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Home-made failure

Established companies can afford employees who take care of PR. A Start-up consists of a small team that has to take care of all business aspects. In the absence of sufficient resources, they cannot do everything at once. Due to the initial lack of orders and customers, firms are primarily concerned with marketing (i.e., website, SEO, target groups, or advertising) – without realizing that they have to start preparing their deliverables before they promise anything to the market – although Henry Ford already knew: You can’t build up a reputation on what you are going to do.

However, what burdens in the medium term are the homegrown deficiencies. They arise when the deliverables are not ready yet, and false promises are made, the work is not organized, the cooperation lacks leadership, and the employees lose their commitment.

  • Inappropriate deliverables
    The urge to provide new deliverables, internally or externally, is reinforced by the personal interest in materials, techniques, activities, or abilities. Their passion sometimes leads to deliverables that please the originators but no one else. Even if a comprehensive market investigation is too costly, founders should make efforts to understand their market in advance.
    – Which customer groups are being targeted?
    – What do these groups expect?
    – What issues of the customers will be solved?
    – How much are they willing to pay for it?
    – What are comparable proposals in the market?
    Consciously considering these issues and talking to people of your environment help develop deliverables and reduce the danger of creating inappropriate deliverables.
  • False promises
    Puff is part of the trade. However, the necessary PR needs tangible propositions. Unfortunately, the features are unclear at the beginning of the development, i.e., not everything has been digested or described yet. On the other hand, the increasing share of services cannot be shown through use cases. In addition, wishful thinking and hubris contaminate the promises. This raises unrealistic expectations that inevitably disappoint the clientele.
    Only advertise deliverables that are comprehensively described, or better, fit to action. Use the language of your target group without promising something you cannot deliver.
  • Poor organizing
    The design of the entire value chain often begins after the products are fully developed. The roles, procedures, data processing, templates, etc., are missing. The business model is influenced, for example, by the sales channels: e.g., via retail and mail order, an online store, or sales reps. Suppose these channels are not already considered during the organizing. In that case, it can lead to difficulties in the ongoing operations, e.g., due to incomplete or incorrect customer data in the mailing or the clumsy design of the packaging concerning dimensions, weight, protection, and shipping costs. Or let us consider the prepared procedures and templates, e.g., for quotations and invoices.
    If the commercial building blocks are not prepared, they burden the daily procedures with additional disruptive activities and double work due to the subsequent correction of flaws.
  • Unguided collaboration
    Unexpected difficulties arise when the development of deliverables obscures the look at leadership and coordination of the employees. The smaller the company, the more spontaneously the founders steer their employees. Even here, groups form with varying degrees of interaction, leading to misunderstandings and conflicting actions. If on top of that, leaders suffer from hubris and think they have to micromanage everything by themselves, then it indirectly leads to disrespectful interaction that undermines the willingness to cooperate.
    It is not so much a question of a particular form of organization as of consciously shaping collaboration – and not just when the effects impact on the customers.
  • Lack of commitment
    Founders are motivated by themselves and assume that the workforce feels the same impetus. For a time, this may be true. However, habitual behavior will become ingrained, which also exists in large companies. At that point, at the latest, countermeasures must be taken, as the dwindling commitment will quickly impact performance.
    Extensive employee involvement and participation in decisions are effective motivational factors. The participants need a long-term perspective that secures commitment.

Bottom line: Even though the proposals are in the center of interest, the results are burdened by false promises, an ineffective organization, unguided collaboration, and a lack of employee commitment. For this reason, everyone needs to address homegrown threats so that customers do not run away frightened.

Building blocks of a value-adding whole

Aristotle already had in his metaphysics, more than two thousand years ago, the right intuition – The whole is more than the sum of its parts. However, the Cartesian perspective has broken the world down into its components for centuries, thereby obscuring the look at the holistic possibilities. Despite the encouraging experiences of companies like 3M or W. L. Gore & Associates GmbH, large corporations struggle to rethink. Aligning collaboration based on the needs of the employees and creating a more fruitful whole through with the resulting engagement is the ultimate purpose. The inability to leverage these strengths can only be explained by the inertia of the responsible managers. They are unsure how it will go on for them when the bureaucratic regulations, permanent surveillance, and excessive news dissemination are no longer needed, and they become obsolete. The brave are already trying agility in various forms – agile enterprise, agile organization, agile employees, agile managers, agile culture, agile mindset, agile project management, and agile product development, simply agile hodgepodge.

The following building blocks promote productive wholeness.

  • Positive diversity
    In a VUKA world, the components found on different levels influence each other mutually. To react appropriately, i.e., to act at the right place and, above all, on time, other capabilities take center stage. Ashby’s law of required variety has clarified that the greater the variety of acts of a system controlling others, the better it can compensate for disturbances. This means that the remaining managers and employees must be more diverse in their traits, behavior, and means than the tasks and the competition. The difference is created by:
    –  a wider range of skills (e.g., besides technical, also social and systemic capabilities),
    –  an extra commitment of all,
    –  extended perseverance,
    –  the restriction to tasks that are needed,
    –  the interaction in the team, and
    –  a strong sense of responsibility.
    The losers are all those who continue to worship lockstep and only add skills that already exist in the company.
  • Leadership style without leadership
    The new style replaces leadership with fostering. The most significant burden for a company is a legacy structure, whose decision-making and reporting paths are unnecessarily long, diluting resolutions and slowing the speed. Leaving the choice to employees at the point of action creates a momentum that the usual leadership cannot match. At the same time, the open work style provides employees with a common direction and security. Influence then no longer comes from a formally established position but trust and contagious enthusiasm.
  • Entrepreneurs in the company
    The days of economic officialdom are coming to an end. The new understanding of leadership works through entrepreneurial action. The employees can no longer pull back from solving a given task but must behave like they owned the company. They have, as a result, more risks. On the one hand, a large company offers the danger of unintentional mishaps and losses, but on the other hand, these are more than offset by surprising gains. Even if individual units can fulfill their tasks more flexibly, the whole remains a large fleet that works together because of its joint alignment.
  • The energy is in each personality
    Everything that happens originates in the minds of individual employees. If the human image of the Theory Y is adopted by the leaders, they can bring their experiences and abilities to effect. Together, they experience adventures that expand their mental models with new insights. With a shared vision, ideas emerge that are no longer predetermined but are jointly elaborated and move the company forward. Combined with the personal drive fueled by shared momentum, the fitness evolves that secures the business.

Bottom line: It is not a question of the size of your company whether it has to take care of the new leadership beyond agility, but when. Change is happening no matter what. And if you are already suffering from the feeling that you should be taking more care of your employees, or that cost pressure is melting your margins, or that the economic climate is threatening you, then the right moment has come to act. Should you have done it earlier? This question is useless because you cannot turn back time. The positive diversity, the leadership style without leadership, the entrepreneurs in the company, and the use of the existing personalities are building blocks that already take you extremely far. You only need to activate your most vital advantage now – namely the whole that is jointly generated with everybody and brings more than the tayloristic waste through the old-fashioned bureaucracy.