Vlerick Expertise in People Management & Leadership

Senior managers expect more strategic leadership and process leadership from middle managers to be able to maintain and enhance performance amidst rapid, frequent and unpredictable change. That is the conclusion of professors Katleen De Stobbeleir, Carine Peeters and Steve Muylle, together with researcher Matthias Pfisterer based on recent research about leadership behaviours that contribute to organisations’ adaptiveness. The study was conducted within the Centre for Excellence in Leading Adaptive Organisations.

Everyone is talking about Industry 4.0 – from the Internet of Things, additive manufacturing and the cloud through to artificial intelligence, augmented reality and blockchain. But what does it all mean in practice? It’s not a question of if Industry 4.0 will drastically change the way we do business. It’s a question of when and how quickly. So how can you apply this technology in your business – not just to improve production and performance, but to make a difference for customers?

The war for talent is raging, yet lots of talent remains unused. Women are still underrepresented in STEM sectors, 1 out of 10 LGBT+ people feel discriminated against when looking for a job or in the workplace, for trans people this figure is 1 out of 3, and almost 11% of trans people are unemployed. What can we do to improve the inclusion of these target groups? That was the focus of a joint research project carried out by Vlerick and KliQ vzw.

The success of your digital transformation depends on the agility of your organisation. You need to constantly evaluate opportunities and take action, preferably faster than your competitors. This is where the leadership challenges lie. Together with his team, Professor Stijn Viaene has developed a leadership model and a game, the Digital Transformation Leaders Game. This is a light-hearted way of gaining insights into the different types of leadership which contribute to the success of your digital transformation.

Diversity in the workplace goes far beyond ethnic, cultural or religious differences – and research shows it can lead to better performance and greater creativity. But organisations don’t always implement diversity policies effectively – partly because there are misconceptions about the role managers play. So Professor Katleen De Stobbeleir has developed a theoretical framework to chart the impact managers have on how successful a diversity policy is.

How do you become an agile leader - really? “You need to develop an ‘and-and’ mindset, because right from the start you are confronted with a double challenge: identify and build on everything that is relatively immune to the impact of volatility in your operating environment, while simultaneously experimenting with new systems, ideas, products and processes wherever possible.” With this scrapbook, Professor Herman Van den Broeck and Professor Barney Jordaan want to help leaders find a “sweet spot” – not necessarily a perfect balance – between stability and agility, between roots and wings, or what they term “rooting” and “soaring”.

A leader is charismatic and visionary: this CEO cult no longer fits in with today’s complex dynamics. Research has shown that modern leaders are successful if they adopt modest, vulnerable attitudes, asking people around them for feedback to achieve widespread support.

In today’s fast-paced, uncertain world, organisations need to adapt quickly to survive. But change doesn’t always happen easily. And many change programmes don’t deliver the expected results. There are various models that set out a process or series of steps to follow to achieve successful change. But change is increasingly continuous – and in today’s change programmes, it’s hard to identify a start and end point. Which means seeing change as a purely top-down, sequential process can be dangerous. This is why we’ve taken a different approach. The starting point of our change model is that effective change is all about managing energy. Each organisation has a level of energy – and when you generate enough energy, you can use it to make lasting change happen. But if your energy reserves are running low, your change efforts will quickly fizzle out.

Professor Barney Jordaan is a South African negotiation, mediation, dispute and conflict resolution specialist. He has worked with many global organisations – and teaches negotiation skills and conflict resolution at Vlerick. In this white paper he shares 10 tips about negotiating.

Would you prefer your staff to go ice fishing or cast their nets on the high seas? It all depends on what you want to achieve as an organisation. In his doctoral thesis, Bart Verwaeren researched which fishing method leads to more radical innovation and how you can stimulate people to do things the way you want them to. Should you give your people bait or a boat?