Author: Jos Opdeweegh

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Jozef Opdeweegh: The Soccer Player and the Formula One Race Car Driver: A Tale of Odds and Good Fortune

Sports are often a tool through which we can learn critical life lessons and skills. However, sports teach more than just teamwork and good sportsmanship, it can also provide a lens through which we can view the path to and expectations of CEOs.

On June 14th of this year, the FIFA World Cup will kick off in Russia. The World Cup is the most popular sporting event in the world by quite a distance. It is estimated that more than half of the world’s population consider themselves soccer followers. With more than 4 billion fans worldwide, it dwarfs any other sport in terms of global appeal. Even more impressive, at any given point, there are an estimated number of 265 million active soccer players, which equals about 4% of the world’s population.

Meanwhile, the 2018 Formula One racing season is in full swing. The nexus of speed and technology, exhilaration and excitement, Formula One speaks to the imagination of an ardent and growing fan base. It is also an iconic sport where a very select few have the opportunity to compete for the coveted world title. Each year, no more than 20 drivers are allowed to participate in the Formula One Championship, two drivers for each of the 10 racing teams in F1.

Jozef Opdeweegh, CEO

While it may seem surprising, the experiences of a soccer player and race car driver are quite illuminating on the trajectory and journey of CEOs. With nearly two decades of business leadership experience, Jozef Opdeweegh explores the similarities between reaching success in the athletic and business worlds.

Everybody’s game

Soccer Players

Many of the world’s greatest soccer players had very humble beginnings. The Brazilian legend, Pele – who is universally recognized as one of the greatest players of all time – was too poor to afford cleats or even a soccer ball growing up. He used to make a ball using his parents’ socks filled with paper to play the game in the streets.

Soccer is a sport with virtually no barriers to entry. It is inexpensive to play. The game can be played on any open patch of grass, sand or concrete. Successful male soccer players range in height from 5 ft 6 to 6 ft 2. No less than 95 percent of the world’s adult male population fit within that range (to contrast this with other sports, professional basketball and American football players for instance require levels of strength and height that exclude over 90 percent of the adult male world population).

Simply put, success on the soccer field is available to almost anyone.

The $8 million price tag of access

Race Car Drivers

Becoming a Formula One driver is no easy feat. In fact, there may be not be a smaller or more elite group of athletes in the world. There is a recommended path for racecar drivers whose ultimate ambition is to end up in the most prestigious of all categories. It typically starts with karting. Those who are very successful at karting may evolve to one of the entry-level racing categories to subsequently try their luck in Formula 3 or 2. Very few ultimately make their way to Formula 1.

Are they the most talented drivers? They most certainly are better drivers than you and I. But what separates them from the pack is a very large wallet. It is estimated the path to a Formula 1 seat comes at a price tag of at least $8 million dollars. And while there are driver traineeship programs to promote very talented youngsters, even those come at a steep monetary price.

Best versus good

To excel at a game with more than 260 million active players and become one of the game’s 50,000 or so professional soccer players, you have to be exceptionally gifted. The sample size is so large that it may be concluded the most successful soccer players are also the most talented soccer players. In a game with universal access and appeal, it is virtually impossible for a hidden gem to go undiscovered. In the world of soccer, “best” truly equals best.

Conversely, while a Formula 1 champion is undeniably a very good driver, he (or she) is almost certainly not the best driver on this planet. Countless are the people out there who unknowingly have tremendous potential as a racecar driver but shall forever remain anonymous. Without the monetary means, they simply will never be given the opportunity to sit behind the wheel of a racecar. In a sport with very high barriers to entry, it is virtually impossible for the biggest gemstone to ever be discovered. “Best” equals (very) good, in Formula 1.

Cleats or a racing seat for the CEO?

The path to becoming a CEO is arguably more akin to the story of the race car driver than it is to tale of the soccer player. Certainly, being a good CEO requires a combination of relevant education, experience and skills to handle the role with success. But good fortune undeniably plays a major role in whether a qualified professional ever gets a shot at the top job. Being in the right place at the right time is very relevant to the opportunity of being selected in your very first CEO position. And once you have been chosen to run a company, you will quickly become a proven commodity and your next job will very likely also be a CEO job.

