Strategy

From this article you will learn:

• Why traditional control-based management models no longer work in modern organizations.
• How to build an organizational culture based on trust and authenticity.
• How to turn empathy and emotional intelligence into real business results.

Traditional management models based on control and micromanagement are increasingly failing in today's organizations, where creative and imaginative processes play a key role. So how do you ensure quality work and the achievement of business goals without stifling innovation and team engagement? The answer is a transformation to leadership based on empathy and a culture of continuous learning. Find out how to make such a change and what concrete business results it can bring.

Garden instead of factory

Let's imagine two gardens for a moment. In the first, the gardener spends every day pruning every branch, controlling the growth of every leaf and forcing a certain shape on every plant. In the second, he focuses on creating the right conditions: fertile soil, proper watering and pest control, allowing the plants to grow in their own natural way. Which garden will be more lush and vigorous?

The same goes for team management. The traditional leader-controller model is moving into the background, giving way to leadership based on creating conditions for development.

Giving confidence is offensive. Most people say "no" too often because they are afraid of the consequences. Many are also driven by ego - they don't want their subordinates to be better at something because they feel insecure - Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia

When running business and projects, we declare that we expect the team to be courageous, that each employee will raise his hand, point to a solution, assertively defend his point of view. But don't we all too often send contradictory signals and de facto expect not courage, but submission, because we are afraid that something will not be done in accordance with subjectively idealized expectations - especially if we tend to be micromanaging, leading by the hand, apodictic, zero-sum evaluations of reality, making immediate judgments and decisions? 

Moreover, when faced with problems, we often don't give ourselves space to reflect, relax, change our perspective and, most importantly, calm our emotions and stress, in the company of which our cognitive abilities, limited by the "fight or flight" atavism, do not work clearly and produce meaningful solutions. 

The manager's role is not only to lead, punish, reward and manage, but also (or especially) to seek new perspectives and tirelessly unleash the full potential of the team. A leader's overconfidence and uncompromising attitude can cause people to become withdrawn and reluctant or fearful of confronting arguments, or it can induce uncritical trust caused by strong authority - a superior convinced of the validity of his ideas gives the promise of effectiveness and takes responsibility for his decisions.

At this point, in the vast majority of cases, there is a withdrawal of team members and a surrender of control to the boss, who then succumbs to frustration because he suddenly has to take care of everything himself. A vicious circle. But fortunately there are ways around this, as you'll read about in the next section.

Saying goodbye to micromanagement

As Simon Sinek notes in his book Leaders Eat Last: "leadership is not a license to do less, it is a responsibility to do more." But what does that mean? Is it about answering every challenge on your own and bailing employees out of their responsibilities? Nothing could be further from the truth, although many bosses fall into this trap. They grab the reins and manually control many processes, limiting courage, impairing decision-making and stifling the natural resourcefulness and proactivity inherent in most of us. 

Micromanagement is like trying to lead an orchestra by controlling each musician's movements not with a baton, but by overzealously pawing at the instruments together with the musicians - instead of harmony, we get chaos, a cacophony of uncoordinated sounds. What is the genesis? Lack of confidence, fear that things will take a different shape than the manager's dream vision? Probably all at once, plus a host of other individual reasons that psychologists rather than marketers should speak about. What we do know for sure is that this way of practicing leadership in teams with high marketing and creative skills is a path to failure.

And what do the experts say about this? McKinsey report confirms: psychological security instead of control key to innovation of teams.

In a February 2021 study, McKinsey & Company^[1] confirms that psychological safety is a key factor for organizational innovation and adaptability. The report indicates that the most effective leaders create a supportive environment through two key leadership styles: consultative (involving the team in decision-making) and supportive (showing concern and support to team members).

Significantly, the study found that the traditional authoritarian management style is detrimental to psychological safety and thus to team effectiveness. Success in building high-performing teams depends first and foremost on creating a positive organizational climate - it is only in such an environment that leaders can effectively challenge the team and achieve above-average results.

Building a culture of trust in practice

Case study: Transformation of the creative department of a Polish clothing brand

When I started working with a client in the footwear industry in 2020, their creative department consisting of content creators, a social media manager, graphic designers and a photographer was struggling with the typical problems of a control-based organization: rigid procedures, micromanagement and lack of space for experimentation.

This resulted in low proactivity in building content and marketing activities and a lack of decisiveness and operational initiative at the level of current challenges. Employees were held with a strong, unobjectionable hand, dictated by a desire to screw up results and operational pedantry. It was in vain to find in the processes and fixed routines room for an open exchange of ideas or space for a free search for inspiration, without which good marketing or creative professions do not bear fruit in an optimal way.

The result? High turnover of employees who saw no prospect for growth, and most significantly, unsatisfactory business results. All this while constantly investing in new designs, products, an online store and media. 

