Buy Me A Coffee‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’ – it takes a lot more than these kind of words today to get listened to, followed, and to exert influence and effectiveness over time. Effective change leaders remove barriers to employee success. Leaders of unsuccessful change tend to focus on results, and more often than not employees don’t get the supports they need for change. ‘Process’ and ‘people’ components of leadership are both equally critical, and therefore hard to prioritise since in reality they run parallel.
A 360-Degree Leader
The qualities that a 360-degree leader possesses, as per John Maxwell’s work, include adaptability, discernment, perspective, communication, security, resourcefulness, maturity, endurance, and the ability always to be counted on. This list is certainly not exhaustive but does capture the essentials.
The difficulty in generalising this skillset is that they can differ across markets, crises, industry, and perspectives in specific contexts. For such individuals, who are or aim to become 360-degree leaders, there is also a form of assessment that provides feedback in which their skills, effectiveness and influence as an executive, leader or manager are evaluated. This is an effective process in organisations to give leaders clear feedback from their peers, employees and managers. At the same time, this is mostly done in context, e.g. how any process is conducted for a Human Resources director would differ from Sales Leader or Communications Head. Both the process and feedback are tailored to roles and contexts.
(a) Influence
The role of influence is critical to leadership. It is not only about ensuring compliance, but also the commitment essential to drive change, and therefore includes the ‘people’ part of the change most. At the same time, looking at wider stakeholder expectations today, developing a ‘reward culture’ also goes a long way.
In particular, when the immediate fire of a crisis is over the leaders must reflect on who rose to the occasion, who struggled and why. Several organisational roles will change post-crisis and therefore leaders can strategise who they want to be at the table both during and after the crisis to head to the new normal.
During periods of business-as-usual, influence can shape and affect long-term strategy making, talent acquisition and retention mechanism as well as seek knowledge and business partners as fitting.
In some cases, where exercising command is difficult, since leaders are working in peer groups and therefore the dynamic is different, i.e. not the typical leader-follower setting, influence comes out to be the strongest and the most effective trait that an individual can demonstrate. This is because it involves leading across levels, including peers involved in the same stage.
(b) Operations and Strategic Management
The effectiveness of good leaders can be demonstrated firstly by mobilising realistic and time-bound goals; secondly, laying out clear objectives and setting up the deliverables; thirdly, by building high-performance teams; fourthly by creating a risk-resilient company culture; fifthly by creating organisational knowledge building; and finally by creating a culture of value.
For sure, however, these are not magic bullets, nor meant to address the challenges or promote business growth overnight. The strategies and planned action that leaders take within firms, whether a large corporation or Small or Medium-Sized Enterprise (SME), would be largely determined by the stage of growth where a company find itself at a given point in time. In addition, building a reward and trust culture would make employees more confident in making decisions and not being risk-averse.
Besides effectively managing operations, business development, consolidation or a strategic integration of mergers and acquisitions, new research by McKinsey shows that leaders have the following six broad functions: Aspiration; Inspiration; Imagination, Creativity, Authenticity; and Integrity. When it comes to either managing culture at the workplace or leading others through crisis, leaders also need to develop the right mindset based on introspection and self-awareness, which are equally critical skills. Several studies by Sloan and HBR show that it is the mindset, adaptiveness and change that leads to growth and, at times, survival.
(c) Leading through Crises
A crisis is very often systemic in nature and call therefore for solutions that are not quick fixes. In the business world, depending on the nature and scale of a crisis which can make or break a business in the medium-to-long-term needs careful identification and scrutiny after early detection signs become evident. Over the years, studies have evidenced that there is a strong correlation between organisational culture, learning, market orientation, the degree of risk and resilience embedded within the firms. The role of leadership is undeniably paramount.
Most often, it requires that rare ability to dive and drive through the unknown against the known patterns from the past. Leaders should gain new insights, work through new patterns, and determine timely and effective responses to any crisis. For example, during the pandemic, the primary function of leaders of large or high-growth firms was driving innovation, exploring new markets, and enhancing market share.
