Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1398
October 10, 2015
Change vs. Transformation
Transformation is robust and sustainable - it requires a lasting mind shift.
Change is defined in the Oxford dictionary as "substitution of one for another," and transformation is defined as "to CHANGE the character or form." Transformation....., the word itself is the first indicator, transform....The definition of transformation in the dictionary is, "to change (something) completely," so it’s much more than renewal, its rebirth. The dictionary adds..."and usually in a good way," which suggests it’s co-productive, rather than counter-productive, and implicit too, is enjoyable, Hence it includes the affective realm of experience. It makes sense to use the complexity of the shift required to differentiate between change and transformation. The biggest challenge with any large scale transformation program is – do the senior leaders truly understand the time and impact on the organization and do they have the intestinal fortitude to hold up to corrections in the face of quarterly earnings report pressure? In that light, isn't the point of the discussion here to clarify something about management? What is difficult about the concept of managing one or more changes as a means of accomplishing a managed transformation?
Transformation is robust and sustainable - it requires a lasting mind shift. The work is to make the change transformative. Transformation leaders have two jobs: to manage their functional role and to be accountable for the cross-functional initiatives that drive transformation. Getting this concept across and then getting acceptance of this two-part role by individuals and by their team members who will be impacted is very challenging and requires on-going focus and accountability checks. Understanding why the success rate upon change initiatives would be higher than transformations. It’s important to work on a fairly comprehensive model that views change and transformation as different points along a continuum with very different tools and competencies needed along the way. Understanding the difference can avoid the pitfalls of jumping to "managing change" too soon at the expense of preparing for transformation.
Change is the 'Now.' Transformation is a journey and requires larger strategic investment. One could also look at change (things happening now) as the consequence of a transformation journey. Transformation is change, but on a grand level, at the level of the system, differentiate in terms of the end result on a systemic level. Change is fragile and often temporary - it usually occurs at the behavior level without a shift in the underlying belief system - this is true individually and organizationally. Sustainable change is rather achieved by true internal shifts, which is more related to transformation than to "managing" change. Maybe the synergy between change and coaching could lead to a better understanding of the difference between change and transformation. Transformation means doing something proactive that takes you from the past to the present to the future. Change is like the four seasons, it is something that happens every so often and not always in one’s'\ control. So change is something that happens, the transformation is something you take initiatives.
There is the distinction between types of organizational change - incremental and transformative. An organization can be observed to have a predominant change culture that is inherent in their approaches, tools, and resourcing. At the bottom of the pyramid is simply fix-it, followed by prevention (which adds some level of thought and action beyond "fix and forget"); the third level is problem-driven improvement, still focused on correcting a deficit, but tends to be much more process oriented and future directed,; the fourth is goal-driven improvement, which flows from an understanding that proactive change must occur for a particular goal or objective to be achieved. The top of the pile is strategy-driven transformation. So for a company to move from one level to another requires step-function changes in tools, culture, leadership, and capabilities. One reason that change initiatives fail so often is that companies attempt a level of change well beyond their predominant mindset and approach.
The improvement as a change takes place within a company's existing business model (its value proposition, product mix, processes, customers, sales channels, culture, technologies, etc.). Some of these improvement initiatives can be tremendously complex, but still have relatively fewer moving parts. Transformation, on the other hand, is a change to the fundamental business model itself. Transformation is, "the company reinvented itself," although that phrase is too frequently used to describe relatively straightforward improvement efforts. As change agents, the most significant difference between the two main categories of change is that the tools and capabilities that work reasonably well for improvement have little success in transformational efforts, and, in fact, can be a waste of valuable resources and a source of frustration. The other significant difference is that transformation can require as much as 2 or 3 times dedicated resource as a similarly sized improvement initiative. Focus on psychoeducational work on what "change" is collectively for those working with it and affected by "transition," "transformation," and "breakthrough."
Transformation is structural. Change is functional. Both are manageable. Sometimes the transformation is necessary in order to cope with change. Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, agility, versatility, and resilience are good enough choices short of transformation. "Transformation" goes a step further, and involves internalization of the new values and conceptual model, so that the newly required behaviors don't require the same kind of effort and vigilance. Instead, the new established behaviors will be in harmony with the internalized values.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Change is defined in the Oxford dictionary as "substitution of one for another," and transformation is defined as "to CHANGE the character or form." Transformation....., the word itself is the first indicator, transform....The definition of transformation in the dictionary is, "to change (something) completely," so it’s much more than renewal, its rebirth. The dictionary adds..."and usually in a good way," which suggests it’s co-productive, rather than counter-productive, and implicit too, is enjoyable, Hence it includes the affective realm of experience. It makes sense to use the complexity of the shift required to differentiate between change and transformation. The biggest challenge with any large scale transformation program is – do the senior leaders truly understand the time and impact on the organization and do they have the intestinal fortitude to hold up to corrections in the face of quarterly earnings report pressure? In that light, isn't the point of the discussion here to clarify something about management? What is difficult about the concept of managing one or more changes as a means of accomplishing a managed transformation?
Transformation is robust and sustainable - it requires a lasting mind shift. The work is to make the change transformative. Transformation leaders have two jobs: to manage their functional role and to be accountable for the cross-functional initiatives that drive transformation. Getting this concept across and then getting acceptance of this two-part role by individuals and by their team members who will be impacted is very challenging and requires on-going focus and accountability checks. Understanding why the success rate upon change initiatives would be higher than transformations. It’s important to work on a fairly comprehensive model that views change and transformation as different points along a continuum with very different tools and competencies needed along the way. Understanding the difference can avoid the pitfalls of jumping to "managing change" too soon at the expense of preparing for transformation.
Change is the 'Now.' Transformation is a journey and requires larger strategic investment. One could also look at change (things happening now) as the consequence of a transformation journey. Transformation is change, but on a grand level, at the level of the system, differentiate in terms of the end result on a systemic level. Change is fragile and often temporary - it usually occurs at the behavior level without a shift in the underlying belief system - this is true individually and organizationally. Sustainable change is rather achieved by true internal shifts, which is more related to transformation than to "managing" change. Maybe the synergy between change and coaching could lead to a better understanding of the difference between change and transformation. Transformation means doing something proactive that takes you from the past to the present to the future. Change is like the four seasons, it is something that happens every so often and not always in one’s'\ control. So change is something that happens, the transformation is something you take initiatives.
There is the distinction between types of organizational change - incremental and transformative. An organization can be observed to have a predominant change culture that is inherent in their approaches, tools, and resourcing. At the bottom of the pyramid is simply fix-it, followed by prevention (which adds some level of thought and action beyond "fix and forget"); the third level is problem-driven improvement, still focused on correcting a deficit, but tends to be much more process oriented and future directed,; the fourth is goal-driven improvement, which flows from an understanding that proactive change must occur for a particular goal or objective to be achieved. The top of the pile is strategy-driven transformation. So for a company to move from one level to another requires step-function changes in tools, culture, leadership, and capabilities. One reason that change initiatives fail so often is that companies attempt a level of change well beyond their predominant mindset and approach.
The improvement as a change takes place within a company's existing business model (its value proposition, product mix, processes, customers, sales channels, culture, technologies, etc.). Some of these improvement initiatives can be tremendously complex, but still have relatively fewer moving parts. Transformation, on the other hand, is a change to the fundamental business model itself. Transformation is, "the company reinvented itself," although that phrase is too frequently used to describe relatively straightforward improvement efforts. As change agents, the most significant difference between the two main categories of change is that the tools and capabilities that work reasonably well for improvement have little success in transformational efforts, and, in fact, can be a waste of valuable resources and a source of frustration. The other significant difference is that transformation can require as much as 2 or 3 times dedicated resource as a similarly sized improvement initiative. Focus on psychoeducational work on what "change" is collectively for those working with it and affected by "transition," "transformation," and "breakthrough."
