Balance is an essential leadership capacity. can your leadership muscles balance all your business needs?
How do you balance between exploiting what you know and exploring what could be useful.
Here are some thoughts on balancing your businesses focus. This is based on Jacqui’s video on ‘growth and wealth’ and a paper ‘From sharing to shaping: Role of knowledge quality and ambidexterity in SME innovation performance.’
Ask yourself these three questions to test where your balance is:
How much time do you spend working on systems within your business to enhance what you’ve got?
How much time do you spend looking for new knowledge that will help you expand your business?
Does this give you the right balance between enhancing your productivity and growing your sales for your business at this moment?
Is your team working with you?
Your business needs to be flexible enough to exploit the knowledge it has to enhance current systems and to explore opportunities to build new opportunities.
You can achieve both of these as and when necessary. But you can only do this if you know the balance your business needs between exploitation and exploration.
Then your business can only achieve the balance if your team understands the role it plays in developing your businesses knowledge and has the time to build and use this knowledge.
The right path
The right path will always change.
Take regular time to check the needs of your business (balance between productivity and sales) and create ambidexterity in the way your team finds and develops knowledge to improve sales, productivity or a combination or both.
As always you know the balance you need and the more your team is involved the better the outcome.
Thank you
Thanks to the authors Vladimir Dzenopoljac , Aleksandra Dzenopoljac , Jasmina Ognjanovic , Sascha Kraus , Kaisu Puumalainen
And to Jacqui Jackson for the video. If you want to dig deeper please read the paper here.
We will leave that with you.
Just give me an email if you want to talk more.