When the pandemic struck, the immediate focus shifted to reducing costs while maintaining the essential liquidity! Most firms, big and small, faced supply chain and logistical impediments, downsizing the firms and other operational challenges on a daily basis. All of this while working through health and safety issues, managing remote working and also offering empathy to employees and their families.
d) Talent Recognition and Retention
During team meetings it is a good practice to delegate to the right people and establish ‘who’s who’ and ‘who’s doing what’ to avoid confusion and overlap of roles. Leaders need to break through the inertia for business continuity today, while increasing the odds of mid-to-long-term success by focusing on the few things that matter most. Above all they need to listen to advisors and smart people to seek insight and information from diverse sources, and not only from in-group sources. Effective leaders always extend their antennae across the diverse ecosystems in which they operate, while also creating a culture of accountability and transparency during tough times.
e) Leading Change
Most research on organisational change, cognitive flexibility of both leaders and followers, and also managing fast change illustrates a necessary connection between the ‘process’ and the ‘people’ part of the change. These 3Cs that unite effective change leadership are a) Communicate – leaders and followers need a continual discussion on the larger purpose of the change and how it would connect to the organisational values, and more importantly establish the purpose of change by focusing on ‘what’ and the ‘why’. B) Collaborate – aligning organisational values with personal values is something that effective leaders constantly strive for; we can nonetheless admit that doesn’t always happen. It is a level above when cross-cultural leaders bring people together to plan and execute change going beyond barriers of borders and boundaries. They should also include employees in decision making and thereby in a way solidifying their commitment to change while promoting inclusivity. C) Commit – research shows that leaders who negotiated a change successfully are resilient and persistent, and willing to step outside their comfort zone. On the contrary, unsuccessful leaders failed to adapt to challenges, started a blame culture while creating a toxic workplace environment, and were impatient with a lack of results.
f) Leading Remote and Hybrid Work
With hybrid working becoming increasingly formalised, leading a remote workplace becomes a key priority. This sudden change in the working environment comes with pros and cons and is new to all employees. So they need leadership to guide them through the transition.
If your business has employees with more remote working experience than you, let them take charge. Feed off their expertise and appoint them to your business’ remote leadership team. This is the time for them to step up.
Have communication plans ready. Many employees will have an area where they can relax and have a quick chat with colleagues, and a separate area where they can discuss pressing work issues.
Businesses can recognise their ‘at-risk clients,’ who can cope with this eventuality to a certain extent. Similarly, losing staff can have the ripple effect on a small business of losing a clients, leading to a loss of revenue. A lack of profitability, in turn, leads you to have to make hard decisions as to which members of staff are worth retaining. Maintaining a ‘punishment’ or ‘fear’ culture makes people afraid of taking decisions and being accountable for their actions.
Leading Dynamic Capabilities in SMEs
Research into leadership shows how significantly they can affect the morale and confidence of staff (or followers). This will depend on the extent to which leaders perceive mistakes either to be opportunities for learning or leads to them brutally nudging their followers, thereby damaging the self-worth of the latter.
As Sir Richard Branson once said, ‘clients do not come first, employees come first. Take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.’ Leadership, by its nature, can cultivate the foundation of a culture that empowers employees to achieve the company goals and allows you to recognise how vital each of their contributions are to furthering those goals. At the same time, the pandemic showed how important it is for a leader to diversify efforts and strive to innovate for future success.
The core of any leadership’s role is to develop dynamic capabilities that allow organisations to respond and adapt effectively to rapid changes to the external environment. This includes sensing opportunities and threats, seizing opportunities, and transforming the organisation accordingly. This is particularly important for SMEs who may not have the scale or resources of larger firms but can excel through agility and innovation.
By embedding a culture of learning, continuous improvement, and resilience, leaders can position their SMEs not only to survive crises but emerge stronger. This involves empowering employees at all levels to take initiative, encouraging experimentation and calculated risk-taking, and maintaining open communication channels to gather feedback and insights.
Inherent Volatility
Markets today are defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Thus, leadership can no longer be confined to positional authority or tactical decision-making. It requires a 360-degree orientation, one that integrates strategic foresight, operational discipline, emotional intelligence, and which exerts influences across hierarchies and functions. Effective leaders today must navigate crises not just by reacting to disruption but by proactively reimagining systems, realigning cultures at every level of the organisation.
For SMEs in particular, the imperative is clear. Developing dynamic capabilities is no longer a luxury, but a strategic necessity. These capabilities, whether it’s cultivating a learning mindset or institutionalising innovation, allow small firms not only to survive shocks, but to emerge stronger and more competitive to shifting market demands.
Crucially, leadership in this context is not merely about managing transitions; it is more about stewarding transformation, mobilising collective purpose, creating meaning in moments of ambiguity, and holding the long view while delivering in the present.
As Peter Drucker rightly opined: ‘The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.’
Feature Image: A highway sign discouraging travel in Toronto, March 2020
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