Transformation is structural. Change is functional. Both are manageable. Sometimes the transformation is necessary in order to cope with change. Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, agility, versatility, and resilience are good enough choices short of transformation. "Transformation" goes a step further, and involves internalization of the new values and conceptual model, so that the newly required behaviors don't require the same kind of effort and vigilance. Instead, the new established behaviors will be in harmony with the internalized values.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
October 8, 2015
How Deep is Systems Thinking
Systems Thinking is the ability to navigate levels of abstraction or logic as an essential thinking skill for STers. Systemizing is the drive to analyze and explore a system, to extract underlying rules that govern the behavior of a system; and the drive to construct systems. There are two different "Systems Thinking" issues that are endlessly debated - "where do you draw the boundary" and "how do you partition the whole"?The level of trust is required. As Systems Thinking deals with nonlinear systems, the results of the intervention to be proposed by an STer as a leverage point will be nonlinear as well: no immediate improvement or some losses in the beginning, very small changes in the middle, while huge benefits after some delay. Having the patience to wait without seeing any changes demands trust to the STer's as a person, or to the ST principles as such. Generic nature and high abstract level. ST is very generic and can be applied to many areas. This positive side has the other side of setting high requirements on the STer's expertise, being able to get inside a new domain pretty quickly. While ST is quite good as a general approach (methodology /philosophy), it is not easy to use it "on the floor," for a particular task in a particular domain. The generality also hinders spreading among professionals in various application domains, as the learning curve is quite long, and may be disconnected from the near to the further problems.
Systems Thinking requires the deep thinking!! Using ST is tightly coupled with having modeling skills. The latter is not easy to acquire even for ordinary "reductionist" modeling. Such skills include two parts: (a) formal - knowledge on syntax and semantics of a modeling language, and (b) informal (tacit knowledge) - a skill to dissect the reality and identify object/systems and their relationships. While (a) can be acquired by sitting on the school bench, reading books, etc., (b) requires doing things (modeling). To make acquiring (b) efficient, one should become an apprentice to an ST master, following the master and getting partial assignments in real cases. Indeed, it would not be unusual for the roles of master and apprentice to be shared with each deferring to the other regarding particular areas of knowledge.
A possible remedy is by using ST as a high level "philosophy" create practical methodologies/ packages. It aims at solving a particular class of tasks in particular domains. Systems Thinkers shape a worldview based on the realization of interconnectedness. Simply a lot of us as humans can and really think systemically, even if we are not aware of this fact or don't use the specific terms by default. Everyone performs systems thinking to some degree, whether they're aware of it or not.Any new thing to acquire is a change. And to be accepted, it needs to fit the mental model of the person, meaning either she wants it in the first place, and so adapted her mind to accepting it and working enough to bend its mind to fit the new change, or the change is presented in a way that is already acceptable to the person.Systems thinking is a way of understanding complexity; to transposing another term, 'systems,' emphasis on 'a way.' It is a descriptive term for an object or an experience. Systems Thinking by definition is a cognitive process (thinking), a profound thinking process to embrace holism and nonlinearity. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
How Important is for Subject Matter Experts Acquiring Management Skills
Managerial expertise is a useful skill for anyone to have. Subject Matter Experts (SME) are just that - they provide technical and subject matter expertise. If they are pointing to a change to a managerial position, there should be some mechanism or program for elevating these management skills where they have not been a job requirement. As a SME, knowing how management works and what management expects from you will help you add value, even if you never wind up managing anyone. People learn and excel their own managerial quality through which they become assets of the organization. More specifically, how important is to acquire Managerial Skill when you are working as a Subject Matter Expert or Technical Professionals?
There is a huge difference in being competent and excelling at 'things' and excelling at working with people. These are mutually exclusive skill sets possessed by few. There are many examples of technicians, who have excelled in their role as a technician, later failing as a manager when promoted. So, like many others things, it depends - on your organizational structure, existing programs for management training, industry, location, and the ability of HR/Training to create these avenues. If there are performance needs or gaps, and the elevation of SMEs to management positions, then there should have been a performance needs assessment that indicates management training for non-management employees will improve the performance of the company. It is the responsibility of the manager to provide feedback to the SME, Tech professional if he/she is found deficient in such skills and nominate them for appropriate learning interventions. It is equally important for the SME and Tech professional to do introspection and ask for appropriate learning support.
People should take care of themselves and excel the core competencies of managerial skills.The Peter Principle is a concept in management theory formulated by Laurence J. Peter in which the selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's performance in their current role, rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. every employee will rise or get promoted to his or her level of incompetence. Only people work over the core competencies for that they got selected. People start adopting the situation rather they do something different or innovative, wait for the things which come downward direction (superior to subordinate) and start implementing. That's why when they got a promotion, he/she is not very much sure what he need to do, sometimes they leave from there because the lack of competencies and less managerial skills. So on that position where they start working on initial phase, they should give some extra time on his/her personal development or company also should take initiative to do some managerial skills training programme, very few of company are doing and they got success.That's why few company have excellent employer branding,
Managerial skill is not only dealing with people. It's also about understanding the business and getting the work done and aligning to the management's expectations. As an SME, they also have the skills of a manager. Only thing is until organizations provide them the opportunity to demonstrate it. On the other hand, a few introverts SME will be there who are comfortable within their shell and for them it takes huge efforts to come out. If it's purely about dealing with people then they can deal with their technical or domain competencies. Subject matter expertise only matters and is only relevant if it is appropriately shared and used within the organization. Assuming someone wants to continue to be an SME versus a leader of people, they still need to be able to focus on the "how" they're getting things done. These types tend to be very focused on "what" they know and what they can do, and they may lose sight of or have rough edges around the "how" they get things done. Their managers and leaders would be well served to have courageous dialogue with them about the what and the how to help them understand the competencies related to emotional intelligence that will help them be effective in broader, bigger, deeper ways.
The Subject Matter Expert and the technique professional aspire to excel in their respective roles and grow in professional stature. A manager, a SME and a Tech professional, invariably, will come across some common challenges to deal with, common performance expectations to meet. Everyone must have time management skill, the complexity of managing time will be wider and deeper for a manager. Can the SME, Tech professional disassociate themselves of the responsibilities of optimizing resource utilization? The scope will be narrower for a SME or tech professional than a manager. A manager is supposed to assess and mitigate risks. Who will advise the manager about technology risks and domain-specific risks other than the Tech expert and the SME? So, within a limited scope, the SME and the tech expert are expected to have a risk assessment and mitigation skills. Multi-disciplinary work is almost the order of the day in which contrasting ideas, views will surface often. If the SME and the tech professionals are devoid of collaboration and conflict resolution skills, how long will they remain “valued members” in the team? Two more skills qualify to be common among these three roles – presentation skill and coaching/mentoring skill. The context of the work may mandate the concerned SME and Tech Professional to have an estimation, prioritization, and process management skills as well. Development of interpersonal skills while expanding on one's technical knowledge is key. A technical proficient person but having poor interpersonal/ management skills will lead to a loss in productivity.
Gaining new skills should be inspired and driven by individual recognizing that it adds value to them, at times at their own expense. Depending on HR or organization wouldn't help much. The lack of some basic soft skills can seriously impair the specialist ability to communicate his/her expertise. In consulting, services, solutions, all customer-facing practitioners (consultants, systems architects, project managers, subject matter experts/SMEs, etc.) are required to play different roles in addition to their primary job roles . Depending on the skills and leadership needs of the engagement or project, this often includes assuming an engagement leader role at some point - so all need to have leadership/managerial skills as part of their professional growth and development. Firstly, managers must have the mindset that they have subordinates or people that counting on them to success. Most of the managers are likely to focus on delivering own result instead of team result. This is not easy to change because this means a lot of work and responsibilities. It's not easy to accept a team that we don't hire, incompetence or we don't know, the root cause is the manager mindset need to be changed. once they change it then only managing people and result becoming easy and better.
