Management challenges for the 21st Century
What Are Three 21st Century Challenges in Strategic Management? Answer Many challenges face a manager in the 21st century. A looming challenge in strategic management right now is globalization. Another is a volatile world economy. A third challenge in 21st century strategic management is the ever changing environment of government regulations, both domestically and internationally. Globalization Globalization is the international integration of intercultural ideas, perspectives, products/services, culture, and technology.
Ethics and Governance
Ethics is at the core of corporate governance, and management must reflect accountability for their actions on global community scale. Diversity Globalization demands a diverse work force, and assimilating varying cultures, genders, ages, and dispositions is of high value. Career Success and Personal Fulfillment Career success and fulfillment hinges on effective human resource management, the practice of empowering employees with the necessary tools and skills. Technology Technology management is crucial in offsetting the risks of new technology while acquiring the operational benefits the technology provides.
Competition Managers must understand a company’s competitive advantage, and translate this into a strategy that incorporates the competitive landscape. A Framework for Considering Challenges: PESTEL The PESTEL framework highlights six critical factors for management to consider when approaching the general business environment. A Look at the Managers of Tomorrow Posted on August 25, 2009by greatworkplace Randstad recently published an excellent report on the Managers of Tomorrow, including some fascinating statistics and observations on what our managerial landscape might look like in the future.
In his book, “The Future of Management,” Gary Hamel argues that the secret to long-term business success is “not operational excellence, technology breakthroughs, or new business models, but management innovation–new ways of mobilizing talent, allocating resources, and formulating strategies. ” We’ll take a look at some predictions for the future and how we might be able to influence them. Who wants to be a supervisor? According to Randstad’s report, current employees have mixed feelings about the quality of managers currently, but their outlook of future supervisors looks somewhat bleak.
The report goes on to suggest that “It’s clear that finding and preparing the next generation of managers is rapidly becoming one of the most critical business needs in the modern workplace. ” The problem: future generations of employees aren’t embracing the role of a manager. “Employees watch their managers and see long hours, loads of new responsibilities and not much more money. Increased stress is the number one reason employees don’t want to become managers. ” What attracts employees to a manager role?
We’ve established that future generations might not currently embrace the role of a manager, but Ranstad’s report does provide some insight on what employees do find attractive about being a manager. So what makes management more attractive? “Maybe it begins with rethinking management. When we asked employees to list the reasons why they would want to be a manager, the answers were surprising. Power, status and money didn’t even make the list. The number one reason was being able to share my knowledge with others. Number two was being responsible for the success of an organization. And, number three was being able to influence decisions.”
Some Goals for the Future In February, the Harvard Business Journal published an article featuring 25 Stretch Goals for Management in the 21st Century. Here are a couple interesting points from the article: Redefine the work of leadership. The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration. Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. Markets are better than hierarchies at allocating resources, and companies’ resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.
Depoliticize decision-making. Decision processes must be free of positional biases and should exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization. Retrain managerial minds. Managers’ traditional deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills. (Source: “25 Stretch Goals for Management“, Harvard Business Journal) Supervisory Training for Tomorrow’s Supervisor Today’s work environment demands highly skilled frontline supervisors different from the command-and-control leaders of the past.
People are not interested in working for someone who just gives orders daily and conducts evaluations annually. Today’s employees are looking for leaders who develop, support and coach them and keep them engaged. In ERC’s popular Supervisory Series I, beginning September 8, participants learn the managerial and interpersonal skills necessary to handle all leadership interactions—including those that are emotionally charged—along with the ability to apply both of these skill sets in any leadership setting or interaction. Organizational Promotions – The Managers of Tomorrow
SEPTEMBER 1, 2010 BY JORRIAN GELINK 1 COMMENT The people decision process is the control an organization has in whether its vision is being executed as well as achieving high performance. Having mission statements and core values posted across the walls is irrelevant unless the actions towards the people align with the organization’s core vision. Delivering a message emphasizing the importance of attaining new markets falls short when the company promotes an associate that is focused on retaining older clients but moves up due to “long tenure”.
Every decision that is made in regards to people movement up, down or sideways is viewed on carefully not only by those within the department or division; but as well with others that do a “temperature check” of what it takes to stay/move up within the organization. The management of today need to follow two core steps in order to promote the management of tomorrow. Integrity of character. The start of any promotion should be on an individual’s integrity; for without that the organization is compromised. Integrity is not something learned in an organization, it is a trait brought into the organization and is easily judged by others.
