizational understanding and address challenges with a global business mind-set.  This trend is increasing the importance of inclusion in the workplace.  Global leaders value diverse opinions, backgrounds and ideas.    

Taken together, these trends paint a picture of the enterprise of the future, which IBM describes having five characteristics:

1. Hungary for change.
2. Innovative beyond customer imagination
3. Globally integrated
4. Disruptive by nature
5. Genuine, not just generous

Our challenge as leadership development professionals is to create environments and tools that help employees gain the critical leadership skills to be successful in the enterprise of the future.  In order to do this, we need to practice continuous process improvement and apply these prinicples to our learning departments.  By measuring our results, holding our learners and ourselves accountable and constantly looking for incremental improvements, training departments will evolve over time to effectively support the future enterprise. 

The 5A’s Framework is a great tool to use when assessing your training departments current level of effectiveness, and to guide you as you transform your department to meet the learning challenges of the future.