Being technically savvy without managerial skills will work in old corporate cultures who are experiencing turnover low morale decreased productivity and absenteeism, but at today’s business dynamic, a leader who wants to have their ideas and that technical expertise shared and implemented into projects needs to have interpersonal skills, business acumen, and the ability to motivate and communicate effectively. Skill development is something which depends on the individual's wish as per the organization's standards. The best technical professionals make the jump to perceiving their role as a business partner to help the company achieve its long-term business goals.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
October 7, 2015
Three Things an Effective Leader Must Gain
Leadership without influence, just like the air without oxygen.
Leadership is all about changes. the “always on, always connected” nature of digital dynamic does raise the bar for digital leadership, the title only can’t make one a leader, which crucial things leaders need to gain in order to lead more effectively?
Respect: Overall, as a good leader, one of the tough choices to make is “do you prefer to be liked or get respected,” Respect is based on being trustworthy and authentic. the liking has to be qualified and be able to garner respect, otherwise a leader who just likes to be liked can be detrimental and indicative of someone trying to compensate for leadership and technical deficiencies. No matter respect or likability should be based on the value, being respected with fair value, make the right decision for the organization and majority of people, also live fulfilled life with energy and balance; as a leader, respect for others' ideas, respect for truth, respect for process, respect for 'knowledge.' Doing the right thing at the given circumstances will earn a leader respect. When a leader consistently takes the right decisions and is perceived to be fair over the longer term, she or he is also liked by the majority. Earning respect comes first, liking eventually follows.
Influence: Leadership without influence, just like the air without oxygen. At its core leadership is about influencing people to act in a particular way. Leaders without vision do not influence at all, positively or negatively, for the long term. Positive influence is very temporary from a leader who lacks vision or poor behavior only makes the negative influences. Either way this makes for a poor leader. What leadership focus on is about leading with purpose and intent to achieve particular objectives. Leadership is about change, to make a difference. The more gaps a leader can fill, the broader influence a leader can make. Leadership is about identifying and envisioning a worthy objective, and engaging people to work towards that objective.
Wisdom: A wise leader demonstrate the soundness of judgment: Many people do wrong things, not because of ignorance, but because of poor judgment, due to the lack of comprehensive knowledge, bias, or preconceived notions. Wisdom in the workplace means to encourage knowledge sharing. When organizational leaders value the contributions of each individual, understand and encourage the career aspirations of each person in the team, the likelihood of information sharing increases, because the old adage "knowledge is power" is less likely to be a barrier to knowledge sharing. When people feel supported and confident they will be developed and valued. A wise leader can also effectively manage collective wisdom which gains more knowledge that creates more wisdom. Understanding of wisdom in the data, information, knowledge and wisdom spectrum is that wisdom is the application of knowledge to solve practical problems in the daily life.
The great leaders with characteristics listed above can lead more effectively with courage to challenge unfair practices amongst peers and colleagues, have an ability to stand for that which is just, fair, and have wisdom to do it the right way; hold sound and equitable, innovative, great communication skills, charisma, be able to positively influence others, be a benchmark setter, embodiment of good practice, be good role model for all groups within an organization, take exemplary conduct, they are hardworking and approachable; they are problem solver, effective negotiator, inspirational, firm and decisive, and they have integrity and ability to manage workforce effectively to productive/successful outcomes. A great leader will inspire confidence and encourage employees to learn and improve, while not lingering on imperfections. In simpler words, A great leader is a continuous game changer.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Leadership is all about changes. the “always on, always connected” nature of digital dynamic does raise the bar for digital leadership, the title only can’t make one a leader, which crucial things leaders need to gain in order to lead more effectively?
Respect: Overall, as a good leader, one of the tough choices to make is “do you prefer to be liked or get respected,” Respect is based on being trustworthy and authentic. the liking has to be qualified and be able to garner respect, otherwise a leader who just likes to be liked can be detrimental and indicative of someone trying to compensate for leadership and technical deficiencies. No matter respect or likability should be based on the value, being respected with fair value, make the right decision for the organization and majority of people, also live fulfilled life with energy and balance; as a leader, respect for others' ideas, respect for truth, respect for process, respect for 'knowledge.' Doing the right thing at the given circumstances will earn a leader respect. When a leader consistently takes the right decisions and is perceived to be fair over the longer term, she or he is also liked by the majority. Earning respect comes first, liking eventually follows.
Influence: Leadership without influence, just like the air without oxygen. At its core leadership is about influencing people to act in a particular way. Leaders without vision do not influence at all, positively or negatively, for the long term. Positive influence is very temporary from a leader who lacks vision or poor behavior only makes the negative influences. Either way this makes for a poor leader. What leadership focus on is about leading with purpose and intent to achieve particular objectives. Leadership is about change, to make a difference. The more gaps a leader can fill, the broader influence a leader can make. Leadership is about identifying and envisioning a worthy objective, and engaging people to work towards that objective.
Wisdom: A wise leader demonstrate the soundness of judgment: Many people do wrong things, not because of ignorance, but because of poor judgment, due to the lack of comprehensive knowledge, bias, or preconceived notions. Wisdom in the workplace means to encourage knowledge sharing. When organizational leaders value the contributions of each individual, understand and encourage the career aspirations of each person in the team, the likelihood of information sharing increases, because the old adage "knowledge is power" is less likely to be a barrier to knowledge sharing. When people feel supported and confident they will be developed and valued. A wise leader can also effectively manage collective wisdom which gains more knowledge that creates more wisdom. Understanding of wisdom in the data, information, knowledge and wisdom spectrum is that wisdom is the application of knowledge to solve practical problems in the daily life.
The great leaders with characteristics listed above can lead more effectively with courage to challenge unfair practices amongst peers and colleagues, have an ability to stand for that which is just, fair, and have wisdom to do it the right way; hold sound and equitable, innovative, great communication skills, charisma, be able to positively influence others, be a benchmark setter, embodiment of good practice, be good role model for all groups within an organization, take exemplary conduct, they are hardworking and approachable; they are problem solver, effective negotiator, inspirational, firm and decisive, and they have integrity and ability to manage workforce effectively to productive/successful outcomes. A great leader will inspire confidence and encourage employees to learn and improve, while not lingering on imperfections. In simpler words, A great leader is a continuous game changer.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Change Management from Buy-in to Enrollment
Change Management can become more successful with people at the core of change, the cause of changes and the purpose of change.
Business Change Management is managing everything that is necessary to get people to adopt new ways of working such as stakeholder management, communications, process or organizational change, training, business readiness and technical change management, etc. Compared to the business world 20 years ago, the speed of change is increasing, and digital ecosystem has become more complex and dynamic, Change Management also turns to be more complex, that’s perhaps part of reasons why the failure rate of Change Management is so stubbornly high. Leadership is an important success factor in managing changes, from buy-in to enrollment, how deep should leaders involve in?
If the management is able to get the support of everyone in the organization, it helps during a change process. This underlies the buy-in concept which is a top-down approach. The alignment of the work you do to the corporate goals and objectives and cascading strategic intent to all areas of the organization is key to achieving enhanced performance. Engagement and ability to impact change are just as important at the global level as they are within the boundaries of the country they work in. Though cultures, countries, religions, and customs are different worldwide, the Change Management required to make change work across your entire global company is remarkably similar. People worldwide want to be engaged enough, listened to enough, and supported enough to impact and navigate the proposed changes they will be asked to go through. Advocate culture of innovation to break down the outdated custom and the "old way to do things." No matter your language or culture, avoid local slang and colloquialisms. Businesses do the same types of things across cultures, objective behavior-based business language is typically understandable across the company and translates well across cultures.
