ABSTRACT
As a manager, your role as Strategist is to engage others. As a senior leader, you need to be more involved in defining the leadership engagement strategy and your organisation’s design at a macro level. This means being actively involved with key talent at different levels of the organisation so that you can nurture them and ensure that plans are in place to grow your leaders of the future. Specifically, as a senior leader, you need to:
An appropriate organisational structure and design is a must. Clear roles and responsibilities help people to take accountability and avoid duplication of effort. It’s the senior leader’s role to be involved by giving input to the organisational design needed for success. This is particularly important if the business is in a changing environment and needs to reposition itself for the future. For example, the executive leadership team at UKTV recognised the need to change from being a business that predominately showed television ‘repeats’, to one that entertained audiences through newly acquired and commissioned programmes. They saw the requirement to grow fans of brands rather than channels. Although this strategy kept UKTV in the television business, it also needed a new organisational design and capabilities. The leadership team actively gave input to the design they felt was needed. An overarching structure was developed and then given to the managers across the business to define in more depth. This was a way to engage managers but also allowed them to create the design needed for the business that they believed would best make UKTV successful in its ambition.