Much like the race car driver though, there are many people who would make excellent CEOs but never get a chance to demonstrate their talent for running a company. In any organization with a sizable workforce, it is a near certainty that there are one or more employees who are intrinsically better equipped at running the business than their CEO. But despite their efforts and their talent, they don’t rise to the top, often due to office politics, shortfalls in talent recognition and development or a predisposition to recruit outside the organization. Consequently, these professionals often leave the organization to try their luck elsewhere, thus depleting the company’s talent pool.

At social functions or industry conventions, you can’t help but overhear CEOs explaining to their peers how they carefully, step by step, crafted their path to the leadership job. They will lay out in excruciating detail how they realized from a very young age that they were destined for success. Without taking anything away from their professional journey, the reality is that these CEOs simply had a healthy dose of plain luck on their side.

Given this reality, CEOs not only are bestowed with luck but immense responsibility. A responsibility to deliver on their good fortune and hard work through thoughtful leadership, a commitment to doing what’s right and a focus on creating value – for shareholders, employees and the community at large. A rare opportunity to truly make a difference.

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Jozef Opdeweegh: Why the First Two Weeks as a new CEO Are the Most Important

No matter if you are an entry level employee or a company’s brand-new CEO, the first day on the job can be nerve-wracking. Even so, your path to professional success begins the moment you walk through the door. Read on to discover why the first two weeks as the CEO of a company are the most important.

The recruitment process:

When considering an individual for a leadership role, the candidate is typically subjected to numerous interviews by recruiters, the board, and shareholders. Oftentimes, the final recruitment process stage involves the candidate providing example insights and an example strategic plan for the business. The candidate would then present the plan to the board, mapping out key strategic goals and proving why they (the candidate) are the best pick for the role. The audience will assess the plan and presentation through the lens of what the company may look like after three to five years under the candidate’s leadership.

The first week on the job:

Once the chosen candidate successfully passes all the hurdles and negotiated a satisfactory employment agreement, it is time for them to assume the leadership role. The first week is an important week, and longtime CEO, Jozef Opdeweegh, recommends spending those first days like this:

Day 1 – 2: Establish a vision, mission and core values/behaviors

Day 3 – 4: Map out the key drivers of success

Day 5: Draft the strategic plan

Opdeweegh says, “it is my experience the senior leadership team gathers in person to attend this 5 day-exercise. Of course, the size of that group depends on the size of the company, but I would caution against groups in excess of 40 -50 people because the ability to interact openly and effectively diminishes with an increased group size.”

Day 1-2

The first two days are really all about culture. “In the mission statement, you define the company’s current business, its key goals and the key milestones to achieve those goals,” says Opdeweegh. The vision statement describes how the company’s future state will look. And then finally, the corporate culture is defined by a set of shared core values and behaviors that will best enable the company to achieve its goals. Opdeweegh says, “it is paramount to focus on core behaviors early on: the future success of the company, and therefore your future success, largely depends on it. You cannot have a large group of associates work towards a common set of goals if they do not share a set of collective beliefs.”

Day 3-4

The following two days center on the key drivers of success. Opdeweegh suggests asking, “What do we need to focus on to be successful?” Obvious topics include financial success, and to satisfy the board, shareholders and lenders. It may sound somewhat counterintuitive, “but in my experience, many members of the senior leadership team do not necessarily have a good grasp of what the main drivers of financial success are. An extensive tutorial may be in order,” notes Opdeweegh. Topics that require discussion are historical valuation of a relevant peer group and the drivers of those valuations: compounded annual rate of revenue growth, EBITDA-margins, EBITDA-multiples, evolution of earnings per share, level of diversification across customers, geographies, industry verticals and product or service offerings and many more. “You need to ensure the leadership group acquires a sufficiently large level of financial literacy in terms of balance sheet, cash flow and P&L to allow them to monitor the financial performance of the company,” advises Opdeweegh.

