Think about how you spend your time as a leader. What percentage of your time is spent:
1. Undertaking your own tasks and achieving your own objectives?
2. Improving the performance of your own team and helping them achieve their objectives?
3. Working on the priorities or objectives of the organisation as a whole?
4. Improving the performance of others outside your own team and leveraging their performance to better achieve organisational goals?
The mature cross-enterprise leader may spend as much as 20% of his or her time working in areas 3 and 4. They are able to balance up the importance of individual achievement and team leadership with the overarching requirements of the organisational as a whole and the performance of other teams.
Why is this important? The organisation that consists of a series of silos operating independently, or even in conflict with each other, will achieve little despite the hard work and dedication of the various teams! If the leader is concerned about customer engagement, profit improvement, or enterprise transformation then operating solely inside their own silo will achieve very little.
How do busy leaders make the time to develop a cross-enterprise focus? The answer is to build the capability of your own team so you can delegate more of their own tasks and so free themselves up to focus on the bigger organisational priorities. Are you up the for challenge?
Research by Gartner suggests the benefits include:
· A 12% revenue growth for the cross-enterprise leader’s business unit
· A 5% revenue growth for other business units
· Teams lead by enterprise leaders are 68% more innovative and 21% more adaptable than teams of individual leaders
· Teams experience higher levels of engagement and customer satisfaction when their leader is an enterprise leader compared to an individual leader.
Does your organisation work very hard but still disappoint in how much it achieves?
Iain McCormick (021 575449) and Helen Burt (021 864 650)
Executive Coaching Centre