In many global or multinational organizations, the challenges of stakeholder involvement are real for Change Management effort. We should recognize that a lot of changes is unpleasant for those impacted. Stakeholder involvement and engagement nearly always makes these difficult paths easier to tread. However, the concept of true stakeholder involvement is an alien concept for many project and change managers. Project teams often think of Stakeholder Analysis rather than engagement. Even the traditional Stakeholder Management process has a ‘them’ and ‘us’ attitude as its core! Many teams try to execute change without listening or putting in the means to measure their impacts on the organization. Stakeholder involvement has positive implications at each stage of the change journey. Problems with geography and time zone make true involvement a difficult place. However, the dividends for early involvement and continues engagement during the change journey payback hugely during the organizational impact stage. Having built strong relationships with stakeholders makes the listening process simpler and any adjustments in approach easier to execute. The more stakeholders can impact a change capable of seriously affecting their lives, the better chance the change will achieve or exceed the target. Change and project managers need to be careful to not fall too much in love with their own plans and processes. Though they may be master planners and implementers they, by their very jobs, are not in the best position to assess the nitty, gritty challenges and issues that must be addressed to ensure the plan succeeds at every level. Even the most difficulty of changes are best addressed by engaging those most impacted by them.
There is a world of difference between ‘selling’ and ‘enrolling.’ ‘Selling’ generally means getting someone do something that he/she might not do if they were in full possession of all the facts. ‘Enrolling,’ by contrast, literally means placing one's name on the roll. Enrollment implies free choice, while ‘being sold’ often does not. Today, it is common to hear managers talk of getting people to ‘buy into’ the vision. For many, this suggests a sales process, but the best way for people to enroll in to change is by using valid data which help them make an informed choice. Ideally, you’ll also have them collecting the data, so they can discover for themselves the need for change, and become committed because they want to rather than because they feel they have to.
Leadership is crucial in managing change smoothly. From reactively buy-in to proactively enrolling and engaging, Change Management can become more successful with people at the core of change, the cause of changes and the purpose of change.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Business Change Management is managing everything that is necessary to get people to adopt new ways of working such as stakeholder management, communications, process or organizational change, training, business readiness and technical change management, etc. Compared to the business world 20 years ago, the speed of change is increasing, and digital ecosystem has become more complex and dynamic, Change Management also turns to be more complex, that’s perhaps part of reasons why the failure rate of Change Management is so stubbornly high. Leadership is an important success factor in managing changes, from buy-in to enrollment, how deep should leaders involve in?
If the management is able to get the support of everyone in the organization, it helps during a change process. This underlies the buy-in concept which is a top-down approach. The alignment of the work you do to the corporate goals and objectives and cascading strategic intent to all areas of the organization is key to achieving enhanced performance. Engagement and ability to impact change are just as important at the global level as they are within the boundaries of the country they work in. Though cultures, countries, religions, and customs are different worldwide, the Change Management required to make change work across your entire global company is remarkably similar. People worldwide want to be engaged enough, listened to enough, and supported enough to impact and navigate the proposed changes they will be asked to go through. Advocate culture of innovation to break down the outdated custom and the "old way to do things." No matter your language or culture, avoid local slang and colloquialisms. Businesses do the same types of things across cultures, objective behavior-based business language is typically understandable across the company and translates well across cultures.
In many global or multinational organizations, the challenges of stakeholder involvement are real for Change Management effort. We should recognize that a lot of changes is unpleasant for those impacted. Stakeholder involvement and engagement nearly always makes these difficult paths easier to tread. However, the concept of true stakeholder involvement is an alien concept for many project and change managers. Project teams often think of Stakeholder Analysis rather than engagement. Even the traditional Stakeholder Management process has a ‘them’ and ‘us’ attitude as its core! Many teams try to execute change without listening or putting in the means to measure their impacts on the organization. Stakeholder involvement has positive implications at each stage of the change journey. Problems with geography and time zone make true involvement a difficult place. However, the dividends for early involvement and continues engagement during the change journey payback hugely during the organizational impact stage. Having built strong relationships with stakeholders makes the listening process simpler and any adjustments in approach easier to execute. The more stakeholders can impact a change capable of seriously affecting their lives, the better chance the change will achieve or exceed the target. Change and project managers need to be careful to not fall too much in love with their own plans and processes. Though they may be master planners and implementers they, by their very jobs, are not in the best position to assess the nitty, gritty challenges and issues that must be addressed to ensure the plan succeeds at every level. Even the most difficulty of changes are best addressed by engaging those most impacted by them.
There is a world of difference between ‘selling’ and ‘enrolling.’ ‘Selling’ generally means getting someone do something that he/she might not do if they were in full possession of all the facts. ‘Enrolling,’ by contrast, literally means placing one's name on the roll. Enrollment implies free choice, while ‘being sold’ often does not. Today, it is common to hear managers talk of getting people to ‘buy into’ the vision. For many, this suggests a sales process, but the best way for people to enroll in to change is by using valid data which help them make an informed choice. Ideally, you’ll also have them collecting the data, so they can discover for themselves the need for change, and become committed because they want to rather than because they feel they have to.
Leadership is crucial in managing change smoothly. From reactively buy-in to proactively enrolling and engaging, Change Management can become more successful with people at the core of change, the cause of changes and the purpose of change.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
October 6, 2015
What’re the Real Purpose of Performance Indicators
The real purpose of Performance Indicators is to provide business insight and monitor the progress and performance.
The goal of Performance Indicators is to identify if the adopted strategy, operation and process, etc is working toward the objective. KPIs should be periodically reviewed and revised depending upon what the firm's strategy is and what they are targeting. Are they entering a new market? Is their goal to achieve 25% higher profits than the last 6 months? Have they recently re-engineered their organizational structure? All such questions need to be kept in mind when deciding and revising the KPIs. And you define KPIs to monitor the progress and performance. KPIs should be under constant review to determine if they actually provide the necessary insight into what is happening in order to make informed decisions. If the KPI is not providing the necessary insight, it needs to be refined. KPIs should change when business needs and environment changes.
The issue with many KPIs is that they are set against archaic business process models that are mostly manual. Every time something changes, resources, etc. The KPI measurements are off. How long a KPI should last heavily depends on whether it is measuring something fundamental to the mission or measuring something related to shorter-term strategic actions. As long as 1) It is insightful to the challenge the business is trying to address. And 2) It offers relevant information against aspects of the challenge that can be directly tackled. Another perspective on KPIs is that these measures or indicators are only as good as the processes that generated the raw data, the frequency the measures are collected, and the analysis performed. Otherwise, it’s garbage in and garbage out.
A true and meaningful KPI should last as long as the business strategy is set. It's hard to define a general lifetime of a KPI. The life of each KPI should be defined in dependency of its horizon. KPIs that are concerned with long-term activities clearly should have a longer lifetime than short-term oriented KPIs. Otherwise, inaccurate KPIs are the result. The other aspect of KPI lifetime is people related. People will adapt to the KPIs that are used for their performance evaluation and compensation determination. If the strategy changes, then the KPIs should be reviewed to see if they are still relevant. If they then keep them, if not then change them. Let's not forget the real purpose of a KPI, it is to act as an early warning signal such that the relevant job role deals with the relevant issue. This then prevents issues occurring further down the line. You do not require loads of KPIs. With the right KPIs, the company will benefit.