Day 5

Finally, on day five, Opdeweegh says, “you should present a draft-summary strategic plan that consists of a P&L, balance sheet and the key strategic goals for the next five years.” This draft is then open for discussion with the group. At the end of day five, a subcommittee should be appointed with the specific task to develop a more detailed strategic plan within 30 days and to present that plan to the group. The executive team needs to be intimately involved in this exercise.

The 2nd week on the job

In the second week on the job, Opdeweegh recommends, “organizing a roadshow to get in front of the rest of the organization. You need to be out there and allow the associates to get to know you. You should spend time on the shop floor, demonstrating a decent level of understanding of the operational processes, but more importantly, you should interact with your coworkers.”

In your first couple of weeks on the job, and during your entire leadership tenure, it’s important to be relatable and approachable. Work to be humble, kind and authentic. You are human, and there is something very endearing about sharing stories about how you have faced challenges in the past and how you have successfully dealt with them. They need to see somebody who is fair, inclusive and open to new ideas. You are nothing more than member of the team who is there to support his co-workers. A good CEO does not find authority in his job title, but rather in tangible achievements.

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Jozef Opdeweegh on the Importance and Requirement of Standardizing Operational Practices

Large businesses often operate in a number of geographically-dispersed facilities, which typically overlap in terms of the services provided or products produced. Moreover, these businesses regularly serve the same customers out of a number of different facilities, especially if the customers span a large geography. And despite the logistical challenges of managing multiple locations, all customers rightly have high expectations around consistency in terms of quality, customer service, and customer reporting, no matter what facilities are involved in their product or service delivery.

Unfortunately, too many companies still operate in a disjointed environment where either legacy, a false interpretation of the concept of empowerment, or the singular perspective of the individual plant manager determines the organization’s processes and procedures. This approach, however, hinders corporations from achieving their full potential in terms of customer service and return-on-capital-employed.

The implementation of a rigorous and prescriptive universal operating structure is the most effective way to guarantee the highest level of standardization and scalability to deliver the greatest operational efficiencies and best performance against relevant customer KPIs.

Jozef, ‘Jos’, Opdeweegh has been a CEO of large international companies for close to two decades and recognizes the importance of standardizing operational practices for optimal efficiency. In the following, he shares his perspective and insights on the importance and hallmarks of standardized operational procedures.

Aligning Interconnected Facilities

When a company operates a number of geographically-dispersed facilities, they are likely interconnected in one or more of the following ways. They may share a supplier/customer relationship, with one facility producing components that are used further down in the assembly or production process in another company-operated facility. In other cases, such as in the distribution industry, facilities are interconnected as the products are collected and stored, or cross-docked, in various locations. More simply, the organization may serve the same customer out of different facilities.

In the case of interconnected facilities, though important, it is arguably not the average performance of the company against a number of critical customer KPIs that is most relevant. Instead, the variance around the mean, and specifically the negative outliers, is the most relevant component. While these worst performers will mathematically drag down the average performance of the company against relevant KPIs, they will have an even more harmful impact on the customer’s perception of the quality of operations. The quality of the end product is only as good as the weakest link in the chain.

Scalability of the Platform

Since it is a strategic imperative of companies to grow, companies with a dispersed landscape of operating entities will typically increase the number of facilities and its geographic reach over time. In an environment where a consistent operating system is successfully deployed, launching incremental facilities becomes a much easier task. The platform is much more scalable, as the processes and procedures that determine how the operations and support functions inside the new facility will be organized are already largely determined. Some minor tweaking may be required to accommodate a new service offering, a new product design, or different customer requirements, but the core of the proven solution will already be solidified.

Mobility of Human Talent

When a standardized operating system is in place, human talent is much more interchangeable and transferrable. Since the company’s professionals have been trained in a standardized environment, they can easily and efficiently be deployed to fill talent gaps in other operations in the group or to help address quality deficiencies in sister facilities. Additionally, these resources are ideal in helping to launch new facilities in different geographies, or new service or production offerings as knowledge is portable, universally deployable, and highly valuable.

