Leaders Avoiding Disaster With Your Company’s Complexity

By Neal Burgis Ph.D.

Every Disaster Is an Opportunity You Must Seize

“There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.” -Brene Brown

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With the inability to solve the ongoing projects due to not having enough time and running into obstacles at every turn, how can you as the leader help reduce these difficulties? Both managing or leading people and making sure complex and complicated situations don’t interfere with the daily operations of your business needs you to constantly observe your business daily.

Leaders need to show more composure than ever before in the workplace. Knowing the difference between complex and complicated impacts your business differently. Most people use these words interchangeably. If you’re a leader and you treat a complex problem like a complicated problem, you are setting up yourself and your company for failure.

Learn From Failure

“Learn to listen. Opportunity could be knocking at your door very softly.” -Anonymous

Too many leaders fail at change management efforts because you either don’t follow through completely or when you begin to fail you give up. Don’t give up as failing is part of the learning curve. Trying to experiment with rules, processes and procedures works best takes some time see what works and what does not. This takes place with everything you do in order to get the right things in place.

Preventing

-Demosthenes

Look carefully at what you have in place. Some are self-imposed that you and your employees put in place. Some are assumptions and beliefs. You need to separate them out before you start looking at what works and what you can eliminate or change. Updating your processes and procedures allows you to work better.

Start allowing your employees to “break the rules” when generating ideas for innovative breakthroughs. This means they cannot get rid of specific regulations that are required.

Move Beyond Same Old Approaches = Same Old Results

“Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.” -Elon Musk

Breaking away from the traditional ways you’ve been conducting business sometimes happens when a crisis occurs. The problem for many organizations is that you’ve been working the same way for years- the same rules, processes and procedures and have not changed with the times. O.K., you believe that what’s happening is a fad and everything will get back to the way things were. Sorry, in today’s business world creativity, innovation and technology are the way to go. On top of this is using simplification for getting things done is the extra your company needs to be productive.

Shift Your Mindset

“Picture your brain forming new connections as you meet the challenge and learn. Keep on going.”

Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

In today’s business world your mindset needs to change for what you need right now. Yesterday’s mindset was for yesterday as business change in the blink of an eye. Looking at your business you need to change more often than before. Instead of having one product to work with, today’s business cycles are faster requiring your company to have at least 2-3 other ideas generating in the pipeline ready for the next cycle before the current one begins.

You need to use your creative thinking to generate greater ideas as your competition is already doing this. Don’t be left behind to think that everyone wants you product or service and that a slow period will eventually bring people back for more of the same. The world has been changing and it is getting faster with newer products and service. You need to think this way too.

Start Taking Risks

“Spend eighty percent of your time focusing on the opportunities of tomorrow rather than the problems of yesterday.” -Brian Tracy

Besides asking thought-provoking questions, you and your employees need to look at what is possible from the complexity you have in front of you. Yes, you do need to take some time to look at what you have and try small changes that will make a greater impact on what you currently do.

Taking a risk requires leaders and employees to go both inside and outside the box in search for other ways to find ideas as well as how to get things done more efficiently.

Leadership is not rocket science and in reality some people think it is especially when it comes to avoiding the problems, challenges and difficulties complexity brings. As the saying goes “Don’t take your eyes off the ball” this is what many do to let complexity into the workplace. You do need to work hard to make simplification work. It is better than the alternative- bankruptcy and fading away.

 

About

As an executive coach specializing in creativity and innovation, my consulting has expanded in helping small and mid-size businesses to Reduce Business Complexity and Increase Simplification for Greater Productivity.

 

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