What does it mean to be an exponential leader?
After over twenty years of teaching and coaching business executives, I’ve seen a big change in what makes some businesses successful and others barely make it. The executives I work with now have problems that didn’t exist when I first started consulting, and the playbook that helped them succeed five years ago is becoming less and less useful.
Let me tell you what I’ve learned about exponential leadership from these interactions and workshop floors in Malaysia, Thailand, and other places.
One incident came to mind about a few years back when I was conducting a workshop for a group of senior leaders. Their company had been in the forefront of the industry for decades because they were always getting better and better at what they did ,growing year on year until they came across a competitor who was using exponential technology using less resources and delivering their services faster than them
The leaders hadn’t missed it; they were just leading with a linear way of thinking in a world that was growing exponentially. This happened to me in a lot of different industries and situations, and it taught me something very important: the rules have changed, and leadership needs to adjust with them.
During my training sessions and coaching, I’ve had the pleasure of working with leaders who are successfully adapting to this new reality. They aren’t superhuman, and they don’t have magic powers. But they do think and act in distinct ways.
They choose trying new things above getting things right. One of the e-commerce executives I worked with does what she terms “learning sprints,” which are quick tests that are meant to fail quickly and inexpensively. “Tom, I’d rather have ten small failures that teach us something than one big bet we can’t get back,” she said. While traditional leaders in her field typically plan for six months at a time, she has changed her plans three times.
They don’t see lack, they see plenty. At a recent workshop in Johore, I urged the people there to come up with solutions as if they had unlimited access to technology. The change was very noticeable. They stopped fighting over few resources and started thinking about how to use mobile platforms, cloud computing, and AI to make their work more effective without raising expenses by the same amount. This is an example of exponential thinking.
They don’t just develop cultures that work well; they build cultures that change. The exponential leaders I work with work on building what I call “learning loops.” These are processes that let teams quickly notice changes, try out different solutions, and communicate what they learn.
I’ve worked with executives who have moved their businesses from cash-based systems to totally digital ones in less than two years, skipping over whole generations of technology.
But this advantage only helps leaders who can see it and do something about it. I ask people in my courses to think about this: “If we were starting this business today, knowing what we know, would we do it this way?” The answers are frequently hard to hear, but they change everything.
This is what I stress the most in my coaching: exponential leadership isn’t simply about technology and planning. It’s quite human.
I have seen great digital transformations fail because leaders forgot that change scares people.
This was hard for one of my clients, who runs a family business in Penang. His crew had all the equipment and training they needed, but they were too scared to take risks. We found the problem during our coaching sessions: a culture of command and control that has been around for decades. Leaders of today have to move from command to catalyst.
To be an exponential leader, you don’t have to know everything. From what I’ve seen, it’s about developing the skills to find new solutions as the questions change. In today’s ASEAN business world, that might be the most important skill for a CEO to have.