Challenges of the 21st Century

The following note is intended to clarify the matter in depth following your request to develop ways to boost company revenue as well as financial health in the long term. The leadership element is important for all businesses, but the changing factors like globalisation, technological advances, challenge its capacity and functionality. Dynamic and environmental changes are significantly underway in the 21st century which require companies to be strategic and understand how the competitive environment is changing. Leadership challenges The today’s leadership lack the aspect of adaptability to the changing business environment. Leaders lack the ability to effect change through assisting the company to develop the capability to adapt. Leaders should develop a vision that drives the company towards adapting to changes and evaluate the changes that should be made and have minimal negative impacts on the company. Adaptability brings out the aspect of flexibility; when the company can adapt to the dynamic changing environment, its operations are flexible thus making it easy to adapt to the current technologies and the global market. By adapting to current business trends and strategizing based on the company’s business line helps the business to build a competitive advantage for their business (Tice, 2007).

Sustainability is the need for leaders to develop a strong foundation for the company at all levels of business operations. The organization can gain a competitive edge by training and developing the company’s employees to be creative at work particularly to be accountable in their social and environmental engagements. Workers who are committed to achieving excellence render quality of services and products that satisfy the necessities of the community as well as improving their lives. Further, sustainability entails providing financial security which is worth their hard work (Nelson, 2016). In the 21st century, the aspect of sustainability is challengeable to leaders because it entails cultivating most of their time to the growth and development of workers as well as providing salaries that motivate them to work effectively.

Innovation is the ability of the leaders to portray certain leadership styles that influence creativity and a high level of competency which result to high work performances. Enacting change within an organization to embrace innovation is a major shift from the 20th century to the 21st century. The role of leaders is to instill change within an organization by shifting from traditional practices to enabling employees to cultivate innovative behaviors. The value of innovative thinking significantly influences the positive performance of the company. Developing a company’s culture that is innovative changes the way in which workers perceive aspects related to work and eventually enables them to change their behavior towards work positively. Innovation motivates workers to reach their potential capabilities thus enabling the organization to gain a competitive edge in today’s business endeavors (Nelson, 2016).

Knowledge management is a business element that involves bringing out new forms of knowledge into the organization as well as establishing a dissemination approach that ensures that the knowledge reaches the workers. Leaders in today’s century fail to distribute the new knowledge to workers and instead end up delegating instructions that do not necessarily inform the employees of the new organizational contextual strategies. Knowledge management is crucial in enabling the company to gain a competitive edge because it involves sharing of knowledge. The competitiveness of a firm is majorly based on how the intellectual capital is strategically managed and less on how the allocation of financial and tangible assets are strategically conducted (Clarke, 2001).

Globalization goes hand in hand with the current information technology therefore, leaders find it difficult to keep up with the new and economic resourceful technology because of the costs, time and change that it demands. Globalization refers to establishing networks throughout the world and engaging in global scale production. The performance of global leadership and their efficiency is crucial to the organizations that deal with international businesses and the management of employees. The aspect of globalization significantly affects the competitive advantage of the organization in relation its rivalries (McDaniel, 2000).

GDD status regarding these challenges

Considering the drop in sales by 7% shows that the GDD Company is undergoing inadequacies in its operation system particularly based on their sales promotion, marketing, and advertising strategies. This is further affected by the stiff competition in their line of the market, and it can be evidently seen that the customers are not responding positively to their products and services.

The downward trend of the company’s performance can be reversed through instilling new knowledge management approach that involves sharing of their strategies with its employees through cultivating a culture that embraces innovation (Nelson, 2016). For customers to be attracted to and be aware of the company's services and products, there is the need for adapting to sales strategies that are informative, captivating and utilizing the new technology to effect the change. Leaders, on the other hand, should make use of sustainability measures that promote creativity and wisdom in their daily operations. All these factors will eventually result in not survival in the global market but also to thrive and gain a competitive advantage over their business rivalries.  

Practical recommendations

The leaders should incorporate adaptability in enabling the company to adapt through assessing which business operations in the sales department should change. Secondly, the leaders should build an environment that engages all workers in decision making. This will help the management to gain potential insights on how they should go about in instilling strategies Clarke & Rollo, 2011).  

 Corresponding to the aspect of sustainability, the leaders will be required to address the needs of its employees by ensuring they are paid well, their ideas are taken into consideration and recognition of good performance. For the company to realize profits in the sales sector, the leaders require to be genuinely committed to the community's well-being.

On the issue of innovation, the leaders need to develop a culture of innovativeness through encouraging creativity and adapting to leadership styles that are distinctive (Nelson, 2016). This will help in incorporating strategic approaches that lure customers to buy their products. The organization should shift to the usage of knowledge that is specific to the context, personal, casual, and experiments so as to enable the company to attain sustainable competitive advantage. Since it’s a company that operates in different countries, it will automatically be affected by forces of globalization therefore, it is prudent that the firm utilizes the new technology in its sales strategies and expose the employees to the global business trends for them to be conversant with the sales trends.

Implementation of recommendation by the executive director

The executive director can implement change by use of knowledge management aspect by offering training programs to its employees, develop their sales techniques and restructure the processes of conducting the sales operations. Change can also be effected through setting challenging expectations in order to achieve better performance. For such an organization, transformative style of leadership is essential in uplifting the current status of the company. Transformational leaders initiate change from top to bottom level employees. Motivation of employees is key in fostering change in an organization (Tice, 2007). Traditionally, transformative leadership style have more committed and satisfied followers.

References

Tice C., (2007). “Building the 21st Century Leader.” https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/173522 

Nelson T., (2016). “Inclusive Leadership is a 21st-century competitive advantage.” http://www.theceomagazine.com/business/inclusive-leadership-is-a-21st-century-competitive-advantage/ 

Clarke, T., & Rollo, C. (2011). "Corporate initiatives in knowledge management." Education+Training, 43(4/5), pp. 206 – 214.

McDaniel, B. A. (2000). A Survey on Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Social Science Journal. 37 (2): 277-285