Leaders, Corporate Culture, Strategy, and the Talent Potentiality in The Successful Organizations

Frankly speaking whatever we know now might not be enough for the future because we seem to be living in a very dynamics planet and in order to solve all these problems in future we should always be focusing on how to select people who are ready and willing to learn new things at all times. And these talents should always be preparing to learn what they need to learn as they move forward to help themselves, their companies, their societies , their countries and the globe as a whole.

Great leaders should always make their employees feel valued, these leaders make their believers see the bigger picture ahead and they should always create the cultures that bring values to their companies...

Imagine the president of a company: who, one afternoon at lunch time going through the hallway and found a piece of paper along his way, immediately he picked up this piece of paper and dropped it into the dustbin, all the employees seeing him doing this, will surely be doing likewise from that moment whenever they see any piece of paper anywhere in the complex, that is culture. By so doing, this culture will be creating a very important value inside the company and everybody will be feeling a part of something important. And I really believe that the ultimate source of competitive advantage for a company is to create a high-performing, meaningful, and enabling culture. Remember, the moment that the president had the intention of picking up the piece of paper, this is a strategy and so many employees seeing him started doing the same, and this becomes a culture in the company.

In this case I would say that culture is the godfather of strategy. I would define culture as a silent social order and agreement of an organization. it shapes the attitudes and behaviors that are accepted and rejected, what are encouraged and discouraged in a group, community, organization and even in a country and when it is properly managed, it drives maturity within the organization and brings about organization’s capability to thrive. Mind you! Culture that functioned perfectly in the past might not fit in for the future and the culture that worked very well for one organization might not be perfect for another. Strategy provides transparency and focus for conjoint actions and decision-makings. It leans on plans and sets of choices to mobilize people and can often be enforced by both concrete rewards for achieving goals and consequences for failing to do so.

With time and purchasing power availabilities your competitors can duplicate and possess everything like you have in your company – they can hire away your best people, they can reverse-engineer your process, they can even get your customers, but the only thing they can’t duplicate is your culture. During my university degree, I read about one statement of Peter Drucker, which says that, Culture eats strategy over breakfast. Leadership always goes hand-in-hand with strategy invention, and many leaders are aware of the fundamentals. Culture whatsoever, is a kind of difficult force to understand because much of it is anchored in unwritten, unspoken attitudes and behaviors, mindsets, and social patterns. For better and for worst, culture and leadership are systematically manners linked together. Most successful leaders usually invent new cultures in motion and imprint values and assumptions that could last for a long time. With time, any organization could willingly reshape it’s culture through both conscious and unconscious actions – sometimes with unintended consequences.

In my own personal career, I could say that what truly motivates me, what truly makes me to be collaborative and participative, what truly gives me the guts to be engaged, creative, resilient and what makes me to be courageous in difficult times and in decision-makings, would be my education, home-training and the the fact that I possess the ability and capability to have constant contacts with many great business leaders which precisely is a type of culture in me.

In a well established organization, where there is existence of perfect culture to do with, the new talented people will be attracted and the next-generation of business leaders could be formed. A culture that is built with a sense of community in any organization will result in success because people will feel being part of the community - organization - which will be part of their identity. Because of the unforgiving planet that we are living-in today - the global economy, disruptive technology, digital transformation, internet of things (IoT), robotics, and artificial intelligence etc, which are making the work-force working extremely hard. In a certain times, and taking a lot of risks with a fair amount of insecurity. And for them to continue doing this, it is because they really care so much to be contributing to this company’s purpose which they really care about and they would like to be in a culture where they are being cared for and most importantly where they feel that they have opportunity of professional growth.

The leaders in the successful organizations are the best leaders of innovation and they would be the best in this era of digital transformation, disruptive technology, robotics, internet of things (IoT) etc and these leaders basically could get the best out of talents through creating appropriate culture, and bringing them required experiences and resources.

Culture can also be developed flexibly and autonomously in response to changing opportunities and demands, while the strategy is specifically decided by C-Suit, and culture can seamlessly blend the intentions of leading leaders with the knowledge and experience of frontline employees. I mean, the leaders must have the culture of bringing in the kind of talents they really need in their organizations with the spirit of openness. These kinds of leaders are the ones who have the tendency to create these types of cultures and make sure they all possess the capabilities to get the right Jobs done. Leaders should not be at a stand-still, not falling backward but falling forward together with their crews in the organization because the planet we are living-in now changes so much and Jobs change so much as well. Because of globalization and demographics, market might be running very short of potential talents and the dramatic scarcity of critical talents might not be really in favor of hiring people from other companies but leaders should spotlight out the potential talents inside their companies, and retain them, motivate them, and develop them for the present and future businesses and leadership levels in the organization.

The potential talents are those who are able to, and have the capabilities to perform business magics in both favourables and unfavourable moments – people with great determination, great resilience, people who know the difference between left and right, people who have the ability to connect the dots in the complex world, people with excellent creative visions and they must be able to engage other minds and hearts toward their beliefs and above all, they must be that kinds of holistic thinkers and never would crack nor give up under pressure. But how would the leaders discover out these talents? Besides being optimistic, the leaders must complement their discovery with proper interviews, proper reference-checking and proper humility in the parts of both the leaders and the potential talents of the next-generation executives. This will be a kind of checks and balances between the leaders and the talents – the next-generation executives.

Most people believe that leaders are born and some other people don’t believe that leaders are born but they say that leaders are made. Ok! We know how to spot out talents, and we know how to evaluate talents perfectly...But the question is, how do we really make leaders? To me, I think there are many factors we need to be taken into consideration: Being a leader could be because of personal experiences of life of a person and for the fact that this person might be born with some of these qualities could make him or her to be a leader. But there are some few exceptional leaders whom nobody would be able to detect how and what makes them to become leaders, these types of leaders are Devine-Leaders. They have the deoxyribonucleic acid, it is thier DNA from birth to be leaders.

To some extent, according to the school of thought and according to my research, most leaders are made, as well. In the beginning of the 21st century which began on January 1, 2001 and will end on December 31, 2100. We could observe from the beginning of this century that new ways of developing leaders have been occuring to date: Some people and organizations have been developing some of these capacities to learn to lead innovation – they put in some of their people in a very uncomfortable leadership positions where many of them were put in some kinds of self-organized teams, where there were no clear, quote, leader. And learning how to manage in that kind of situation, in that moment , building new businesses – for themselves and by themselves in a new emerging market they hadn’t experienced before. So they were able to be creative and developed the competencies needed to finish up the innovative work. Nowadays, we have lots of business institutions with many different kinds of leadership programs helping many organizations in their leadership developments. These talents should be able to connect the dots in order to be able to cope with the new environment and the capability to engage people to have the willingness to do what they are being required to do. So it is the responsibility of leaders to procure these talents the necessary experiences, the kind of project to work on, the kind of co-workers they will be working with. And learning with all these experiences will make them do the right Jobs to be done when they become leaders.

Making talents volunteer to do and participate on certain project by asking questions -Who would like to work on this project? As this will provide the essential atributes of interpersonal conversation: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion and intentionality. So , by letting people volunteer, there would be a chance of detecting more talents who might best fit-in in some specific areas of their talents’ potentialities. And also, to figure out how you really build culture and how to build capabilities. Most of the successful organizations of nowadays are able to reach this stage because their leadership systems are effectively created through mentoring, coaching, and making their organizations the types of learning organizations.