Outcome-related KPIs are as relevant as, even more relevant than - process-related KPIs. A KPI must last while the process it is measuring lasts. It must be constantly reviewed and improved, of course, so is the process. Using process KPIs is necessary - however, it is not sufficient. At the time that processes are developed, of necessity they cannot cater for every eventuality that may arise within or outside the business. In other words, well-designed processes will generally - but may not always - result in the desired business outcome. Everything in the management field needs to have a way to measure. Once the main goal of the managers is to guarantee and maximize the profit to the shareholders, every little thing is very important. People must therefore always have the ability and the freedom to respond in a different, more humanistic way to unforeseen events, so as to produce the desired outcomes that the business is actually driving towards. Because a process failure can make the company lose millions of dollars, it is not acceptable, especially for the top managers. Following this thought, KPI is most important to the managers than to the owners, and when the managers realize that, they will use them better. As long as it will drive the company to achieve above industry average profits, KPIs need to be carefully vetted, and should represent natural outcomes, if they are to be insightful. That said, KPIs should reflect both well-performing activities as well as those that need to improve; as such, one must be careful not to revise the KPIs unnecessarily and risk losing the ability to evaluate performance over time. Trend data is important. KPIs that become outdated quickly usually result because they were selected from a laundry-list of easy to implement measurements, as opposed to developed strategically from goals.
The real purpose of Performance Indicators is to provide business insight and monitor the progress and performance. However, it shouldn’t become another parameter which will diminish the creativity of the resource by training them to think in one particular direction. Being able to show those benefits in hard facts such as measurements helps greatly. More than the numbers, the entire KPI initiative is a candidate for a methodical and sensitive Change Management in the organization. Once this piece is set the rest is about maths and systems framework.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
The goal of Performance Indicators is to identify if the adopted strategy, operation and process, etc is working toward the objective. KPIs should be periodically reviewed and revised depending upon what the firm's strategy is and what they are targeting. Are they entering a new market? Is their goal to achieve 25% higher profits than the last 6 months? Have they recently re-engineered their organizational structure? All such questions need to be kept in mind when deciding and revising the KPIs. And you define KPIs to monitor the progress and performance. KPIs should be under constant review to determine if they actually provide the necessary insight into what is happening in order to make informed decisions. If the KPI is not providing the necessary insight, it needs to be refined. KPIs should change when business needs and environment changes.
The issue with many KPIs is that they are set against archaic business process models that are mostly manual. Every time something changes, resources, etc. The KPI measurements are off. How long a KPI should last heavily depends on whether it is measuring something fundamental to the mission or measuring something related to shorter-term strategic actions. As long as 1) It is insightful to the challenge the business is trying to address. And 2) It offers relevant information against aspects of the challenge that can be directly tackled. Another perspective on KPIs is that these measures or indicators are only as good as the processes that generated the raw data, the frequency the measures are collected, and the analysis performed. Otherwise, it’s garbage in and garbage out.
A true and meaningful KPI should last as long as the business strategy is set. It's hard to define a general lifetime of a KPI. The life of each KPI should be defined in dependency of its horizon. KPIs that are concerned with long-term activities clearly should have a longer lifetime than short-term oriented KPIs. Otherwise, inaccurate KPIs are the result. The other aspect of KPI lifetime is people related. People will adapt to the KPIs that are used for their performance evaluation and compensation determination. If the strategy changes, then the KPIs should be reviewed to see if they are still relevant. If they then keep them, if not then change them. Let's not forget the real purpose of a KPI, it is to act as an early warning signal such that the relevant job role deals with the relevant issue. This then prevents issues occurring further down the line. You do not require loads of KPIs. With the right KPIs, the company will benefit.
Outcome-related KPIs are as relevant as, even more relevant than - process-related KPIs. A KPI must last while the process it is measuring lasts. It must be constantly reviewed and improved, of course, so is the process. Using process KPIs is necessary - however, it is not sufficient. At the time that processes are developed, of necessity they cannot cater for every eventuality that may arise within or outside the business. In other words, well-designed processes will generally - but may not always - result in the desired business outcome. Everything in the management field needs to have a way to measure. Once the main goal of the managers is to guarantee and maximize the profit to the shareholders, every little thing is very important. People must therefore always have the ability and the freedom to respond in a different, more humanistic way to unforeseen events, so as to produce the desired outcomes that the business is actually driving towards. Because a process failure can make the company lose millions of dollars, it is not acceptable, especially for the top managers. Following this thought, KPI is most important to the managers than to the owners, and when the managers realize that, they will use them better. As long as it will drive the company to achieve above industry average profits, KPIs need to be carefully vetted, and should represent natural outcomes, if they are to be insightful. That said, KPIs should reflect both well-performing activities as well as those that need to improve; as such, one must be careful not to revise the KPIs unnecessarily and risk losing the ability to evaluate performance over time. Trend data is important. KPIs that become outdated quickly usually result because they were selected from a laundry-list of easy to implement measurements, as opposed to developed strategically from goals.
The real purpose of Performance Indicators is to provide business insight and monitor the progress and performance. However, it shouldn’t become another parameter which will diminish the creativity of the resource by training them to think in one particular direction. Being able to show those benefits in hard facts such as measurements helps greatly. More than the numbers, the entire KPI initiative is a candidate for a methodical and sensitive Change Management in the organization. Once this piece is set the rest is about maths and systems framework.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Is Big Data too Slow
Effective decision-making in the digital era requires speed and flexibility.
Information is the lifeblood in organizations today, Customer-centric businesses can leverage data in making decisions and delight customers effectively. Business leaders are asking for real time analysis, and for Big Data it means data processing as soon as the data is ingested. Traditional analytical vendors use traditional databases that slow down the analysis and reporting part. Do you face the situations that Big Data is too slow? And how can you resolve this?
One of the big problems of Big Data in organizations is that the end user requirements are not fully understood. For implementing real-time solutions, use case has to be defined well. Most of Big Data systems fail or put on hold as end user requirement is not defined in advance or not clearly understood. Regardless how big your data is, data is the means to the end, not the end itself, to resolve this, you need to understand fully the end user requirements and based on that you can design and develop data management solutions. Big Data has obvious benefits but in some customer-centric industries, the output is often too late for digital laggards.
Traditional Big Data/BI vendors tend to use RDBMS structures to process data and make most analyses and reporting cumbersome, slow and often in batch. Most users want and need the ability to perform "what-if" analyses immediately to determine future outcomes. Users really need the ability to instantly change enterprise-wide inputs to "what-if" future outcomes. Because time-to-insight is increasingly becoming critical and often plays an instrumental role in informed decision making, it’s vital to harness the data’s actionable power as it enters the pipeline. There is major business value in sub-second response times to changing information. With rising customer expectations, the need for speed is actually more important than ever before.
Better access to right information, at the right time - but also access to right people. The need for speed is actually slowing down the decision-making if the organization won't implement new methods for working. Using the traditional ways of working the key experts simply won't have enough time to produce the input for the decision makers. And without proper data or other input, no good decisions can be made. Insights are only useful if they are actionable; a "right-time" approach which decides on latency of data subjects depending on how time sensitive it is, instead of streaming all data in real-time may be more cost effective and practical. One key effect of digitization is increased unpredictability and a need for a faster response to changes in the industry - based on efficient decision making.
Effective decision-making in the digital era requires speed and flexibility. Organizations need to get faster digital technology allows to get to crucial information faster, and yet things become more complex and thus you need analytics tools to cope with complexity. Digitalization is certainly making access to large quantities of data happen faster, but you also run the risk of putting too much faith in the numbers from tools that should primarily support you, not take you over. Decisions are still made by people, so the challenge is to get the relevant people communicating with each other more efficiently, and making the best use of the digital tools. You also have to live with the consequences of making the wrong decisions faster! Therefore, it's essential to both get just the right input (no need to know everything) and quickly pick the good idea or choice among the rest. On the other hand, one needs to be able to ditch the idea in an agile way if it turns out to be a bad one. Since all this is often done among a group of people, proper facilitation tool is required.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Information is the lifeblood in organizations today, Customer-centric businesses can leverage data in making decisions and delight customers effectively. Business leaders are asking for real time analysis, and for Big Data it means data processing as soon as the data is ingested. Traditional analytical vendors use traditional databases that slow down the analysis and reporting part. Do you face the situations that Big Data is too slow? And how can you resolve this?
