Weekly Impact Brief (2023.Nov.12)
Invest in leadership to promote respected, future-focused and prepared leaders; integrate values into company culture; and use innovative growth strategies to get ahead.
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Read time: 3 min
Welcome
It’s great to have you here!
This Brief offers leaders quick, fact-driven insights on trending articles released in the last week around leadership, innovation, and more. These are curated from top sources, such as McKinsey, Harvard, and many others, looking at elements of the Impactful Framework.
In case you missed the last Impact Briefs, here are the links for the previous two:
Thought Starter
Last week, we covered the element of “Attention”; this week, we cover “Feedback”. Feedback mechanisms are vital tools for fostering continuous improvement and performance enhancement within organisations.
Highlights
McKinsey & Company: Innovative Growers: A View From The Top
London School of Economics and Political Science: When Corporate Values Interact, They Can Have A Strong Influence On Work Culture
Josh Bersin: Companies Have Been Neglecting Their Leadership, And It Shows
Kellogg School of Management: Avoiding the Likability Trap At Work
[Feature] MIT Sloan Management Review: How Ghost Scenarios Haunt Strategy Execution
Impact Pulse
Each week, we review 200+ articles from 50+ premier academic and consulting firm sources to highlight a few “essentials” below.
Innovative Growers: A View From The Top
Big Idea: Companies that combine a strong focus on innovation with growth strategies like M&A and digital transformation tend to outperform their peers in shareholder returns. Companies that do not do this face the dangers of stagnating.
Quick Quote(s): "Innovative growers unfailingly put innovation at the center of strategic and financial discussions… They activate critical growth pathways within their core businesses and enter only those adjacent markets where they have the strongest competitive advantage… Making a conscious choice to grow and supporting that choice with the right mindsets, development pathways, and capabilities can yield superior shareholder returns."
When Corporate Values Interact, They Can Have A Strong Influence On Work Culture
Big Idea: The interaction of values shapes a company’s organizational culture can result in negative, neutral, or positive cultural outcomes, with the pairing of values like autonomy and aggrandizement potentially being toxic, while autonomy paired with accountability can be mutually beneficial.
Quick Quote(s): "Values react, rather than simply coexist… Choosing which values to uphold, especially which combinations of values, has cultural consequences… Two independently neutral or even good values can lead to undesired outcomes when combined… The best work cultures... emerge from a unique blend of personnel characteristics, responsibilities, and capabilities."
Companies Have Been Neglecting Their Leadership, And It Shows
Big Idea: Leadership development has a proven impact on business growth, with high-growth companies scoring 151% higher on leadership development than low-growth companies. Neglecting to invest in leadership development can hurt leadership quality and focus, organizational performance, and culture.
Quick Quote(s): "Of all the things we spend money on in HR, leadership development is the most important… Companies that focus on developing leaders (not just promoting them) far outperform their peers… CEOs and CHROs have been so worried about the pandemic, employee burnout, quiet quitting, and reskilling that they somehow “forgot” about their leadership.”
Avoiding the Likability Trap At Work
Big Idea: Leaders should prioritize being respected instead of being liked to more effectively guide and develop their teams. Provide clear, transparent feedback, build trust and take committed, decisive action.
Quick Quote(s): “As a leader, assuming you can lead yourself… your next responsibility, obviously now, is to develop each person to their full potential… In order for me to help you develop, I’m going to be providing you feedback… And I’ve seen people, “well, wait a minute, I thought I was doing a good job. Am I a 10?” My view is none of us are a 10 because it’s a journey. It isn’t a destination. We can always get better. So I’m going to be giving you pointers as to what you can do to progress, but letting you know, here’s what’s going well, here’s what isn’t going well, here’s some things that you can work on.”
Featured Summary
Below are our featured insights for the week: MIT Sloan discuss the importance of scenario planning and questioning assumptions to avoid ghost scenarios.
How Ghost Scenarios Haunt Strategy Execution
Big Idea: Strategic planning often overlooks potential future challenges, but scenario planning can reveal hidden assumptions and prepare leaders for various outcomes. Like the Rubin vase illusion, leaders need to be able to shift their focus between the figure (strategy) and the ground (context) to avoid blind spots.
Quick Quote(s): “Research on human perception has demonstrated that people differentiate the object of their visual focus from its background by bringing that object to the forefront of their attention while everything else recedes. Humans can focus on either the figure or the background but never both at the same time… It’s important that executives are able to recognize how people’s ability to focus can also blind them to important contextual information."
Source: Researchgate.net
Parting Thoughts
Thank you for spending your precious time with us.
We are still in early “beta” mode for the coming weeks. If you find this Brief useful, please forward it now!
Please feel free to reach out with any thoughts or questions that today’s insights might have sparked.
Impactfully yours,
Ali Monadjem (LinkedIn profile)
For The Impactful Executive Team
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