Strategies for the work of tomorrow
31.10.2024
Innovations bring today to the future. This is also the case in the world of work. Corporate management expert and HR influencer Sabine Kluge helps organizations with this transformation with her company, Kluge und Konsorten GmbH. Her innovative approaches to leadership and organizational development make her an innovation pioneer. She shares what makes a good leader for her, golden tips that organizations can use to actually achieve their visions for the future and what really matters in the modern working world.
What makes an innovation pioneer for you?
Sabine Kluge: I think it's a personality type. At HR, we like to talk about different types. For example, there are the hunters and the gardeners. The gardeners are the ones who can manage issues in the long term, and the hunters are actually always on the hunt for something new. And I think that simply reflects my personality. I get excited about new things very easily. I'm magically attracted to that. And I think that's also important for an innovation pioneer. I'm simply not afraid of failure.
What is your recipe for success for surviving in these complex times?
Sabine Kluge: I believe that in organizations you have to get used to the polyphony, to the many brain cells that have to work together in order to find complex answers for a complex working world. And this polyphony and the need to hear all the voices and see them all means that we need different forms of leadership than we may have come to know in a traditional organization. I think that is also characteristic of our time.
What does contemporary leadership mean to you in concrete terms?
Sabine Kluge: If you think about how our organizations are generally managed, it is a very efficient communication system, namely a hierarchical structure. Efficient because you can make decisions very directly and immediately and it is clearly regulated who talks to whom about what and who decides what. In a complex situation, we experience that it is no longer so clear and that we then need many more voices. That's what makes today's world different. From the management side, we need to set different priorities. What does a manager do? Delegate, control, motivate, inform and communicate. The question now is in which of these areas you invest how much energy. I maintain that much more energy needs to be invested in the area of communication and information and perhaps much less in the area of delegating and controlling, because we can do this very well today with digital tools, but also because people need a completely different approach in order to be motivated.
What skills does a manager need today?
Sabine Kluge: I need people who can manage, i.e. who can control the here and now. At the same time, I need people who can lead. Leading means that I invest a lot more energy in the future perspective. These skills are often mutually exclusive in one person. There are few people who have mastered this. Being able to win people over, i.e. ensuring that people are passionate about what we do, sometimes means that I have to micromanage and give people little freedom at the same time. On the other hand, the ability to set an example of change is an important meta-competence or role model. This is sometimes not so easy for managers because they are familiar with certain recipes for success and it can be difficult for them to leave a well-trodden path. But people only follow changes and transformations if they see that their manager is also following. In my view, this ability to be a hunter as a manager and to welcome the new is therefore an important personality trait. Of course, this is a skill that can be trained.
What three golden tips do you always give in your coaching sessions?
Sabine Kluge: The three golden tips and the topic I work on most with managers is letting go, letting go and letting go. So it's about nothing other than the willingness and ability to participate, even as a manager. And I have to let go of a lot. For example, I have to let go of the fact that leadership is a status symbol. I have to let go of the fact that I have to control. I have to let go of being the smartest person in the room. I have to let go of always having the answer. I have to let go of the fact that I have my job for life and have to keep it.
So this letting go manifests itself in different ways these days. We are fortunate that we often support organizations and decision-makers individually. And you often realize that it is very difficult to micromanage, to have the ability to trust your employees. That's why I always focus on entrepreneurship. When it comes to new topics such as artificial intelligence or the whole topic of coding, a more traditional, long-serving manager may sometimes have to admit: "I can't really have a say anymore and I have to make way for someone who is perhaps much younger and who doesn't have management responsibility and positional power, but who knows how to do it."
How do you create acceptance for this letting go in a company among the workforce and also among managers?
Sabine Kluge: There is an exciting momentum of: "We have always done things this way, it has always worked well and now something new is coming." We can seize on this and the question here is when we do it, how we do it and why we do it. The pivotal point is the question of what risk there is in doing it. What stops us from doing something new? And what is the risk of not taking a new path?
Far too few companies clearly envision these scenarios. If organizations ask themselves this question together with people, what will happen if they don't dare to take the plunge now, then they have the people on board. By the way, not everyone, that's always a popular saying: "But we have to take everyone with us." We will never take everyone with us, it's like in real life. But we will take a lot of people with us if we can envision the future. That's why this visioning and this storytelling are so important, to make it clear what the world of tomorrow will look like and what our place in it will be. That is the very definition of transformation: let's imagine a world that doesn't even exist today, but let's also try to paint a concrete picture of it.
I often observe that companies find it difficult to formulate concrete measures to achieve a goal. Do you share my impression?
Sabine Kluge: Yes, that is a major difficulty in organizations. I have recognized this since we have been able to support transformation projects in organizations. We find that this ability to break down the big picture into manageable steps is actually not present in organizations. We have learned to plan. That is a tradition in a hierarchical organization. But this project management skill of breaking down a big goal into small sub-goals and developing a methodology for doing so is incredibly important today. I often see that organizations still assign jobs based on content. I think that, above all, people should be taught methodological skills. In other words, classic project management, then actually thought of as Scrum. Everyone in the organization has to master this, because everyone has to be involved in the transformation. And I believe that until this methodological competence is in the organization, it is incredibly difficult to get a picture of how we get from Nowland to Nextland.
Do you have any practical tips for SMEs in particular with regard to competence building?
Sabine Kluge: Small and medium-sized companies usually don't have the volume to install an academy or develop large programs. For us, it's always about working from the middle. In other words, our specialty in transformation projects is always to see how we can involve people and how we can make them hungry and want to help shape things. And you can do the same when it comes to learning. It's hard to imagine how much knowledge there is in every organization. All a decision-maker needs is the freedom to say, as is the case at Google, that Friday is a learning day. At Google, there is no work on Fridays. Not every company can afford to declare Friday a learning day. But you can, of course, establish things like a "Lunch and Learn" or leave two hours a week free. We often ask organizations: "When will you actually learn what you'll need in five years' time if you don't start now?" Because everyone agrees that they won't be doing the same job in five years' time. You can only ever appeal to people to start learning self-management.
This brings me back to an important meta-skill that everyone needs, especially managers, namely self-management. This is the ability to take time for yourself again and again, beyond a busy schedule and beyond a full inbox. We need this learning time in order to help shape the world of the day after tomorrow. If you don't invest this time now, you won't be around the day after tomorrow.
What motivating final sentence would you like to give us in connection with the future of work?
Sabine Kluge: I can only go back to my credo again and again because I find it so incredibly important and because it encompasses so much. And that is to promote entrepreneurship within the company. That means participation, everyone can get involved. So everyone can feel responsible and everyone is trusted to do something. And if you can do that, then nothing can really stop you.
The interview was conducted by Dr. Tanja Jovanovic, Head of Marketing and Innovation Management, Member of the Management Board, Bayern Innovativ GmbH, Nuremberg.
