Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Leaders need to avoid falling victim to the sunk-cost fallacy. Measure your organization’s perceptions about its emotional investment as well as whatever reputation, political capital, money, time, or any other resource it has committed to the project thus far. The most important step to freeing yourself from making poor decisions based on sunk costs is to recognize the logical fallacy. Even simply being aware of it will help you make more rational decisions in the future.

This article is a compilation of contributions from the Guest Editor’s colleagues at the Atlantic Systems Guild, who believe that the work modes of the pandemic years may have signaled a change in the way we need to work from now on. The article is organized into six potential patterns, from reinvention of the office, the value of group work, and challenges of remote work to work-life-balance, team cohesion difficulties, and the potential to move to an entirely virtual model.

Bill Fox advocates for leaders to transform internally in a way that enables them to shape the future rather than just respond to events. He describes six areas of growth that are key to transformation: forward thinking, self leadership, inner awareness and intuition, inner-leader journey, listening and dialogue, and understanding how the mind works. Fox stresses that insight for new leadership resides not in the “other”; rather, it is accessible to everyone. By enhancing our ability to look and listen within, we shape our world from the inside out.

Debabrata Pruseth and Pooja Subramanian take a sweeping look at how managers can use psychology to mitigate the challenges of today’s changed work environment. The article describes how their Prism View Framework can help us change our work culture, which is based on planning and certainty, to embrace uncertainty. This involves understanding employees’ mental well-being; their need for meaningful goals and flexibility; and the roles of digitization, personalization, and communication. The article also discusses the softer skills that managers can (and should) use to form and sustain successful teams, including self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.

Robert Fuchs says self leadership can help us understand teams, ourselves as leaders, and better ways to select and train new employees. He begins by explaining the difference between self and identity (we change identities to suit the situation, but we don’t change our “selfs.”) Fuchs then describes how fragmentation of the selfs makes people less able to use signals from the self in decision making, so we must extend the concept of responsibility beyond our contractual obligations as employees. He explains the importance of understanding the relationship between the soul, the mind, and the body, leading to a discussion of how strong self leadership can result in sustained productivity.

The team is an integral unit of work. Yes, there has always been romantic talk of the superstar, the super-programmer, the one who can outperform a team of 10 mediocre developers, but if you truly watched our world for many years, then it is clear that delivery of the real work is done by teams. In some cases, it comes from teams of teams. And that is why teams are worth studying and are good grounds for discussion; they are fascinating — hence, the reason for this issue of Amplify.

The authors offer their own Agile Teamwork Effectiveness Model via five teamwork components (shared leadership, peer feedback, redundancy, adaptability, and team orientation) along with three coordinating mechanisms (shared mental models, mutual trust, and communication). They describe the three main ways their model can be useful. First, colocated teams can better understand how their team works by reflecting on how well they meet each factor in the model and by using behavioral markers to identify ways to improve. Second, it helps distributed teams, multi-teams, and teams doing safety-critical development to evaluate themselves and make improvement. Third, it’s a way for Agile teams not doing software development to better manage themselves, provided they’re doing knowledge-intensive work.

Jim Brosseau explains that culture and leadership are connected by the form in which power is wielded in an organization. He uses John R.P. French and Bertram Raven’s five forms of power (coercive, reward, legitimate, expert, and referent) to show how these forms result in certain leadership processes and company culture. Brosseau then uses the Lift-Slab Organizational Model to show why organizations in an unpredictable environment must have a participatory structure and a project-centric approach to succeed.