Leadership in Space & Time

If you have toiled under the command of a [traditional manager], in a traditional business, then it must be very clear to you that most current business-structures lag the technological advances we take for granted elsewhere.

We have instant global access to written correspondence / mainstream communication / social interaction by application; virtual face-to-face meetings & so on. Imagination & innovation is a cheaper, faster, better mockery of yesterday's constraints. How about ordering a tailored-suit online? Done.  [BTW: Check out the new app. [Israeli], currently in β, - measures your exact physical fit and relays the 3D-map to your chosen designer / tailor / retailer whatever & the SP - pays..]

Here's the thing though. Why are we still expected to commute to a place of work, dock at an assigned piece of commercial real estate and deliver a contracted service / skill, within a defined time-frame, under conditions of consequence premised on time-at-the-desk rather than on output?

Image by: www.teluguone.com

Most of us live in terminal-failure. We get up each day; prepare for the work-day; commute to an office; fulfill our time-sheet responsibilities at a desk; commute home; eat & sleep - REPEAT. Older generations looped in the same way but quite often at the same place of work for the duration of their working lives. If they were lucky they enjoyed promotion; attained a level of incompetence - retired. Later generations are paradoxically in a constant flux of false-security. Buying promotion through regular job-hopping changes the office-interface perhaps but is still TIME-terminal & by TIME-terminal I mean having to do what you have to rather than what you want to do.

The lucky few find a paying-niche that satisfies a passion or a talent & 'never work a day in their lives' or something along those lines. So if most of us fall short of perfect & if most of us go about our day as best we can & almost always in terminal-failure, does Leadership play a role?

The answer to that is yes and on so many different levels. Let's take a step back for a minute and look at business from the boardroom-down rather than from the more familiar flog-them-up. 

A Board of Directors, apart from fiduciary duty, has a singular function only. [BTW: The boardroom is an assigned-desk, on good carpets, for a group of people with a specific skill-set. We're not talking demi-gods ..] That singular function is the operational / strategic oversight of PROFIT-growth or Up - Revenue / Down - costs. The associated airs & graces, on the top-floor, are a false brand-building the rest of the building is conditioned to emulate. It's called 'motivation' an obsolete concept if ever there was.

5-years at a Business School teaches one important truth only. Here it is - Increase / raise productivity or output per unit of labour [Yip - you're a unit of labour ] & the cost of doing business falls. That equals PROFIT. PROFIT equates to bonuses - money-motivation - more time-at-the-desk - upward-mobility concessions & so on.

Leadership recognises / embraces the current environment and is, wholly, outcomes-driven. If outcome is premised on results, efficiencies & productivity then here's another business-truth. We know most commercial-space operates at a 43% occupancy. [Note the unoccupied space in your office?] We know traffic-congestion impacts people: TIME-lost mostly. A smart leader uses technology to:

• discover inefficient space utilisation & in, most cases, results in a down-scaling of the real-estate footprint.
• change the space-allocation structure. Work-stations, rather than closed office-space & always allocated on walk-in efficiencies.
• source satellite office-space [outside the business-hubs] & / or promote a culture of work-from-home. TIME opportunity-cost is placed back in the hands of the empowered employee & out of the control of middle-'management'; an absurdity in design anyway.

If effective Leadership frees up company resources; creates efficiencies and empowers employees who loses?