Note: This article was initially written and published in the year 2015. The source for the top CEO challenges mentioned in this article were taken from The Wall Street Journal 2014. Although the top CEO challenges may have changed a bit but the core article remains relevant for all times.
Day-in and day-out business leaders and organizations are in a constant run to address business issue and challenges. By the time they get a grip on one issue the other issue arises. It seems like the run to address such issues is never ending. This happens mainly because the organizations are in a reactive mode.
Be an individual or an organization, everything must abide by the universal law, and the law says to be proactive and not reactive. Building an inside-out or a proactive organization must be the utmost priority of any business leader.
In today’s fast paced world, every business leaders is challenged with the same sets of issues while running a business. When the CEO’s were asked to name their most bothering issues, almost everyone uttered the same list of top issues.
All the business leaders are well aware of their day-to-day issues. One more interesting thing is that they also know the solution to those issues. If we ask them to name one thing that could resolve most of their business issues, invariably all of them will utter the same answer and it is the people or the human capital running their organization.
When the leaders are so well aware of their challenges and the solutions to those challenges, what is keeping them away from overcoming those challenges? Why does every organization undergo the same challenges? Are they all doing some fundamental mistake that is working against the universal law? Let’s deep dive and find out.
Business Challenges
Business leaders are facing three different types of challenges these days – internal, external and personal challenges.
The most bothering external challenges are, the disruptive innovation, rapidly changing technology, changing government regulations, financial market uncertainties, and too many competitors.
The top internal challenges – we may also label these as leadership challenges, such as, creating brand identity, product and service differentiation, proactive opportunities and risks management, building capabilities, fostering learning and innovation culture, building teams work, thinking globally, showing financial growth every quarter, so on so forth.
On top of it, the leaders themselves are overwhelmed with too many activities, which they cannot ignore. They don’t get a quality time to spin new thoughts and ideas around their vision and strategies. Not to mention that they also fall prey to the work-life imbalance situation.
The Core Problem Lies In Defining – What Is Top Talent?
Leaders are always ready to bet on top talents who can resolve their business challenges. But identifying the right people and giving them the right responsibility is again a big leadership challenge. Typically the leaders think that a major solution to all their problems lies in the ability to hire the top talents and there is this ‘war of talents’ that they have to win to grow.
Based on the existing definition of top talents, finding such talent requires a very solid talent management practice and a thorough interviewing system in place, which is time consuming and costly. Even after investing considerable time and resources, not every business is guaranteed of getting the top talents.
The problem is not due to the dearth of talent, but it is due to the lack of clear definition of the term ‘top talent’. Organizations are misled with the wrong definition and thereby creating a wrong demand of people who are in short supply.
Top Talents Are The Proactive People
Proactive people are the people with a growth mindset. The processes defined by them can steer the organizations to great success. Highly proactive people are good at what they do. They do not need much processes guidance to do what they are supposed to. These are the people who carry their own independent thoughts and ideas. They demonstrate a very high level of originality, uniqueness and a great integrity to the goal of common purpose. They carry their own set of flawless rules, and a great discipline to follow those rules.
Proactive employees can think ahead of time and they can easily look at the big picture. They set the bar of innovation, analyze the future business trends, lobby the government regulations, and tackle rapid technology changes. They can proactively address the opportunities and risks, so that the organizations don’t miss any good opportunities and don’t step into any wrong business practices.
Proactive people can address all the challenges in their field of business like a breeze and it is inbuilt. The core responsibility of the leadership is to build the strength of such proactive people at all levels within the organization.
Proactive People Build Proactive Organization
Proactive or inside-out organizations are not driven by external challenges. Or we can say that they are not reactive to external challenges. Such organizations leverage the people and the processes to function proactively. Externally driven organizations are less proactive, less creative and more reactive. They can also be called as outside-in organizations.
There is a misconception that organizations have to be Outside-in to better serve its customers and to be agile in a dynamic market. This is really an understatement or a lack of clarity in understanding what is proactivity. Proactive people can read the subtle changes very well. Their presence helps the organization to better understand the customer dynamics even before they become obvious. This helps them to address the customer needs, more effectively, independently and ethically.
Proactive People Bring Agility To the Organization
Being a purely people driven or a process driven organization is never going to occur, it is always a combination of both. Hypothetically speaking, an organization with majority of such high caliber people will require very less process guidance and handholding but it is highly unlikely to even imagine such organizations.