One of the big problems of Big Data in organizations is that the end user requirements are not fully understood. For implementing real-time solutions, use case has to be defined well. Most of Big Data systems fail or put on hold as end user requirement is not defined in advance or not clearly understood. Regardless how big your data is, data is the means to the end, not the end itself, to resolve this, you need to understand fully the end user requirements and based on that you can design and develop data management solutions. Big Data has obvious benefits but in some customer-centric industries, the output is often too late for digital laggards.
Traditional Big Data/BI vendors tend to use RDBMS structures to process data and make most analyses and reporting cumbersome, slow and often in batch. Most users want and need the ability to perform "what-if" analyses immediately to determine future outcomes. Users really need the ability to instantly change enterprise-wide inputs to "what-if" future outcomes. Because time-to-insight is increasingly becoming critical and often plays an instrumental role in informed decision making, it’s vital to harness the data’s actionable power as it enters the pipeline. There is major business value in sub-second response times to changing information. With rising customer expectations, the need for speed is actually more important than ever before.
Better access to right information, at the right time - but also access to right people. The need for speed is actually slowing down the decision-making if the organization won't implement new methods for working. Using the traditional ways of working the key experts simply won't have enough time to produce the input for the decision makers. And without proper data or other input, no good decisions can be made. Insights are only useful if they are actionable; a "right-time" approach which decides on latency of data subjects depending on how time sensitive it is, instead of streaming all data in real-time may be more cost effective and practical. One key effect of digitization is increased unpredictability and a need for a faster response to changes in the industry - based on efficient decision making. Effective decision-making in the digital era requires speed and flexibility. Organizations need to get faster digital technology allows to get to crucial information faster, and yet things become more complex and thus you need analytics tools to cope with complexity. Digitalization is certainly making access to large quantities of data happen faster, but you also run the risk of putting too much faith in the numbers from tools that should primarily support you, not take you over. Decisions are still made by people, so the challenge is to get the relevant people communicating with each other more efficiently, and making the best use of the digital tools. You also have to live with the consequences of making the wrong decisions faster! Therefore, it's essential to both get just the right input (no need to know everything) and quickly pick the good idea or choice among the rest. On the other hand, one needs to be able to ditch the idea in an agile way if it turns out to be a bad one. Since all this is often done among a group of people, proper facilitation tool is required.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Can you Impose a Culture of Innovation
Practically you can not impose a culture of innovation, but definitely you can influence and putting the right innovation elements into your strategy and execution.
Culture is better defined by the "collective mindsets, attitudes, and behaviors of people in an organization.” There is no question that culture can make or break an organization. Nowadays, innovation becomes an important ingredient in business strategy, but how to cultivate the culture of innovation is perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing business leaders today. Can you impose a culture of innovation, or shall you build, cultivate, or foster it, and how? What are the key elements in fostering a culture of innovation?
The Cultural transformation may be the desired outcome, but it cannot be mandated--it must evolve: Engaging in the existing practices, Introducing the changes and reinforcing the changes. It requires shared vision plus innovative, committed and passionate leadership and a commitment to alignment and integration of people, process, practices and technology across the enterprise, including customer and vendor engagement. Each person wants and needs to know, understand and be willing to be a part of the transformation. C-levels have the vision and want to maximize creativity and innovation at all levels in the organization to grow their organization, realizing not all might wish to do so. As the change is being reinforced, other types of activities help the change take hold. The biggest reason most organizations are not more creative is that the vast majority of senior managers simply don't know how to get there. There is no one size fits all recipe. Hiring winners, is an essential part of growth and being successful, but the real challenge is transforming the existing workgroups, departments, and facilities into creative and high performers.
Amplify small changes to make an impact on organizational culture. Senior managers would take a systemic look at how these 'good' managers affect change in the small groups. Those techniques could be applied corporate-wide for culture change; to increase involvement, creative problem solving, and innovative ideation. But the problem is senior managers often view small-group changes as an isolated effort, not a model for culture change within the organization, and lack of best practices to amplify its effect. When it comes right down to it, managers have a powerful impact on corporate culture. And most managers don't manage to maximize creativity and innovation, mostly due to constraints from above. One of the difficulties here is the use of the words "creative" and "innovative." They are drastically different. Creativity is the innate process to create new ideas. A new manager with corporate Change Management can influence people to become more creative, but innovation is more about how to transform creative ideas and achieve its business value, often in the systematic way. And innovative thinking is also different, it’s about looking at the world in a unique way. While you can train somebody to become more innovative or at least understand the innovative thinking. It takes time and generations of changes within a company to embrace the fresh thinking and the new way to do things. Otherwise, there will always be roadblocks to these "new" ideas.
The change in culture starts at the top. If top leadership is not willing to change - it doesn't matter who they hire. This is very hard for existing leaders - they have been part of building the old culture. Culture change is not easy - it takes long term effort. Many companies do not have the courage. By adding a systems mindset - you can begin to change the culture. a systems mindset is integral to beginning to change the culture. Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization still resonates and underlies effecting change. A learning organization is a group of people, human beings, how do you process the learning in change. If you are able to do that - how you duplicate this learning in the change process? You can never duplicate a change process without a visionary leadership. In spite of that the process will require a lot good creative leadership and an innovation manager that have courage to break a lot of rules and creativity to think out-of-box.
Practically you can not impose a culture of innovation, but definitely you can influence and putting the right innovation elements into your strategy and execution. Applying the framework to the specific organizational culture requires leadership, trust, time and process. There is no one-size-fits-all set of policies, programs and structures as well, organizations have to keep exploring, experimenting and adjusting for fostering the culture of innovation.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Culture is better defined by the "collective mindsets, attitudes, and behaviors of people in an organization.” There is no question that culture can make or break an organization. Nowadays, innovation becomes an important ingredient in business strategy, but how to cultivate the culture of innovation is perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing business leaders today. Can you impose a culture of innovation, or shall you build, cultivate, or foster it, and how? What are the key elements in fostering a culture of innovation?
The Cultural transformation may be the desired outcome, but it cannot be mandated--it must evolve: Engaging in the existing practices, Introducing the changes and reinforcing the changes. It requires shared vision plus innovative, committed and passionate leadership and a commitment to alignment and integration of people, process, practices and technology across the enterprise, including customer and vendor engagement. Each person wants and needs to know, understand and be willing to be a part of the transformation. C-levels have the vision and want to maximize creativity and innovation at all levels in the organization to grow their organization, realizing not all might wish to do so. As the change is being reinforced, other types of activities help the change take hold. The biggest reason most organizations are not more creative is that the vast majority of senior managers simply don't know how to get there. There is no one size fits all recipe. Hiring winners, is an essential part of growth and being successful, but the real challenge is transforming the existing workgroups, departments, and facilities into creative and high performers.
Amplify small changes to make an impact on organizational culture. Senior managers would take a systemic look at how these 'good' managers affect change in the small groups. Those techniques could be applied corporate-wide for culture change; to increase involvement, creative problem solving, and innovative ideation. But the problem is senior managers often view small-group changes as an isolated effort, not a model for culture change within the organization, and lack of best practices to amplify its effect. When it comes right down to it, managers have a powerful impact on corporate culture. And most managers don't manage to maximize creativity and innovation, mostly due to constraints from above. One of the difficulties here is the use of the words "creative" and "innovative." They are drastically different. Creativity is the innate process to create new ideas. A new manager with corporate Change Management can influence people to become more creative, but innovation is more about how to transform creative ideas and achieve its business value, often in the systematic way. And innovative thinking is also different, it’s about looking at the world in a unique way. While you can train somebody to become more innovative or at least understand the innovative thinking. It takes time and generations of changes within a company to embrace the fresh thinking and the new way to do things. Otherwise, there will always be roadblocks to these "new" ideas.
