Innovating UK business growth: why leaders can’t secure the performance they need post-2008
Why can't leadership teams get the performance and growth they need post-2008?
The reason.
Their organisational alignment thread has been snapped, and they are stuck behind a set of current beliefs and approaches to performance that can never deliver.
It’s time executive leaders took a new, but recognisable approach to organisational performance.
If executive leaders want sustained performance and growth in their business, they need to ensure their people:
But executive teams find it harder and harder to obtain successful transmission of their strategic messages to their people, never mind the total adoption of the performance behaviours that will deliver the successful business transformations they seek.
No amount of resources, activity or effort will work; no amount of insights, training and development programmes built on current performance beliefs or approaches will ever obtain the traction necessary for success without organisational alignment.
No organisational alignment, no sustained uplifts in performance.
No company-wide AI adoption.
There are three aspects of business which evolved to meet the market realities and pressures post-2008, inadvertently becoming the key reasons why organisational alignment is no longer possible for large-scale legacy businesses. These three areas disrupt and break the executive message transmission and the organisational behaviour traction, and they are:
The 3 C's - Capabilities, Culture and Confusion (caused by distractions)
In the effort to deliver growth in an epoch of near-free money and as a way of integrating global, multi-market expansion, leaders followed a growth playbook - M&A and restructuring, applying matrix, agile and digitally empowered business models. They delivered organisational efficiencies, including outsourcing, digitisation, offshoring, and streamlining; they flattened structures and removed middle management and costs. Leaders prioritised strategy over management and business transformation capabilities, passing responsibility for delivery to the people function. Through this process, organisations inadvertently eroded their management capabilities and weakened the organisational alignment thread, undermining the ability for all their people to contribute successfully.
Leadership development and the culture market trends and expectations, driven by academics, psychologists and coaches, established a belief that inclusive leadership, representative targets, meaning, and purpose would somehow deliver breakthroughs in performance. A belief that if everyone had psychological safety, felt included, had equity, were welcome and wanted, allowing them to bring their full selves to work, productivity and performance would explode. It didn’t.
Instead, businesses became internally focused on non-performance driving conversations about equality, wider social issues, and feelings, with leaders swamped and burdened by impossible standards and responsibilities, as well as unsolvable social agendas. All of which further confused organisations and their people, making it even harder to focus them on the things that mattered - the things that built capabilities and drove performance and growth.
Worse still, it prioritised performative over performance, representation over diverse talent, weakened individual accountability, responsibility and transparency, placing the responsibility on leaders to meet impossible upside-down expectations. Organisational cultures didn’t drive focus and performance anymore; they became divisive, political, and distracted.
Centrally caused by the exponential growth in distractions.
Alongside the constant external hyper-VUCA shocks, it was the endless disruptions that undermined focus. The overwhelming cacophony of distracting low-value activities, meetings and programmes, and yet more requests for data, information and compliance-driven form-filling. The constant creation engine of new low-impact and low-quality projects and programmes. The layers and layers of additional processes and systems added, due to a lack of capability, accountability & focus.
All this additional effort, activity and information just hid, muddied and obfuscated the lack of ownership, focus and accountability.
It weakened, disrupted and distracted people and pointed them inward, not outward. To the point where the executive signal could no longer punch through the internal noise.
People no longer know how or what to prioritise, so they focus on everything all at once in an attempt to do everything and please everybody. As the activity and noise grew, the quality, impact, and performance sank.
Without a resolution to these non-alignment issues, no amount of effort, resource, activity, strategy, or AI investment will stick, or give leaders the transmission signal for behaviour traction required to unlock their executive strategic ambitions for growth.
