| Leadership Matters More Than Ever |
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| Today the traditional, artificial distinctions between constituencies have been swept away: Now more customers are competitors, more members are overseers, more employees are shareholders, more suppliers are customers, more governments are sometimes customers, and more shareholders are public interest advocates. Products and services are becoming essentially commodities with fewer intrinsic qualities to distinguish them. Politics is pop culture and aspects of our culture are ever more politicized. |
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| As corporate organizations are held more accountable for integrity-based citizenship, backed by social responsibility, government services and nonprofits must operate in greater commercial mode to improve accountability and value delivery. All of them are competing for resources in a globally-interdependent economic system. |
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| The new responsibility consciousness has engendered a resiliently punitive mindset on the part of the American public, consumers, and corporate watchdogs; each uses an array of criteria or attributes to form their perceptions. Judgment is rendered more from how an organization behaves than what it preaches. When stakeholder expectations diverge from an organization’s internal or cultural reality, dangerous gaps emerge bringing risk and liability. For organization leaders and their boards, the fear factor of accountability from their own constituencies is now on par with that for regulatory and legal impositions. |
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| Well-exercised leadership can be a powerful mobilizing force; a management asset that ensures an organization’s mission viability, brand equity, and prosperity. However, your intentions must be aligned with the tangible outcomes of your marketplace behavior. If you fail to model what you stand for you open up to others the opportunity to define who you are. |
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| To be truly sustainable, leaders must cultivate honest and transparent brands along with the ability to withstand the impact of situations they cannot directly control. Being a responsibility-centric organization demands leadership that recalibrates the balance between short-term self interest and the longer-term common good of the whole. Organizations cannot perpetuate success if their holistic context (market, industry, economy) is not healthy. Viability of the whole is critical to advancing the ambitions of any singular enterprise; organizations attain peak performance when trust is high and constraints are low. |
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| Like leadership, your brand should be exercised as a values vehicle, ingrained throughout your organization’s anatomy and then consistently applied at every touch point in your strategy. Real brand building is a strategic management function that drives the scope and character of your behavior. (Read Art Stewart’s Washington Business Journal article.) |
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