The change in culture starts at the top. If top leadership is not willing to change - it doesn't matter who they hire. This is very hard for existing leaders - they have been part of building the old culture. Culture change is not easy - it takes long term effort. Many companies do not have the courage. By adding a systems mindset - you can begin to change the culture. a systems mindset is integral to beginning to change the culture. Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization still resonates and underlies effecting change. A learning organization is a group of people, human beings, how do you process the learning in change. If you are able to do that - how you duplicate this learning in the change process? You can never duplicate a change process without a visionary leadership. In spite of that the process will require a lot good creative leadership and an innovation manager that have courage to break a lot of rules and creativity to think out-of-box.
Practically you can not impose a culture of innovation, but definitely you can influence and putting the right innovation elements into your strategy and execution. Applying the framework to the specific organizational culture requires leadership, trust, time and process. There is no one-size-fits-all set of policies, programs and structures as well, organizations have to keep exploring, experimenting and adjusting for fostering the culture of innovation.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
October 5, 2015
What is the Philosophical EQ
Higher EQ helps you have an open mind, minimize biases, be cautiously optimistic, be an effective listener and be more creative.
The philosophical EQ is a measure of capacity and not knowledge. A person can be taught to swim like a fish, act like a fish, and even look like a fish. But a person cannot be taught to be a real fish. You can teach people knowledge, but you can’t teach them how to think. Intuition and empathy are innate feelings. Some people just use them preferably or not over other cognitive tools. They are indeed part of EQ. Intuition, empathy, or sensitivity often cannot be taught. If such attributes cannot be taught, how do you as individuals ever learn or become empathetic?
Empathy is the ability to feel the emotional condition of another from their frame of reference. It is not merely recognizing or caring about their feelings...but internally experiencing their emotional state as they do. We can learn to recognize what sadness, or anger, or happiness look like. We can practice controlling, moderating, or commensurate responses to create a more compatible environment. But, this is not empathy but social awareness. Empathy is feeling their emotional state as if their experiences were your experiences, people are different, they have different characters, personalities, cognitions, priorities, different life experience. Hence, even many leaders or managers have a strong intention to lead, however, they just lack empathy to lead in the right way and often go to the wrong direction.
Perhaps a better measurement of Emotional Intelligence is the person's overall healthiness - how healthy are they emotionally, mentally, physically. We each might have a range of empathy that we are able to truly realize, understand, and exhibit in life, the wisdom can be gained through retrospection, life experience, diligent practices, etc. Using leadership techniques such as empowerment and team engagement to get the maximum from your staff by knowing how to approach them in different situations. All employees need to be motivated by chasing a purpose and not only for profit. EQ helps you achieve this. Each individual has an approximate range of capacity or a personal limit to what they could actually assimilate into a feeling, or truly comprehend, but doesn't all wisdom and understanding begin with recognition? Teaching what you refer to as social awareness helps people become aware of this range of emotion. After they become aware of it, perhaps later down the road they experience a similar situation.
Performance can be based on a number of factors. We can’t assign a percentage to the value of any one of them. For certain situations, emotional IQ may be a significant contributor to the success and for others it may account for a small percentage. In any event, this is also dependent on the people themselves if they have compensating skills which they can draw upon. The judgment may vary from one person to another. The perception is shaped by your own values and experience. Maybe you could think about key facts that are easier to measure and uncontestable.
Higher EQ helps you have an open mind, minimize biases, be cautiously optimistic, be an effective listener and be more creative. All these qualities become critical when you are leading and have to constantly align and motivate people to follow your direction; when you deal with cross functional peers where you do not have authority and be persuasive with other senior managers who have strong opinion about doing things. Higher EQ is not completely equal to political cleverness, especially doesn't mean to tramp down others in order to climb up the narrow corporate ladder, or to win without purpose, principle and professionalism. EQ becomes more critical for leading today’s business dynamic with uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
The philosophical EQ is a measure of capacity and not knowledge. A person can be taught to swim like a fish, act like a fish, and even look like a fish. But a person cannot be taught to be a real fish. You can teach people knowledge, but you can’t teach them how to think. Intuition and empathy are innate feelings. Some people just use them preferably or not over other cognitive tools. They are indeed part of EQ. Intuition, empathy, or sensitivity often cannot be taught. If such attributes cannot be taught, how do you as individuals ever learn or become empathetic?
Empathy is the ability to feel the emotional condition of another from their frame of reference. It is not merely recognizing or caring about their feelings...but internally experiencing their emotional state as they do. We can learn to recognize what sadness, or anger, or happiness look like. We can practice controlling, moderating, or commensurate responses to create a more compatible environment. But, this is not empathy but social awareness. Empathy is feeling their emotional state as if their experiences were your experiences, people are different, they have different characters, personalities, cognitions, priorities, different life experience. Hence, even many leaders or managers have a strong intention to lead, however, they just lack empathy to lead in the right way and often go to the wrong direction.
Perhaps a better measurement of Emotional Intelligence is the person's overall healthiness - how healthy are they emotionally, mentally, physically. We each might have a range of empathy that we are able to truly realize, understand, and exhibit in life, the wisdom can be gained through retrospection, life experience, diligent practices, etc. Using leadership techniques such as empowerment and team engagement to get the maximum from your staff by knowing how to approach them in different situations. All employees need to be motivated by chasing a purpose and not only for profit. EQ helps you achieve this. Each individual has an approximate range of capacity or a personal limit to what they could actually assimilate into a feeling, or truly comprehend, but doesn't all wisdom and understanding begin with recognition? Teaching what you refer to as social awareness helps people become aware of this range of emotion. After they become aware of it, perhaps later down the road they experience a similar situation.
Performance can be based on a number of factors. We can’t assign a percentage to the value of any one of them. For certain situations, emotional IQ may be a significant contributor to the success and for others it may account for a small percentage. In any event, this is also dependent on the people themselves if they have compensating skills which they can draw upon. The judgment may vary from one person to another. The perception is shaped by your own values and experience. Maybe you could think about key facts that are easier to measure and uncontestable.Higher EQ helps you have an open mind, minimize biases, be cautiously optimistic, be an effective listener and be more creative. All these qualities become critical when you are leading and have to constantly align and motivate people to follow your direction; when you deal with cross functional peers where you do not have authority and be persuasive with other senior managers who have strong opinion about doing things. Higher EQ is not completely equal to political cleverness, especially doesn't mean to tramp down others in order to climb up the narrow corporate ladder, or to win without purpose, principle and professionalism. EQ becomes more critical for leading today’s business dynamic with uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Digital CIO: Rise for Change
The CIO must now wear many hats, and see the forest through the trees.
In the industrial age, CIOs are the second class executive who often does not have a seat at the big table to make strategy, and who spends most of time and resource on “keeping the light on.” However, digital means the increasing speed of changes, data abundance, and hyperconnectivity, technology is often the very disrupter of innovation, and information is the lifeblood of organizations, many forward-thinking organizations empower their CIOs to be the frontrunner digital transformer, recognize CIOs as communication hub and change agent due to the unique position they hold to oversight business processes, and interweave business capabilities, so are CIOs ready to rise for CHANGES?
The clue has always been in the name! Chief INFORMATION Officer. This role should always have been to focus on the ‘I’ element of the IT spectrum, “Information, Innovation, Intelligence, Integration, Improvement, influence, etc. But too many times the focus has been on the ‘T.’ Now, with much of the ‘T’ being transferred to the cloud in various forms, the CIO has the time to examine the ‘I’ which is generally the lifeblood of many organizations. The transformative digital CIOs have already changed the focus of their work - from technology oriented tactical managers to information technology leaders and business strategist. IT leaders involve co-creating business strategy. This will allow IT to shine in both roles –as enabler and driver. IT proactively works as integral part of the business to capitalize on opportunity via leading the transformation; IT is a key component in building differentiated business capabilities, and business catalyzer to reach high-level performance.
