Todays High Potential Leaders are Reinventing Leadership

Todays High Potential Leaders are Reinventing LeadershipTodays High Potential Leaders are Reinventing LeadershipTodays High Potential Leaders are Reinventing Leadership Charan, author of The High Potential Leader How to Grow Fast, Take on New Responsibilities, and Make an Impact (Wiley, 2017)Amid everything that is new and different, todays high-potential leaders, or hipos, must be able to identify the untapped opportunities their companies will pursue and mobilize the organization.Understandably, this is a weakness in many older geschftliches miteinander leaders today. Throughout their careers, growth welches defined as improving on things that already existed increasing profits through cost cutting, tweaking products for adjacent markets, or acquiring other companies in the same industry.More radical changes like reinventing the entire business model, reshaping the entire ecosystem of supply and distribution, or rethinking the entire customer experience have been rare in the life o f a company.Its now clear that businesses might need to be transformed more than once in a leaders tenure, and todays high potential leaders must be prepared for that. They should exhibit characteristics that the previous generation of leaders did not always need - such as these characteristics1.They imagine on a large scale. Hipos can take in a ton of information from many different sources and almost instantly find what could be meaningful. In doing so, they pick up clues about what might be possible, and they dream big.In the past, wild dreams or visions of things that dont yet exist might have been considered delusional, but high potential leaders dont see it that way. If they personally lack the capability to realize the picture they have in their heads, they know they can use technology, algorithms, and other peoples capabilities to make it real. They are psychologically prepared to scale it up very fast and go after it fearlessly.2.They seek what they need to make it happen. I had just finished speaking to a group of executives about how to set up an advisory board when a young man approached me. Do you have a minute? he asked. Polite but straightforward, he continued, I run a small company, much smaller than the corporations youre used to working with. Would you consider advising me?Its no secret that Ive worked with a lot of big, well-known companies, but he was undaunted. What I came to learn was that he had sized up his market opportunity, and it was huge. He wanted to grow his company very fast and was seeking help building the capacity for it.3.Hipos will talk to anyone. They dont just stay within the hierarchy. A young Steve Jobs didnt hesitate to call Bill Hewlett, co-founder of tech giant Hewlett-Packard, when he was seeking technical help. When Pat Gallagher was groomed to take over his familys Chicago-based insurance brokerage in 1983, he reached out to the CEO of McDonnell Douglas, a company far different and much bigger than his own. The C EO took time to talk to him, and Gallagher eventually took his firm to number four in the United States.4. They understand the concept of the ecosystem. Companies rarely act alone in delivering their product or service. High potential leaders understand the complex web of participants, from the makers of small parts that go into larger ones to the mom-and-pop shops or FedEx fleet that delivers the product. Walmart became a juggernaut of low cost because of how it used its tight relationships with suppliers, the largest of which were housed right at the Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters.Walmart schooled its suppliers in state-of-the-art logistics that reduced inventories but kept store shelves stocked with merchandise that turned over very quickly. Both Walmart and the supplier grew, and consumers benefited from low prices.Digital-age versions of rethinking the business ecosystem abound. Apples iPod was a nifty device, but it became a sensation because iTunes changed the way music was packaged,priced, and distributed. Amazon thrives on algorithms that predict a customers need and delivers it through an ecosystem of sellers, purchase options, and delivery methods.5. High potential leaders have the ability to see the total picture. They conjure a mental image of the web of inter-relationships and think imaginatively about how to redesign it.They will come primarily from the fifty-three million Millennialsin the workforce now. This generation has been steeped from an early age in video, the Internet, and social media. They grew up in an information-rich world and a global social hive, interconnected and living with unprecedented social transparency.Theyve had instant access to vast amounts of information from around the world, conditioning their brains to rapid thinking and communication. Text messaging and Twitter train them to be brief and to the point, a sharp contrast with the belabored PowerPoint presentations the baby boomers were expected to use.With a wi de mental bandwidth and ability to absorb key information, they can construct a bigger picture very quickly. All that plays to a hipos advantage.6. They adapt quickly to the new. Theyve seen brands, trends, celebrities, and social conventions rise and fall overnight.7.They have diverse social networks. Theyre connected to people far beyond their local environment, theyve traveled, and theyve been exposed to a wide array of viewpoints through social media.8.They have a change-the-world mentality. Theyve seen unknowns become well-knowns with one viral video, and college dropouts become billionaires before they turned thirty-five. Theyve seen Mark Zuckerberg in a hoodie speaking to an audience of buttoned-down security analysts and Elon Musk launch SpaceX, not to mention beautiful electric cars. The success stories are known across the globe, inspiring hipos everywhere.While basic leadership traits such as high integrity and the ability to communicate are constant, and performance will always matters, they are mere table stakes. Without the qualities and abilities the fast-changing world now demands, a leader is not likely to succeed in a high-level leadership job, at least not for long.Excerpted with permission of the publisher, Wiley, from The High-Potential Leader How to Grow Fast, Take on New Responsibilities, and Make an Impact by Ram Charan. Copyright (c) 2017 by John Wiley Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and ebooks are sold.Author BioRam Charan is a highly-acclaimed business advisor, speaker and best-selling author whose books have sold more than 4 million copies. Ram has coached some of the worlds most successful CEOs and has worked behind the scenes at companies such as GE, Bank of America, DuPont, Novartis, EMC, 3M, Verizon, Grupo RBS, Tata Group, Max Group and Yildiz Holdings.