Continuous Improvement

In a standardized operating environment, continuous improvement is a key imperative. Whether the improvement initiative finds its origin in one of the company’s facilities where a colleague has devised a better way of performing a specific task, or in an idea that emanates from a continuous improvement team, once the idea has been tried and tested it should be rolled out and deployed throughout the entire organization. In the standardized environment, nobody can take a shortcut. A bad idea will not be implemented in any location, and a good idea will find its way to all locations.

As such, to provide the best service to customers in the most cost efficient and effective manner, Jos Opdeweegh suggests placing a dedicated focus on the development and implementation of a comprehensive set of processes and procedures from the outset.

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Jozef Opdeweegh on the Roles of Analysis and Creativity in Business Innovation

“Trust…but verify.” The phrase famously used by US President Ronald Reagan at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit, serves to illustrate that a counterintuitive tension is often the most effective way to break down barriers that prevent progress. This type of wisdom is now commonplace in business, aided by the growth of technology that gives confidence to efficiency arrangements between established partners.

Drawing inspiration from the ideal of trust, Jozef “Jos” Opdeweegh, a seasoned C-suite executive with over 20 years of experience developing, leading, and growing public and private global companies, shared his insight on what teams can do to foster their relationships and excel in an environment that supports further progress.

As someone with a true passion for talent development and business transformation, Jos Opdeweegh has demonstrated and repeated success in complex business and cultural transformations where strong teamwork mechanisms are essential. His commitment to finding the right balance in his work has been fundamental in the striking success of his career. This balance has come from finding enough room for both innovation and data to grow together and complement as a one…rather than siloed approaches.

“Fresh thinking is essential to human flourishing”, Opdeweegh assured. “Without it, we stagnate, our horizons narrow and in business, our competitors overtake us”. For Opdeweegh, when innovation becomes absent or curtailed by strict guidelines and dogmas, there is more likeliness for the environment to feel enclosed — or immersed in the ‘dark ages’ as he pointed out — and stagnant from new fresh ideas.

But the reality is that when it comes to our own circumstances, creative leaps can be scary, evoking the sequence of “disruption, resistance and uncertainty” which characterized progress in the scientific and industrial revolutions. Today, that same pattern continues, most obviously in the digital sphere, which has supercharged the speed, reach, and risks of creative innovation.

It is a mistake, however, to think of creativity purely in terms of inspirational genius. Opdeweegh has closely observed patterns of creative pioneers and leaders in various industries such as the prominent engineer and inventor, James Dyson, whom he recalls pointing out that “practical progress is seldom made in the manner of Isaac Newton under the apple tree”. Rather, it’s an iterative journey, which sharpens our notions and intuition through a process of trial and error. For Opdeweegh, Dyson’s brilliance isn’t just his creative vision, it’s also his commitment to testing, adjustment, and utilizing data to analyze and solve problems.

Opdeweegh also agrees that achieving progress is often subtly different than reinvention, and it requires a blend of aspirational and logical mindsets.

“Under this model, the creative and analytic approaches work together to make marginal gains with measurable impact by repeating the process time and again,” Opdeweegh noted. “I’ve seen this in practice, and would observe that the most analytical people I’ve worked with are among the best innovators, while almost all creatives I know are deeply analytical in their approach.”

Moreover, Opdeweegh also remarked how Dyson allowed innovation to flourish under an atmosphere of creative tension, where ideas are robustly and competitively challenged, in pursuit of a common goal. For Opdeweegh, he agrees to this proposition after experiencing this firsthand with his teams who have most effectively come up with the most productive ideas when being subject to the same standards.

The relevance for business leaders is that innovation works best when creativity and analytics are integral to, and not isolated from, the day to day realities of the organization.

“Analysis is, therefore, the bedfellow and not the bugaboo of practical creativity,” says Opdeweegh. “By measuring and learning, not only do we sort the wheat from the chaff, we also help the good become great – or more often, just that little bit better.”

