Leading When Things are Changing

“Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.” ~ Warren Bennis

Don’t assume that “if we keep doing what we’ve always done, we’ll keep getting the same results.” If your company never changes how it does things—but the market, the industry, and the world change—your company will be left behind.

As leaders, we need to keep an eye on where things are headed, and then we need to guide our people toward a good outcome. For example, if AI is coming into your industry, consider how to use it safely and effectively. Maybe one of the junior staffers who has an interest can take a course in guiding, prompting, and quality-control of current AI models, and then report back to you and your team in a lunch-and-learn.

Sound out your team members for new tech, new ideas, new revenue opportunities, etc.—good ideas can come from anywhere in the organization, and it’s especially important to get the input of current users of the systems, especially if it has been a few years since you were “in the trenches” yourself. If there is a good idea, then create a pilot program for trying it out with a small group before rolling it out to everyone.

In the end, keeping or changing systems boils down to:
If it will still work well, then keep doing it. If it doesn’t work, try something else.

(image generated using Midjourney)