2020 has been a year so far, hasn’t it? Who could have foreseen how this year would play out when they were developing their 5-year plan in 2015?
We have seen many, many businesses scrambling to go from “business as usual” to “business as most unusual” in the space of a few months. Corners have been cut. Processes have been created on the run. People have been put into roles regardless of their previous experience and skill sets.
Excellence has probably taken a back seat to pragmatism and practicality. Don’t forget to include measures of excellence when developing your new operating model. I suspect they are going to need to be deliberately called out – at least during the Business Reestablishment phase – to ensure that businesses don’t just take the “near enough is good enough” option.
And this is going to require education. I don’t just mean formalised training programs. I mean education in all its forms. People given opportunities to learn new skills. Leaders being given support as they start to deal with what I believe will be new leadership structures in organisations – structures that are completely independent of organisational position, years of experience in the organisation, age, gender, etc.
Great leaders are going to come from all corners of an organisation. This unavoidable disruption opens the door to true leadership diversity. To real opportunities for people to become leaders regardless of the traditional management pre-requisites.
And education will be critical.