From inside-out to outside-in focus: Most of the senior CIOs understand that the digital transformation of most of the organizations depends, to a large extent, on their capabilities to transform their duty from an inside-out focus into an outside-in focus. They must devote their time and energy, understanding the business and the potential of digital technologies to improve customer experiences, improve business processes and work with senior executives to develop new digital enabled business models. This should be the focus of the digital CIO. IT delivers the best solution to the business problems which meet business’s requirement or tailor customer’s needs. IT should facilitate the business partners to the right solutions and helping implement them. Today’s organizations are at a crossroads where the segregation or siloing of business units are at a need to reach across the aisles and respectively work with each other. It takes the expertise of all C-Level executives to work together and their teams to propel the organization. The digital CIO has many personas that are internally and externally focused along with business savviness.
CIO must lead IT in reaching high-level performance. IT is the only entity in the organization supposed to understand business entirely and oversight organizational processes horizontally, IT needs to be able to provide innovative solution or supply a differentiated solution that contributes to both top line growth and the bottom line success of the organization. IT needs to become business’s innovation engine, rather than just tools. IT must lead in reaching high-level performance. IT needs to play different role to situation at hand: What should be focused on is the integration of IT into the business decisions and processes,
The CIO must now wear many hats, and see the forest through the trees. In most organizations, the IT leader is positioned to understand the business across the enterprise ("Seeing the forest through the trees"). When he/she can accomplish that goal, that is when IT can drive value into the organization. Then your IT leadership expertise as a technologist can shine most effectively because you are business enablers, from internal support to Sales, Marketing, Finance-billing, Operations, Customer Care and Satisfaction, and lastly reporting all of the above. It is all about the business value, personal or functional. And that value can be tangible or intangible. It is about leadership, CIOs are responsible for delivering value, enabling and catalyzing the business and beyond. The modern CIO must have a balance of technology and business knowledge. A good modern CIO operates with terms like "profit growth," "cost optimization," and "increase productivity."
The shift of focus for the organization’s CIO attributes has moved in such a way that the cutting edge IT type is not enough, more skillset, and integrative capabilities are required. That is, the person who moves up the IT ranks and thus landing in the CIO spot will also need to have an inherent knowledge of the business, because every IT project is business initiative, and every modern business function has IT embedded in it. The world moves too fast and marketing, finance, technology, leadership are all intertwined. You have to be well-rounded to succeed as an executive. It's good to see corporation embracing CIOs and their technology teams as business partners. Technology needs to now embrace the business, companies that have a strong working relationship between their CIOs, CEOs and CFOs tend to outperform their peers on important metrics such as profit and revenue
The expectations for CIO have grown multi-fold, and they are expected to be visionary and path-finder for business strategy and growth. Digital CIOs are specialized generalist who has strong leadership trait to be as a “Chief Influence Officer”; who can think out-of-box as “Chief Innovation Officer”; who can leverage data in decision making and build a data-based business culture as a “Chief Insight Officer”; who can continue to optimize business processes and capability as “Chief Improvement Officer.” Or to put simply, modern CIOs are digital transformers rising for changes.
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In the industrial age, CIOs are the second class executive who often does not have a seat at the big table to make strategy, and who spends most of time and resource on “keeping the light on.” However, digital means the increasing speed of changes, data abundance, and hyperconnectivity, technology is often the very disrupter of innovation, and information is the lifeblood of organizations, many forward-thinking organizations empower their CIOs to be the frontrunner digital transformer, recognize CIOs as communication hub and change agent due to the unique position they hold to oversight business processes, and interweave business capabilities, so are CIOs ready to rise for CHANGES?
The clue has always been in the name! Chief INFORMATION Officer. This role should always have been to focus on the ‘I’ element of the IT spectrum, “Information, Innovation, Intelligence, Integration, Improvement, influence, etc. But too many times the focus has been on the ‘T.’ Now, with much of the ‘T’ being transferred to the cloud in various forms, the CIO has the time to examine the ‘I’ which is generally the lifeblood of many organizations. The transformative digital CIOs have already changed the focus of their work - from technology oriented tactical managers to information technology leaders and business strategist. IT leaders involve co-creating business strategy. This will allow IT to shine in both roles –as enabler and driver. IT proactively works as integral part of the business to capitalize on opportunity via leading the transformation; IT is a key component in building differentiated business capabilities, and business catalyzer to reach high-level performance.
From inside-out to outside-in focus: Most of the senior CIOs understand that the digital transformation of most of the organizations depends, to a large extent, on their capabilities to transform their duty from an inside-out focus into an outside-in focus. They must devote their time and energy, understanding the business and the potential of digital technologies to improve customer experiences, improve business processes and work with senior executives to develop new digital enabled business models. This should be the focus of the digital CIO. IT delivers the best solution to the business problems which meet business’s requirement or tailor customer’s needs. IT should facilitate the business partners to the right solutions and helping implement them. Today’s organizations are at a crossroads where the segregation or siloing of business units are at a need to reach across the aisles and respectively work with each other. It takes the expertise of all C-Level executives to work together and their teams to propel the organization. The digital CIO has many personas that are internally and externally focused along with business savviness.
CIO must lead IT in reaching high-level performance. IT is the only entity in the organization supposed to understand business entirely and oversight organizational processes horizontally, IT needs to be able to provide innovative solution or supply a differentiated solution that contributes to both top line growth and the bottom line success of the organization. IT needs to become business’s innovation engine, rather than just tools. IT must lead in reaching high-level performance. IT needs to play different role to situation at hand: What should be focused on is the integration of IT into the business decisions and processes,
The CIO must now wear many hats, and see the forest through the trees. In most organizations, the IT leader is positioned to understand the business across the enterprise ("Seeing the forest through the trees"). When he/she can accomplish that goal, that is when IT can drive value into the organization. Then your IT leadership expertise as a technologist can shine most effectively because you are business enablers, from internal support to Sales, Marketing, Finance-billing, Operations, Customer Care and Satisfaction, and lastly reporting all of the above. It is all about the business value, personal or functional. And that value can be tangible or intangible. It is about leadership, CIOs are responsible for delivering value, enabling and catalyzing the business and beyond. The modern CIO must have a balance of technology and business knowledge. A good modern CIO operates with terms like "profit growth," "cost optimization," and "increase productivity."
The shift of focus for the organization’s CIO attributes has moved in such a way that the cutting edge IT type is not enough, more skillset, and integrative capabilities are required. That is, the person who moves up the IT ranks and thus landing in the CIO spot will also need to have an inherent knowledge of the business, because every IT project is business initiative, and every modern business function has IT embedded in it. The world moves too fast and marketing, finance, technology, leadership are all intertwined. You have to be well-rounded to succeed as an executive. It's good to see corporation embracing CIOs and their technology teams as business partners. Technology needs to now embrace the business, companies that have a strong working relationship between their CIOs, CEOs and CFOs tend to outperform their peers on important metrics such as profit and revenue
The expectations for CIO have grown multi-fold, and they are expected to be visionary and path-finder for business strategy and growth. Digital CIOs are specialized generalist who has strong leadership trait to be as a “Chief Influence Officer”; who can think out-of-box as “Chief Innovation Officer”; who can leverage data in decision making and build a data-based business culture as a “Chief Insight Officer”; who can continue to optimize business processes and capability as “Chief Improvement Officer.” Or to put simply, modern CIOs are digital transformers rising for changes.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
