3 Steps to Preparing Your Organization to be Future Strong

Learn how to best prepare yourself and your firm for the best possible future. Becoming future strong is not just an organizational strategy — it may ask personal changes of you.

Today’s post is by Bill Jensen, author of Future Strong, (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

My team and I just spent the past few years asking over 7,000 leaders across the globe, “What are the toughest choices you must make to create the best possible future for your firm?”

We wanted to uncover how to make the future of work work. After disruptive technologies blow up most everything we do today… After the Internet of Things creates a world driven by analytics… After Millennials hit a tipping point for being the majority of people at work — (depending on your industry, that happened this year and will through 2019)… And after all the other massive changes coming our way…

What will make the future work? What’s the one biggest thing leaders should be thinking about and doing to successfully lead our teams and our companies into the future?

The Future is Personal

If you were expecting some easy market-driven answer, an updated version of the The Graduate’s “Plastics” — sorry to disappoint.

What we uncovered is that what matters most is not the next big thing that’s coming at you from out there, but how you decide to embrace it, learn from it, and change your attitudes and habits. How you choose to disrupt yourself.

The future is personal in that it reveals itself to you only after you have made a deeply personal choice about how you will embrace it.

During our interviews, 86% said that the biggest challenge facing senior execs is how to free people to succeed. The issue isn’t more people-focus or better benefits. Most leaders get that and are working on this front. The issue is that our current 20^th century hierarchies are hanging on beyond their expiration point. We need to move toward more distributed models of structuring people, capital and work. More in the direction of social models like Airbnb and Uber.

Making that shift is going to require leaders to make leaps and bets on the future before best practices are fully established and before all risks have been mitigated.

Also during our interviews and surveys, we found that less that 10% of our workforce can achieve their dreams where they currently work. Less than 10%! That does not bode well for any future! And it means that leaders need to move far beyond today’s outdated models and measures of engagement, and more toward a 50/50 relationship with the workforce — where their ROI (being able to achieve their dreams and goals) matters as much as company ROIs.

These and other findings (for more, download the free Future of Work Study) led us to conclude that the most important leadership criteria for success in the future is how well and how fast that leader can disrupt himself or herself.

The future is personal in that the biggest key to your success over the next five years lies in you pushing yourself outside your own comfort zones.

The Big So What?

As a society, we need the future of work to be reimagined where most of us are working completely differently within the next five years.

OK, OK, I get it. For many leaders, that may be too much of a leap, too much risk. Here are three recommendations that will have big impact over the next five years, but can all be piloted — field-tested in small ways, before making a full commitment to reimagined-levels of change.

1. Pilot HR and Training and Development Initiatives That Are Outside Your Comfort Zone.

When 86% told us that freeing people to success was the biggest need for future success, they noted that the past couple decades have been the story of the Hare and the Tortoise.

Hare: Business has been hyperfast at changing and reimagining cost-savings and efficiency-driven processes. Tortoise: Business has been glacially slow at investing in and radically changing all people and performance systems.

Millennials simply will not wait for you to get your s*** together on that front. You need to completely rethink these areas — fast! The old ways must crumble to attract and retain tomorrow’s talent. One example: This month, Accenture completely abolished the performance review process for its 330,000 employees.

You need to change that much too! But if that act sounds too risky, too fast — pilot whatever changes you can make as quickly as you can. Your future is at stake!

2. Examine Your Infrastructure for Its User-Centeredness.

The last five years have educated the entire workforce that tools and processes do not have to be as corporate-centered as they are right now. They feel everything should be as easy to use and as tailored to their needs as their smart phone is. And, based on the levels of complexity they must take on and sort through, they are right! Pilot changing your processes to be as user-centered as possible as fast as you can!

3. Take Yourself on a Several-Month Question-Your-Assumptions Journey.

The marketplace is blowing up today’s assumptions at an incomprehensible rate. And the biggest challenge facing today’s leaders is that their own assumptions and mental models are not changing fast enough.

The best approach we’ve found to tackle this is to involve your own employees. Put together a three-month task force where 10-25 front-line and mid-level employees recommend the top ten things that should be blown up and radically changed by 2020. a) Be prepared to be schooled! Most employees know ground-truths and future trends far earlier and better than most leaders. b) Be prepared to embrace seven or eight of their top ten recommendations!

The Choice is Yours

It all comes back to: the future is personal. The biggest challenges you will face as a decision-maker are the massive disruptions coming your way. The biggest challenges you will face as an individual and as a leader is how quickly and how much and how successfully you disrupt yourself.

– Bill Jensen is CEO of the Jensen Group, a New Jersey-based change consulting firm, focused on the future of work. As Mr. Simplicity, Bill makes it easier for people to do great work. His eighth book, Future Strong, is on sale now (CLICK HERE to get your copy). Follow him on Twitter @simpletonbill.

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