Joseph Plumeri, chairman and CEO of Willis Group Holdings, is an interesting guy. It’s unusual for a top executive to admit he is changing his ways, and for the better. A command-control leader for most of his career, Plumeri says that business has changed, and so too must he. Instead of dictating a solution, he wanted to create a culture of collaboration and debate where innovative, practical solutions are developed.
In an interview with Adam Bryan of the New York Times, Plumeri talks about the downsides to his former approach: When you give people their marching orders, you’d better be right. “The problem is when it doesn’t work, and people start to grow and feel like they’ve got more to contribute, it wears out. I think that’s what happened to that whole command-and-control approach.”
Managers are increasingly finding that “Doing what you always did will no longer get you what you always got.” Customers, business partners, and others are demanding better, faster, cheaper. Working harder will not suffice; change is needed. Yet, the requisite resources to undertake large-scale initiatives to produce these results do not exist.
A solution: look for meaningful, smaller changes that will affect the way separate units – departments, functions, businesses - interact with each other. Relatively small steps can yield huge dividends: Continue reading…