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Jozef Opdeweegh Shares Insights on Effective Leadership in Times of Uncertainty

Responsible and measured crisis management has always been a key objective for Jozef “Jos” Opdeweegh, a seasoned C-suite executive with over 20 years of experience developing, leading, and growing public and private global companies. With a career dedicated to leadership, corporate culture, and business transformation, Opdeweegh has seen organizations rise and fall in response to a variety of unexpected and unplanned changes. In times of crisis, he argues that listening and adapting is critical, and to do so successfully is a test of truly effective leadership.

Jos Opdeweegh shared four key takeaways to guide the executives navigating through stormy waters.

Decision-makers must remain solutions-oriented.

According to Jos Opdeweegh, “Leadership in these circumstances requires more than bravado. It needs a cool head, an ability to take others with us, and perhaps most of all, a clarity of purpose as well as strength and consistency of will.”

A crisis is defined as a moment of intense difficulty or danger; a situation when critical decisions must be made. Specifically, it is a time of turning points — when the actions people choose will steer them to either recovery or disaster. Leaders are the primary decision-makers at these critical turning points in times of crisis. They must be level-headed, encouraging, exacting, and dedicated to those that depend on them.

In times of uncertainty, maintain your leadership values.

“The principles of good leadership surely still apply: a willingness to listen and learn, a focus on the common good, clarity, and consistency to our messaging,” said Jos Opdeweegh.

Experts often point to historical examples in offering guidance to help navigate a crisis. But often, in considering the specifics of a current situation, these parallels are less relevant. And occasionally an unprecedented crisis is what risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes as a Black Swan event: a major unforeseen situation, for which we are entirely unprepared — and one with such wide-ranging impact that it changes our view of the world thereafter.

Without concrete lessons from the past, the principles of good leadership are something of a fail-safe. These principles include humility, compassion, emotional intelligence, competence, and cooperation. In troubling times, people recognize these qualities and are actively looking for them in their politicians and influencers.

Opdeweegh is a strong proponent of value-based leadership – the idea that leaders should draw on their own and followers’ values for direction and motivation. He claims that being a good leader involves drawing on these universal values to bring others with you.

Define the organization’s purpose before outlining the direction of next steps.

“The challenge for leaders is that in this moment of greatest uncertainty, the need to provide clarity of purpose and direction is more essential than ever,” Opdeweegh positions.

Jos Opdeweegh consistently champions the value of long-term thinking and cautions against the pitfalls of short-term solutions. In times of crisis, vision and intention are imperative to prepare for the consequences and opportunities that lie beyond our immediate difficulties.

Uncertainty and unease call for actions that demonstrate purpose and direction. And before any action is even taken, that intention must be established. If purpose is the core plan, then direction is the route for translating that purpose into action. Leaders must create a sense of shared purpose, set the direction of travel and guide behavior towards those goals.

Seek impact, rather than consensus.

Jos Opdeweegh also asserted, “Leadership, almost by definition, will never please all parties, nor is it intended to, but there comes a point when a path must be chosen.” To quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “A true leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of it.”

Ideally, that consensus should help to shape our actions beyond the immediate hiatus.

Opdeweegh suggests the various responses to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and how the decisions which followed have impacted those countries, are exemplary of the difference between action and avoidance. He points to the stark contrast between the outcome of the bold action taken by Germany in uniting its country and the grim realities of many former Soviet states.

In drawing lessons from the past, it is relevant that Germany acted with speed as well as clarity of vision. And in returning to the present, it is surely significant that organizations that take the most immediate measures, and proactively focus on containment are those that are successful in reducing further damage.

Opdeweegh concludes that in times of real crisis, whatever path is chosen, leaders must offer their constituents hope. “Today – more than at any time in history – we vastly greater potential to communicate and marshal our actions in a coordinated and steadfast manner. ” If we can add hope and the motivation which comes with it, then “leadership becomes the organization’s most powerful tool in tackling the challenges that unfold.”

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Jos Opdeweegh: Unlocking Financial Success in a Flat Organization

What is a flat organization?

