The more successful you or your company has been in the past the more difficult it is to recognize significant changes of your environment, the markets or customer behaviour and that this requires an adaption of you or your company towards new situations, in other words towards signficant change.

Whenever discussing necessary changes to be prepared for the future with my clients or colleagues in various industries I oftentimes hear
– ”the change will not work with us”
– “it has always been like that”
– “the change is not necessary, why should we”
– “to expensive, no market, no customer demand, no return”
– ”we already thought about this but it doesn`t make sense for us”
– “we have been successul without change”
– “we are still and will be very successful without change”
– ”no need for change, we are the best in what we do anyhow” and
– “we will exist with what we already did the last decades sucessfully”.
In total all the same: we don`t want to change, we want to stay in our safe harbour.

The success of the past is reflecting the intensity of your todays comfortzone. If we stay within we end up like not producing digital cameras (AGFA, KODAK), loosing (significant) market share to smart phone producers (NOKIA) and still catching up to TESLA producing electrified cars (complete german automotive industry)…
Always be aware that your success of the past is not a guarantuee for your success of the future. Adapation, adjustment and change is part of the daily business – It is the most agile who will survive, not the strongest.

Happy to read your thoughts on this…

We are lacking on qualified employees, there is many unutilized jobs out there, we do not have enough experts.

THIS IS THE CURRENT STATE OF THE JOB MARKET.

The natural fluctuation of our senior colleagues cannot be compensated by the same numbers of new hires and trainees.

This fact is well known since more than 30 years! How do you deal with the loss of experience and expertise capacity in your organization, team, company?

Unfortunately there are no short-term measures. You need to untertake some permanent acitvities that should be on your regular agenda, such as…

• permanent research, selection and recruiting, even if you don`t need someone right now, but maybe you will find somebody for later. Start developing your own recruiting pool, start creating a network of experts
• permanent training and qualification of younger colleagues/ new hires, trainings should be more than 2% of your personnel expenses on this,
• import expats necessary meeting your qualification requirements, language skills are mandatory,
• always pay attention to ambitious younger colleagues and create carreer development opportunities, new tasks, more responsibility, etc.,
• establish mentorship, seniors to accompany younger colleagues on a regular basis, maybe sharing same desk/ office,
• make your company somekind of a “family`s home”, difficult to leave for everyone because of its great (team) atmosphere,
• extend employement duration for seniors exceeding typical retirement ages 63/ 65/ …, e.g. consulting agreements, if necessary/ possible for years
• …

The ‘war of talents’ will not end in the next years. Efforts and costs for hiring, integrating and ramping up new colleagues are always more expensive than intensifying the identification and the connection of your colleagues and your company.

Happy to read your thoughts on this…

Processing research and recruiting and helding hundreds of interviews hiring new employees, there are only very few major factors why you should engage an applicant.

The CV might be the entry ticket reflecting the minimum basic skills for an invitation, but the interview is much more important to learn more about the potentiial new colleague. There is only one criteria left that shows me if it makes sense to hire the candidate…

Is this person really burning for this job, he/ she is applying for and how does he show you, to believe this?

Most probably impression might come through during the interview in the first few minutes…

Every process has its lead time. The time you spend with activities getting things done is very little compared to its overall lead time until you have the result. There are phases within the process you are loosing time.

Identify where and how much time you spend in between the initial idea until you get the result of a process, reasons for loss of lead time are
…overthinking
…waiting for a/ your decision
…waiting for/ your response

Führung heißt auch Ziele setzen, die Erreichung dieser Ziele zu planen, sich und seine Aufgaben dafür zu organisieren, Abläufe zu gestalten und zu installieren und diese bestmöglich einzuhalten. Letztens erfordert dies Disziplin und (Selbst-) Motivation.

Wer sich selbst keine Ziele setzen kann, nicht plant, seine Aufgaben nicht organisiert und erledigt und dafür auch nicht die notwendige Disziplin aufbringt und somit sich selbst nicht führen kann, der sollte auch keine anderen Menschen führen. Erfolgreiche Selbstführung ist eine Voraussetzung für Führung anderer Menschen.

4-Augen-Prinzip, ständiges Hinterfragen, Micro-Management, alles selbst machen statt zu delegieren & übertriebene Kontrolle?

Das sind typische Anzeichen von fehlendem Vertrauen in Kollegen und Mitarbeiter. Vertrauen fängt bei uns selbst an. Wer sich selbst nicht vertraut, kann auch Anderen nicht vertrauen. Für die Konzentration auf die eigenen Aufgaben sind Delegation unumgänglich. Delegation fordert das Vertrauen in die Kollegen, dass diese die an Sie übergeben Aufgaben erfüllen und den Ihnen überlassenen Verantwortungsbereich meistern.

#empowerment #leadershipdevelopment #strategicleadership #careerdevelopment