Entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs in the present are navigating a world tackled by crisis, high-speed change, and disruption. Often these challenges have no well-known solutions and are surrounded by high uncertainty. While driving change and further development under these conditions, C-suite executives need to keep the operational business running and fulfil customer and shareholder expectations.
It looks like an unsolvable challenge to struggle with things like developing an effective corporate culture and employer branding or maintaining efficient operations and business performance at the same time. What are the right ways, to seek big and bold ideas or continue with the current strategy? Scaling the company, or focus on the core customers? Fostering the culture change, or improving the running business processes?
On the first view, these various expectations seem paradoxical. If executives with entrepreneurial responsibility focus on enterprise transformation only, they risk failing to hit their annual performance indicators. However, if they focus on performance only, they risk their talent pools and falling behind their competitors. In reality, it is ineffective to differentiate between these topics because they are two sides of the same coin.
21st-century corporate management is like a constant sway between current business performance and transforming next. The key to effective top management is to overcome the traditional business mindset that separates these activities. It is about leading and developing them simultaneously and symbiotically mashed. From this perspective, an effective enterprise leader shall perform in business as much as possible and develop the enterprise system as much as possible. The aim is to invest in both topics with equal priority but not at the expense of one or the other.
If companies want to navigate through the challenges of the digital VUCA age, they will need more than top executives who are sophisticated in vertical leadership, business development, strategic planning, decision-making, and people management.
Successful enterprises will need smart enterprise leaders who know how and when to perform traditionally and when to transform horizontally, across the broader enterprise system.
Enterprise leadership in the 21st century is based on a systemic approach and involves the continuous development and transformation of the whole enterprise system. It reflects a never-ending developmental progression. For executives with entrepreneurial responsibility, there may be no more challenging, significant, and strategic activity than accelerating self-empowerment and developing mindsets and skills to become systemic, visionary, and authentic enterprise leaders who create impact across the enterprise and beyond.
Enterneering® is a synonym for Enterprise Leadership 5.0
In addition to a suitable implementation approach, entrepreneurs and executives who want to develop into such corporate leaders need the awareness of the demand for personal development and the will to change personally and overcome their comfort zones. Enterneering® is a discipline that is dedicated to this development and implementation.
The effective examination of this discipline takes place in 5 consecutive and partially overlapping spheres of activity. On the road to success, the right sequence is just as important as the appropriate scope of the work.
Each person has different prerequisites and a personal background of experience and maturity. Therefore, the scope and intensity of the content to be completed or dealt with in each sphere of activity always depend on each constellation. Taking shortcuts based on insufficient reflection or incorrect judgement harbours risks to success that should not be underestimated.
1. Awareness, Understanding, Classification
- Understanding the approach and the discipline
- Knowing the main features of the approach
- Recognising the relevance and objectives
- Realising the differentiation from other topics and activities
2. Necessity, Role understanding, Acceptance
- Understanding interrelationships and cause-effect relationships
- Recognising the importance of alignment and goal setting for the company's success
- Anticipating the dependencies on one's person
- Understanding the influence of personal thoughts and actions
- Accepting general or hardly influenceable factors
3. State analysis, Need for action, Target and action plan
- Describing and analysing the initial situation
- Deriving and defining the need for action
- Formulating development and change objectives
- Describing implementation measures
4. Personal tasks, Personality development, Leadership
- Recognising and working on tasks that cannot be delegated
- Deriving and defining needs for personal development
- Realising personal implementation measures
- Recognising and consciously assuming leadership and self-leadership
5. Delegation, Promotion, Sponsoring, Empowerment
- Recognising tasks to delegate and assigning them to suitable persons
- Identifying and addressing personnel and qualification requirements
- Recognising and addressing inadequate working conditions
- Identifying and closing budget gaps
- Recognising where the empowerment of people and the organisation is necessary and taking action
The knowledge and expertise in this discipline can be acquired both through self-directed learning or with the support of experienced Enterneering® experts. Regardless of the approach and path chosen, entrepreneurs and executives with entrepreneurial responsibility should take a close look at it, because neither the digital age nor the competition give reason to believe that it is attainable without it.
Consistently systemic enterprise leadership for a complex and disruptive age
The complex challenges entrepreneurs and executives face today have never been so dynamically diverse, so globally linked and so relentless. Constantly high rates of change, geo-economic upheavals, social and political unrest, health and supply crises, climate and demographic change. All of these and other effects require extended leadership.
Smart enterprise leaders manage business performance and develop the enterprise system. In doing so, they are courageous, inspired, and emotionally motivated toward both achieving exceptional business results and driving continuous change. Through the application of Enterneering® these smart enterprise leaders interconnect empowerment, purpose, performance, and impact collectively.
Unlike traditional leadership models, Enterneering® anticipates that leadership is no longer only about vertical management or structural development. Rather, it is about horizontal influence and systemic development.
When looking at the factors shaping enterprise leadership in the digital age, the focus quickly shifts to the resource least imbued with digital characteristics - people, with their talents, inspiration, passion, and motivation, as well as their ability to innovate and change.
Today, most C-suite executives spend a lot of time influencing people without having formal authority over them. Many of them have to negotiate or bargain with different stakeholders to win support.
To successfully compete in today’s fast-paced, decentralised, and agile environment, companies need to have a stakeholder and talent-centered enterprise system with a wide emotional reach. Entrepreneurs and executives with entrepreneurial responsibility have to take a systemic view of their enterprise and its stakeholders, understanding deeply how all the diverse elements interrelate, and then working to optimise that interdependence.