11: Building Leaders in Broken Companies
This is the next podcast for the power sector corporate strategy study we will soon release as part of our Executive Program.
Building leaders in broken companies is very difficult. In an earlier podcast, we discussed a change at Firmsconsulting in the way we are managing large corporate strategy transformation-type studies. Essentially, we now have a dedicated partner working with executive clients to help them with leadership and CEO-transitions issues. The work is absolutely fascinating: it sits at the intersection of leadership, motivation, happiness and clinical psychology.
I am personally learning from watching this partner in action. This is, therefore, a very interesting podcast and we are going to discuss the following.
We are going to predict what is going to happen to the Empire International (EI) executive leadership team based on our experience of running similar studies. Next we are going to briefly explain the leadership challenge at Empire International.
Then we are going to look at the unique context of the local labor market and how the backgrounds of the EI leadership team essentially make them voluntary corporate zombies who cannot fail financially: this is personal financial success even if EI fails financially.
Next, we will explain how and why they will be sidelined and why they will accept it!
Finally, we will look at our leadership strategy to deal with this: hint – involves focusing on the transition.
Finally we will discuss the central concept of our leadership philosophy: authenticity. It will surprise you to learn that this philosophy is absolutely nothing like anything you have read about in mainsteam business literature. We will use some case studies to discuss the philosophy.
I will also add some notes about the profile of the partner who should run leadership development and why it needs to differ from a corporate strategy partner.
Michael Boricki
