The research leading to The Performance Triangle confirms that agile organizations maintain interactive leadership to focus the attention of employees on important things in order to flexibly address critical issues with speed in a fast-paced business environment. Interaction means to communicate across the organization to use the insights of people to translate data into meaning for decisions.
Frame attention: facilitate collaboration
Invest in attention: remove the barriers
People Need Interaction
Make talent management work. In agile organization, employees are hired not only for their routine and physical contributions to work, but also for their knowledge, insights, ideas, and creativity. HR leaders not only are challenged by the difficulty in hiring the best talent, but also by making sure that the talent stays and translates its knowledge into productive action.
Fix the people policy. Insight gained from using the Agile Diagnostic around the world helps our clients understand that talent management is worthless unless people have the opportunity to apply, share, and develop their knowledge and skills.
Get engagement. With our expertise in using a consistent Management Design philosophy, we know that maintaining high levels of interaction improves overall involvement and engagement. This further enhances overall collaboration.
Leadership Frames Attention
Insights into interaction. Leadership is at the lower left corner of the Performance Triangle. Effective leaders in agile organizations must interact with people on a personal level, relate to others to facilitate meaningful collaboration, and establish a supportive work environment based on trust. In the broadest sense, leadership is embodied in effective communication and interaction with others at all levels, throughout the organization. This further means to enable leadership teams to provide choice, to raise the awareness of what is important, and to help people to remain focused on the things that matter most.
Invest in Attention
Remove interaction barriers. With ten years' experience working with clients from a variety of industries and life cycle stages on challenging projects, we recommend that in agile organizations, leadership needs a different design. When leadership is broken, 'control and command' prevails, busyness becomes more important than action; it gets drowned by detail, lacks meaning, focuses on numbers, and makes wrong decisions guided by infected/misguided/inappropriate reward programs.
Interactive leadership guides attention in organizations. And attention is a scarce resource. Its demand is always higher than its supply. This is why designing leadership to pay attention to important things is a high-return investment. It is an investment into high quality interactions with people.
Since 2002, we create twins of organizations with the AI-based operating system for dynamic leadership.
Management Insights is an independent and privately owned company with headquarters in Zuoz, Switzerland.
For more information, contact Lukas Michel, founder and author, or our partners across the world.
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