Integrity is always worn on a manager and is the fabric that can never come off; whether the integrity is strong or weak, all can see it and will respond to it accordingly. Lack of management integrity will show up in less than one month, but be rest assured the damage will show up the same time that integrity of character is breached. Many examples plague a manager’s strength of integrity: favoritism, fear of dealing with strong subordinates, placing blame on others, fear of performance communication, and promoting others “like me” are some of the main issues that plague poor management today.
The people of the organization will forgive upper management promoting someone new to role, but they will never forgive a promotion of one with a lack of integrity. Organizational Performance. The organization has to promote based on performance: clear results achieved by executing tangible goals of the organization. Behavior leading to results needs to be looked at, any manager promoting one based on performing the right behaviors but not achieving results shows a lack of ignorance to the organization’s goals. Others will look upon this type of poor promotion it as “as long as I do what my manager tells me, who cares if I need to perform”.
Not only will you damage your business, you also shun others from wanting to move up the organizational ladder. Another result of poor promotion planning are the “opinions” of whether one can be handle a new role: what needs to be there is factual evidence of performance. The worst damage that can be done is not only average performance of a candidate, but under-performance, as any objectives and goals leading to results will not be taken seriously by co-workers and upper management will be looked upon as “the promoter of friends”.
Continuous poor promotions with this method result in sub-ordinates leaving the organization due to favoritism or even worse, destroy the organizations objectives by trying to be-friend their superior in place of achieving results. The managers of tomorrow require high integrity of character as well of results of organizational performance. Focusing on these two requirements helps the organization be fair and accountable to what it needs from its teams. Missing even one of these requirements not only threatens the performance of the organization, but also detracts others from looking to be promoted.
This is the true control of the organization: moving the right people into the right places for the right reasons. Jorrian Gelink Management Architect 5 Key Roles for HR Managers of Tomorrow What wlll the HR directors of tomorrow look like and what will their roles be? If we listen to theorists and academics, they might not look like much at all — in fact, they might already be extinct. This isn’t news: mandates for change in the profession have been prolific since the ’90s. Remember Fast Company’s 2005 article “Why We Hate HR“? That certainly got our attention: attacking HR’s intelligence and value.
Still today, noted practitioners like Jacques Fitz-Enz advocate breaking up HR, suggesting that the competencies needed for each area of the HR practice be allocated to other capable departments within a company. I, naturally, wholeheartedly disagree with Fitz-Enz and other HR-killing proponents. Why? There is absolutely nothing in any organization that does not require people. People are an organization’s greatest asset — they are the human capital. So why should there not be a talented team of professionals focused on all things people?
I think there is hope for HR, but it will require a dramatic paradigm shift and a deliberate refocus on what’s important to an organization in order to drive the performance and development of the workforce. If HR is to survive, it must think and act as if the organization was paying for its services — and could pull the plug at any time. Here are five roles that the HR Leader of tomorrow will have to play in order to shift the paradigm and add true value to an organization: Strategic Investor Today’s HR team is overwhelmed, overly busy and stretched beyond capacity.
With multiple customers having exponential number of needs, run from one project to the next, without stopping to understand why we are doing it, what the end result should be and whether or not we met the end results. Think about that. If HR were a business with services and products for an organization, would we not have to think about our business as a strategic investor, providing the right products and services for a cost that the customer will pay? We cannot be everything, and do everything. We need to learn to deliver our work where it adds value, and continuously measure that delivery.
Relationship Facilitator Sticking with the concept of Human Resources as “all things people” for a minute, it goes without saying that a huge element of that role is facilitating relationships throughout (and outside) the organization. I see “building relationships” as being part of this, but not all. Yes, HR needs trusted relationships with executives, peers, the HR team, and the employees. But Human Resources cannot stop there; they must facilitate relationship building up and down levels, across business units, and with the community at large.
Relationships are the biggest derailers of organizational success, and HR is poised to be the trusted facilitator bring people, teams and the organization together to drive business success. Developer of People Human Resources tends to be the “cobbler’s children”, going without shoes while the cobbler provides shoes to everyone else. Developing the skill and talent of the workforce goes without saying on the HR job description (at least in my mind), but we cannot forget our own team. How can we expect to influence and facilitate if our own team is in disarray?
