REAL LEADERS CREATE ARTIFICIAL CRISIS, A HEIGHTENED SENSE OF URGENCY, TO CREATE A RIPE ENVIRONMENT FOR CHANGE WITHIN THEIR COMPANY.

REAL LEADERS CREATE ARTIFICIAL CRISIS, A HEIGHTENED SENSE OF URGENCY, TO CREATE A RIPE ENVIRONMENT FOR CHANGE WITHIN THEIR COMPANY.

Waiting for a crisis to befall your company before you implement transformative changes is an unproductive strategy. A successful transformation is driven more by leadership and then supported by management. Real leaders create an artificial crisis, a heightened sense of urgency, to create a ripe environment for change within their company, rather than waiting for something to happen. They achieve this end through the following means:

1. They allow errors exposing major weaknesses to run their full course instead of being corrected at the last moment.

2. Part of their strategy is to dispense with unnecessary excesses and affluent accouterments, like first-class air tickets and gourmet dining rooms.

3. In their plan, they introduce a very high revenue, income, productivity, customer satisfaction, and cycle-time targets that can’t be met by doing business as usual.

4. For proactivity, they raise performance standards above narrow functional goals and make it more responsive to overall business performance.

5. With energy, they expose employees to more data relating to customer satisfaction and financial performance, especially data revealing weaknesses in comparison with the competition.

6. For proper grounding, they make their people interact with dissatisfied customers, unhappy suppliers, and disenchanted shareholders.

7. To spread vigilance, they introduce data from consultants into management meetings to prompt more honest and productive discussions.

8. They foster the insertion of the company’s problems into their newsletters and get senior management to also put them in their speeches and to desist from indulging in baseless, fruitless optimistic talks.

9. They reveal to their people the current deficiencies of the company, its inability to exploit current and future opportunities, and its losses resulting from missed and unexploited opportunities.