A flat organization is an organization where the number of layers or levels is kept to the absolute minimum. As a result, the physical separation between the executives and their colleagues is small, and direct interaction between the remaining layers is not only inevitable, but also stimulated and appreciated. In these organizations, the span of control, or a measure of how many people directly report to their leader, is large. Given this unique environment, for leaders to drive success in a flat organization they should focus on the following strategic imperatives.

Stay open to innovation

Any company that wants to outcompete its peers needs to be proactive and nimble. Organizations benefit greatly from the joint and individual creativity of their team members. However, this creativity can only be captured and harvested in an environment that embraces openness and open-mindedness. 

Openness is an indicator of employees’ willingness to share ideas openly and freely with the rest of the organization. Open-mindedness is a measure of the willingness of the organization to assess, absorb, and implement the ideas brought forward by colleagues without prejudice and with an open spirit. Openness and open-mindedness are key ingredients to building a meritocratic organization where the best idea wins regardless of who initiated the idea —  the janitor or the CEO. 

A flat organization is the most, if not the only, appropriate organizational structure to stimulate and reap the benefits of innovative thinking in an environment that is devoid of artificial barriers and unnecessary layers.

Focus on flat

Building a flat organization has both structural and cultural components. The structural component is quite intuitive, as it involves reducing the number of layers in an organization and increasing individual’s span of control. Other structural or mechanical elements include aligning job titles, decreasing the number of job titles, and creating a simplified but equitable compensation structure.

There is an equally important cultural dimension that is more difficult to broach, and is largely dependent on elements such as organization size, average tenure of the workforce, age of the organization and, of course, the reigning culture. 

Unfortunately, coworkers are naturally reserved and guarded in their interactions with leaders. Empirical studies have shown that out of caution, or perhaps self-preservation, colleagues are hesitant to speak up to share their ideas with the organization. This inherent hesitation seems equally pervasive when it comes to bringing forward creative ideas for sustainably improving company operations. 

A flat and open organization has a much better chance at removing these barriers than a steep hierarchy. If an organization is bureaucratic, its leadership autocratic, and its people unempowered, this will most certainly stifle the creativity of the workforce. It is upon the leadership of the organization to break down barriers, to engage the coworkers in open dialogue through town halls and listening sessions, to be authentic and approachable, and to make it abundantly clear that the company needs the innovative talent and ideas of all its employees. 

Why would an organization invest a tremendous amount of effort and money in recruiting talented colleagues, only to allow a culture where these talented individuals are discouraged from speaking up? This constitutes an incredible waste of talent and an unforgivable loss to the company. 

Invest in empowerment

A flat organization, where the artificial barriers between the different layers have been removed, where colleagues feel safe speaking up and sharing ideas, is an organization that will benefit from the collective creativity of its workforce. The outdated notion that the CEO or the leadership team has all the answers is nonsensical. The smartest ideas for improving process or product will typically stem from the folks closest to the challenge, not from a far-removed executive. That is why empowerment is such an important cultural attribute of the flat organization. An empowered individual, somebody who understands that he or she has the knowledge and authority to make the decision, without fear or hesitation, will be stimulated to come up with new and fresh ideas. 

In a very competitive and fast moving environment, a flat and empowered organization will outcompete its peers through the collective creativity of its workforce. It will be more innovative, agile and entrepreneurial than its competitors. These attributes will vastly benefit its financial performance, and equally important, the wellbeing of its coworkers. 

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Executives exist to serve the organization, not the other way around

A successful organization is dependent on several factors, one of the biggest being internal organizational structure. When running a business, big or small, this is one of the first elements needed to function, yet often times it’s overlooked and falls victim to outdated values. 

It’s imperative for executives of a company to reverse how they may naturally be inclined to run their organization and create an organizational structure that is rooted in the customer and employees. 

The outdated hierarchical structure

In a traditional strict hierarchy, decision-making is the sole prerogative of a select group of senior leaders in the organization. It’s an approach that centralizes power and is steeped in the erroneous belief that a happy few leaders are best placed to make the right decisions for the company on a strategic, tactical, and even day-to-day level. 