When the collective strength of proactive employees goes down within an organization, the process rigidity goes up. Hence, proactive people play a key role in bringing agility to the organization as a whole.
Challenges To Build An Inside-Out Organization Today
The proactivity of an individual connotes the wisdom and scalability of a person, while the proactivity of an organization connotes the professionalism and growth of that organization. Just like it is for an individual, the success or failure of any organization is purely based on either being proactive or reactive. However, there are challenges to build a proactive organization.
Companies don’t usually start with a firm choice of being either proactive or reactive from the inception. But they tend to reach a point where they can make a choice of being on the proactive side. Once an organization reaches that point of growth, the leadership of that organization makes a choice to hire or train the best minds to fulfill their vision of the organization. It is usually driven by the wisdom of leadership running the organization. Very few leaders, who understand how it may work, make the conscious choice of being a proactive organization. A whole lot of them do not know how it works, so they end up being an outside-in organization.
Organizations Are Trapped In An Outside-In Situation
Be it small or big, every company operates with the same belief of growing financial and capital assets and building a world-class brand name. But somewhere down the line they get side tracked due to the lack of proactivity, lack of vision and unclear execution strategy. This leads to the decline of the financial asset. As the financial muscle power goes down, the ability to hire the best human capital also goes down. The company loses the opportunity to attract and hire top talent across the organization. By then the proactivity of the organization goes down and the reactiveness goes up. Once the organization gets into a reactive mode the day-to-day challenges bother them even more.
Intelligence Types In A Reactive Person Vs. Proactive Person
A popular belief among leadership and talent management is that the learning agility, logical reasoning, critical thinking and memory skills are the key determinants of a talented person. Therefore, businesses always spend a considerable portion of time and financial resources to acquire talent with such skills. The strategy of hiring such talents is proven and it has given good results in the past. But this is one of the main reasons for all business issues that we are facing today.
Human Intelligence types belong to two opposite categories, which are inversely related to each other. We have the body sensitive intelligence types on one side and the senses sensitive intelligence types on the other sides. If one increases, the other decreases.
The image above gives us a clear idea of where the existing talent definition is going wrong by following the traditional belief. If you carefully look at the image, it will look like an imbalance circle, wherein the right side pies have gone smaller due to the left side pies taking a larger share. This image represents a person who scores high on the senses sensitive intelligence types, which results in poor body sensitive intelligence types. This sort of high inclination to the senses sensitive intelligence leads to an imbalance and a growth resistance. Such an inclined mind is more reactive and not proactive.
In the above image, look at the opposite pies carefully and understand what one is compromising by being inclined to the senses sensitive side.
- Critical Thinking – Perspective Thinking
- Sequential Learning – Visual Learning
- Logical Reasoning – Intuitions
- Sensing Ability – Feeling Ability
- Explicit Thinking – Implicit Thinking
- Interpersonal Skills – Intrapersonal Skills
The body sensitive intelligence types are higher-level intelligence types. Our scientific advancements are not enough to clearly measure the body sensitive intelligence types. We must remember that the power of intuitions, holistic perceptions, thinking beyond obvious, self-awareness and compassion lies in the body sensitive intelligence. These body sensitive intelligence types become more powerful when it works in balance with the senses sensitive intelligence types and vice versa.
Both these intelligence types are expected to be in balance in a proactive or a growth mindset person.
The next image hypothetically illustrates a proactive persons mind that has a balance between both senses sensitive and body sensitive intelligence types. Such a mind is highly intelligent, proactive and has a high potential to grow more and faster.
Establish A Practice To Identify And Nature Proactive Talents
It’s time to revamp the definition of potentially proactive talent based on the combination of both senses sensitive and body sensitive intelligence types. The leadership must establish a practice and guide the talent management to identify potentially proactive employees. It requires a significant amount of time and meticulous effort by the talent management to master this new methodology.
Organization must evaluate each of their employees to identify the potential ones who can become proactive and this should be carried out irrespective of their educational background and their proven track record. People with a well-balanced mixture of both intelligence types and with the required experience must be considered as potentially proactive resources.
The identified potentially proactive resources will also be biased to the senses sensitive intelligence types due to the existing popular demand. It is very important to identify and reduce any such imbalances found among the identified resources by imparting training and nurturing.
Once the organization starts believing in this new definition of talent and the outlined approach to identify and build the proactive resources, within no time we will find highly proactive people running several organizations. All the business challenges such as, external, internal, personal, people related, will finally come to an end.
