The core nucleus of modern-day leadership has evolved into a wide-array of responsibilities, as we enter into the new workplace era, focusing on humane trends while chasing business and organizational goals. A thought leader not only demonstrates his or her expertise in focused areas but is also eager to learn, understand and adopt new-age practices to stay relevant in today’s dynamic techade, i.e., decade powered by impact of tech.
The very definition of a thought leader, hence, is no more restricted to their knowledge pool on a particular topic, but moves beyond their scope to have a larger understanding. A true leader should be able to anticipate business challenges, provide real-time solutions, and drive company growth whilst instilling confidence and comfort towards their employees and other stakeholders.
‘Trust’ has always been a common core-value across some of the best-managed organizations across the globe. Leaders play a significant role in building this value of trust between their organization and its stakeholders. With leadership development being the need of the hour, organizations have adopted leadership skilling and organizational capability-building exercises to create a well-managed company and survive in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. Most of the enterprises across industries have been able to build their brand with a unique purpose, as a bedrock of their organizational foundation.
The Five Pillars
The key organizational touch-points that truly define overall company growth can be identified across five pillars to determine success. They include:
Brand Excellence: Always aim to become the most preferred brand in key segments through best-in-class innovation that cater to your core consumer. While building on the brand’s legacy, it is also important to keep up with the current trends to stay relevant and build a more dynamic, younger and innovative version of the organization. While analysing consumer insights and ever-changing market demands, it is advised to engineer and build innovative products that provide meaningful solutions.
Portfolio Excellence: Build portfolio excellence by delivering relevant yet hassle-free solutions based on best-in-class consumer insights and smart application of sustainable technology. Identify and build key themes that align with the brand’s persona and vision like energy efficiency, healthy living, and smart connectivity, amongst others. Always look at relevant opportunities to enhance the product portfolio along with a strong regulatory readiness to combat any unforeseen situations. Evaluate and curate a wholesome strategy to plan entry into newer segments/categories that can drive overall growth for the organization.
Go-to-Market Excellence: Provide a structured product distribution with alternate channels and explore various routes to accelerate direct and indirect reach across different cohorts. Also, chalk out relevant product distribution channels like e-commerce marketplaces and new age large format departmental and electronics stores that are relevant to the core consumer. It’s also vital to consistently engage with dealers and distributors that help reimagine a sustainable and impactful trade strategy.
Operational Excellence: Drive operational excellence by providing superior product offerings at a competitive cost, at the right place and at the right time through operations, manufacturing excellence with ESG, and quality. It is also essential to provide cost-effective and cost-saving solutions along with a strong after-sales support that further strengthens the consumer journey at various touch-points.
Organizational Excellence: One of the most important pillars that helps connect the above points together and build organizational excellence is to curate a top performing and highly engaged team. It is essential to build capability in the areas of GTM, innovation and operational excellence to become an employer of choice in the focused industry. An important step is to consistently build initiatives, whether in diversity and inclusivity or employee participation in CSR to help build organizational values. It is also essential to consistently build and revamp best in class people processes based on data and employee experience that provides a people-driven culture.
Balance the pillars
There’s a need to adopt a perfect balance of these pillars to ensure the organization drives overall growth across all focused pillars. These initiatives should work in line with the brand’s vision to further strengthen the employer value and consumer brand recall at all relevant touch-points. A true leader needs to consistently work to build, revamp and structure organizational processes to achieve excellence and drive overall growth.
(The author is Chief Executive Officer of Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals Ltd.)
