The digitization of organizations is indispensable in our society. In many cases, it ensures higher productivity, faster delivery, better insight into supply chains and products and services that are more in line with the wishes of customers.
Digitization obviously has a lot to do with applying technology with the aim of delivering more value to customers, but essential in exploiting the possibilities is ensuring that people work in a different way in order to achieve better performance. From the manufacturing industry, we see the use of Lean principles spreading across other sectors. From the IT world, the term Agile has become a well-known term that is now also spreading to other sectors.
These changes in working methods have proven their worth, and are essential for the proper functioning of our organizations. The application of the ‘new’ – Lean and Agile are now more than 20 years old – working methods is always strongly connected with the primary process, the value delivery chains of organizations.
In our experience from recent years, we see that changing the working methods does not always lead to the intended performance improvements; objectives are not realized. There are always multiple reasons for these disappointments. One of the reasons is undoubtedly the role of leadership; if you change the working method on the work floor, it is inevitable that the working method of leadership must also change. This is the impetus for this research: what are leaders in organizations doing in 2022?
We give the answers and show where improvement is possible.