How can we facilitate trust, if our HR team is not trusted? Risk Manager There is no getting around it; there are tremendous risks related to people in an organization, and it is the role of HR to manage those risks. That doesn’t mean providing policies and procedures to ensure no one steps out of line, but building capability in the leadership team and engagement and commitment in the workforce. Technology Geek The Human Resources Director of Tomorrow cannot survive on inference and buzzwords; they must provide credible business intelligence.
Anyone stepping into HR leadership must have broad knowledge of technology systems, data integrity, process improvement and analytics. We must be able to critically analyze our processes to ensure that the business intelligence that we provide to our customers is credible. With the complexity of today’s HR systems, HR has to have to “geek-y curiosity,” asking, “how can we do this better and more efficiently using technology? ” Can We Shift the Paradigm? Not only can we, but we must, not only for our survival, but for the organizations we serve.
The people of the organization make it or break it, and need the talent and skills to make it. That’s where HR can shine. A Word from the Associate Dean: VUCA and the managers of tomorrow Posted on July 4, 2013 by GMBA Community Change is occurring faster than ever before, the world is more and more unpredictable. More players, more issues, and more voices means chaos and complexity and the “realities” of doing business are not so hard and fast as we may have once assumed it to be. Organizations operating under these forces face unique challenges and opportunities in decision-making, problem-solving, and planning.
VUCA, an acronym standing for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity is a term derived from military vocabulary that is increasingly relevant for describing how managers should take into account the external environment. Being aware, being prepared, and anticipating the complications arising from VUCA are essential characteristics of a global manager today. As companies understand (or more likely, fail to understand) this operational chaos, they seek a new kind of leader, a talent that is prepared, aware, and capable of foreseeable strategy and informed action.
These are the kinds of leaders the Global MBA seeks to train, to help provide companies with the talent they need to stay ahead of the trends. The companies that fail to perform today are the ones that are still operating under the talent acquisition, talent management, and workforce planning processes of yesterday. But this chaos is here to stay, so businesses and business leaders not only need to get up to speed but to start finding the relevant talent that can perform and remain agile in this environment.
Agility is a term we stress in our program. In the age of innovation, disruption, and globalization, sticking with the tried and true won’t necessarily cut it. Unique challenges require unique solutions, and the demands placed on business leaders in this setting are diverse, varied, and in constant flux. As new markets emerge, new opportunities and obstacles arise. At a faster pace, the future is upon us before we can anticipate it. And with disruptive innovation the rule rather than the exception, competition is breakneck.
Traditional leadership styles don’t work in this sort of dynamism. The leadership must mirror the environment and focus on VUCA preparedness, anticipation and evolution. And that doesn’t mean that there’s a one size fits all model for management; complex problems require complex solutions and equally complex strategies. Tomorrow’s leaders must be able to thrive in multiple, multi-faceted environments, keeping a finger on the pulse of emerging markets, mature markets, entrepreneurship and innovation, and efficiency and optimization.
Embracing chaos, taking risks, being capable of rapid strategy changes in response to changing markets: all of these characteristics must also be balanced by pragmatism and commitment and underscored by a passion to bring employees along on the adventure. The skills gained through interacting with a diverse cohort, traveling and working internationally, exposure to emerging markets, studying in a mature market, learning from the best professors from around the world are all hardwired into the design of the Global MBA to respond to these needs.
Studying a variety of cases of multiple situations and from diverse industries helps students examine strategy and learn from failure. Extensive teamwork helps them learn to collaborate, share strengths and compensate weaknesses, and adapt collectively in response to the VUCA microcosm of a rigorous, 12-month MBA. How should companies respond to these complex external environment? In kind. Agile leadership means harvesting the best of skills, styles, and experience to meet specific, unique needs.
In July, the Global MBA students will take off around the world for their International Immersion Projects. Each team consists of students of different nationalities, with different linguistic capabilities, with different professional expertise and different academic strengths. They would be working in for a Lifestyle brand in China, agri-business in Bolivia, energy and bottom-of-the-pyramid issues in India, eco-tourism in Morocco, small and medium size sector development in Djibouti and wine industry in S.
Africa. To tackle these diverse projects in challenging external environment requires diversified skill set. The teams will work in environments ranging from -20 degree C to +50 degree C! It also means that the teams are uniquely equipped to respond to the shifts and demands of their different projects in different locations through practiced collaboration and constructive conflict. The successful companies of the future will harness resources like these and use them to become leaders in a VUCA-fueled world.
