C. Lead and Develop people
This theme explores the concept of leading and developing people. A core focus is leadership within a team setting.
As the information or knowledge economy extends across all sectors of the global and local economies, a shift has occurred towards the importance of harnessing internal strengths to achieve competitive advantage. It is an environment where technology has rapidly reinvented operational technology, information exchange and management systems. An environment where process control and product differentiation is much harder to achieve and even harder to maintain for any period of time before other companies with lower margins of profit and higher levels of quality assume competitive advantage.
In these environments, companies now only have a chance at competitive advantage where they harness knowledge unique to their workforce and embed this knowledge in how people work together in the company. A competitor cannot easily replicate this knowledge. Such actions exist in a context where the motto "people make a difference" has become a commercial reality. In this environment the role of leadership is critical and good leaders become part of the mosaic that underpins the harnessing of knowledge.
The importance of harnessing the knowledge capital of all employees and building partnerships through participative processes are all critical organisational success factors. As the value of traditional competitive factors such as product differentiation, market position and customer loyalty are harder to achieve, it is the focus on the speed of responsiveness to customer and market demands and the value of the product and service in qualitative terms that determine highly competitive firms. At all levels of the organisation the removal of internal barriers to competitiveness became a more serious quest. Barriers to informed decision-making, or failure to improve processes and products became blights on the organisation's aim to create total value for shareholders and customer.
The need for organisations to confront the need for internal efficiency revolved presented few options. Faced with a loss of competitive position or erosion of profit margins in the late twentieth century, organisations embraced team structures that could harness internal strengths, identify and remove barriers to process and product improvement, and communicate common standards for supply and consumer quality.
Structuring, transitioning and implementing teams required, and continues to require, leadership. This leadership extended beyond those leadership attributes previously valued by firms seeking to build competitiveness into the external factors that use to gauge competitiveness. In the twenty first century leaders have to not only build teams, nut motivate and secure commitment, solve complex problems and ultimately, develop people within their workplace context.