This pyramidal structure is a very autocratic and even militaristic approach to running an organization, whereby decisions are pushed down on colleagues without the solicitation of input or the willingness to listen to other ideas and approaches. As a consequence, the creativity and the valuable input of those in the organization who are closer to the challenge or the problem that needs to be addressed, gets lost. And over time, the organization numbs down and resigns to the limitations of the hierarchical structure.

Shortfalls of the traditional hierarchy

Beyond being an antiquated organizational structure, hierarchical leadership also unleashes many obstacles and stumbling blocks on a company, further complicating and hamper achievement of key goals. 

Negative impacts on employee morale. Colleagues prefer to work in an environment that is inclusive, in a structure that values their input and contribution. The workforce of a company consists of individuals with varying backgrounds and experiences whose input enhances the long-term success of the company. People want much more from their professional life than the sheer repetition of a number of narrowly defined tasks, or the execution of top-down instructions without debate or input. A strict hierarchy leaves colleagues with the feeling of being underutilized and undervalued. It negatively impacts the feeling of overall wellbeing and belonging in the extended family that constitutes a successful company.

Employee churn and loss of talent. Companies that adhere to a strict hierarchy are engaging in paradoxical behavior. On one hand, their human resources department is likely spending a tremendous amount of effort and monetary resources to try to identify and recruit the best possible talent. On the other hand, once the talent has been on-boarded, the organization has little interest in the individual contribution of the valuable new recruits. This will lead to a situation where the high potentials quickly get frustrated with the culture they are forcefully being inundated with and will decide to leave the organization in due time. 

The road to mediocrity. The combination of a scenario where an organization stymies creativity through centralized top-down decision-making will over time create a workforce that is mediocre in terms of overall quality and core behaviors. The high potentials will leave the organization, frustrated because of their lack of ability to influence to company’s decisions and direction. At the same point in time, the company – through its performance management tools – will decide to part company with the worst performing co-workers. In balance, those who will survive in the long term are those who never challenge the status quo, who are risk adverse and non-inquisitive.

Suboptimal decision making. Top-down decision making, without regard for the input and knowledge of those colleagues who are much closer to the issue and much more qualified to make or at least contribute to the right decision, is by definition suboptimal. Why would somebody come forward with a novel angle to an issue or an opportunity if that person knows that the sound advice will fall on deaf ears? A number of key considerations and knowledge sources that would greatly enhance the quality of the decision are lost. Therefore, decisions that are made in isolation and pushed down to the mass organization are unbalanced and uninformed.

The shift to the inverted pyramid and servant leadership 

Rather than applying an outdated steep hierarchy, executives should try to come to grips with the reality that the company does not revolve around them, but around its valuable customers and its hard-working colleagues. The leadership team really is in essence an enabler, an instrument to create an environment that guarantees the largest probability of success for the company and its key stakeholders: customers, colleagues, investors, and lenders. 

In organizational structure, which can best be described as “the inverted pyramid”, customer and customer-facing colleagues are viewed as the most important asset of the company. As we go down on the pyramid, we see the executives all the way at the bottom, as an indication of the reality that their primary task is to serve the organization and all of its constituencies. 

Customer-centric values 

In addition to the notion that the leadership works for the organization and its valued colleagues – not the other way around – the inverted pyramid also squarely puts the customers at the center of its purpose. Without the customers, the company has no reason to exist. In this context, it’s important to note that every individual is a salesperson for the organization. Driving consistent core behaviors, a positive attitude, and a high level of engagement with the workforce are the best possible ways for supporting incremental sales. 

When a prospective customer is looking to source business with a new provider, they are not looking for yet another glossy presentation. They want to experience in practice whether what is being portrayed in the sales deck matches the reality on the shop floor. Nothing will convince that prospective buyer more than a visit to a state-of-the-art facility that is already in operation and that is populated with a knowledgeable and enthusiastic workforce that can energetically articulate what processes they are responsible for, and how their hard work fits into the bigger strategic direction of the company.

Implementing a solid organizational structure will create a positive ripple effect that will reverberate throughout a company all the way to its customers. Success cannot happen if there is not a strong inner foundation for employees to be proud of and support, and this all begins by flipping the organizational pyramid.