Leadership

Developing connections outside traditional hierarchies can help organisations and employees to become more efficient, creative and better able to deal with complex problems.

The modern workplace is an increasingly complex and interconnected beast and as such traditional leadership hierarchies – which can morph into troublesome ‘silos’ that discourage information sharing across departments – are no longer viewed as the most effective way to manage an organisation.

That’s not to say formal authority isn’t an important source of influence, but an emerging body of research is beginning to show the benefits of informal leadership networks to both organisations and employees. It turns out that building informal connections across organisations aids efficiency, knowledge sharing and the capacity to deal with complex problems.

A lot of companies say they care about the environment and commit to certain goals but don’t end up doing much about it.

A whopping 78% of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500, for example, issued sustainability reports in 2018 and 66% of all U.S. companies committed to the U.N.‘s Sustainable Development Goals in 2017 through either explicit statements about the goals or implicit actions that support them.

But relatively few say they’ve actually embedded the sustainability goals into their business strategies or into departments such as communications, human resources and supply chain management, corporate functions that can play a huge role in boosting sustainability. A 2016 report found that just 2% of companies actually achieve their sustainability goals.