In addition to expenses, there was growing frustration and, very common in such cases, greater control and discipline despite the fact that manually controlling a dozen problems a day divided the attention and talents of several managers. And all because of the challenges they were currently taking on, instead of adding and multiplying the potential of the entire team of a dozen people. It's like with divided attention - attention is always 100%, and if you do 4 things at once, you give a maximum of 25% of your potential to each of them. 

The temptation for more solutions gravitated toward new investments, only to turn into a search for savings, then back to screwing tactics and stronger control of employees. What worked, however, was - eureka - more freedom in the process of creating content and marketing solutions, an openness to ideas and a complete change in the team's conceptual approach. This was not without hiring a new employee - an experienced and extremely assertive photographer, who turned the management of the brand's creative processes upside down. 

What exactly has changed in her creative processes?

1. space has been created for experiments

• Introduced 10% of working time for in-house creative projects in terms of specialization and brand needs.
• Regular brainstorming sessions without management.
• A/B tests - daring to test and compare solves (at first glance the best with the bold and subversive). As a result, they repeatedly better converted solutions considered plan B, which even before the transformation would have gone out the door from the spot, including the author of the concept.

2. fail forward culture and celebration of the smallest successes

• Loudly and publicly naming successful solutions, successes and progress, naming the authors and publicly praising them.
• Openly discussing failures as a source of learning. During regular meetings, the manager started with himself, setting an example that anyone can be wrong. Beginning to list stumbling blocks by the supervisor built an authentic atmosphere, and gave courage for the others to share their own challenges.
• Transparent sharing of lessons learned and ideas for solutions to avoid similar stumbling blocks in the future.

3 Empowerment of the team

• Decentralization of decision-making - on the principle that the faster the response to a problem at the lowest level, the shorter the problem will last and the less costly it will involve - less people and time, and cause less damage. It wasn't without mistakes - there were misguided decisions, but it opened up an additional training ground for shaping courage, experience, character, responsibility and proactivity at the grassroots level. Thanks to the retro routine, any failures and mistakes were quickly detected and named, and new policies were created against them so that they would not reappear.
• Monthly rewards for decisions, content and initiatives that produced the best results on marketing and business KPIs. A small material reward, such as a spa trip in the mountains for 2 people, as well as recognition and individual praise can really work wonders.
• 1:1 sessions and "venting" of emerging doubts, personal challenges and uncertainties.

After 12 tumultuous months of owner discomfort, an experiment on a living organism and the ousting of one leading and experienced manager, the results were as follows: 

• Turnover dropped from 20% to 5% per year.
• Natural energy and enthusiasm were unleashed, based on which the team created 10 times more original ideas related to the development of digital marketing than in the previous year.
• The unblocked potential has led to building more authentic and creative content, consistent with lightning-fast trends, so the brand has seen dozens of percent growth on nearly every social media marketing KPI, such as engagement rate, increase in followers or website redirects, and social media revenue consistency.
• 2 people were dismissed who until then were considered ideal employees - they were never late, followed every order, but in the face of greater freedom neither could make their own decisions nor initiate effective and creative solutions.

Empathy as a strategic asset and an essential element of an open environment

Empathy creates space for the authenticity of relationships, fosters openness, unleashes potential and allows timeless connection to occur in organizations, and this in management directly translates into tangible business benefits, as shown by the example of Microsoft under Satya Nadella - the change in organizational culture from know-it-all to learn-it-all contributed to a 10-fold increase in the company's value in a decade.

This transformation of attitudes represents a fundamental shift in the approach to leadership in organizations. Microsoft under Nadella's leadership has moved away from a culture where leaders had to pretend to be all-knowing experts, toward an environment that supports continuous learning and development. This shift requires leaders to admit that they don't have all the answers, which naturally increases their openness to the perspective of others.

When a leader adopts a learner's attitude, he automatically becomes more empathetic - he needs to listen, understand different points of view and appreciate the contributions of others. This attitude creates a safe environment where employees feel valued and can give their best. In practice, this means moving away from rigid evaluation systems to a culture that supports development and dialogue.

As Satya Nadella himself states: "showing empathy to your team is probably the best way to advance your career. If you show empathy to your people, they will do their job to the best of their ability."

But there are more examples. Adobe, after replacing standard employee evaluations with a program of regular, empathetic check-in calls, has seen a 30% drop in employee turnover. VaynerMedia, on the other hand, under the leadership of Gary Vaynerchuk, by prioritizing the role of Chief Heart Officer over traditional C-levels, is achieving steady growth while maintaining a highly engaged team of 700.

We also have Google's research (Project Oxygen), which confirms that teams led by managers who demonstrate high levels of empathy achieve better business results. As a result, as LinkedIn's 2024 Global Talent Trends Report^[2] shows, companies that practice empathetic leadership are able to attract the best talent in the market, which translates into a competitive advantage.

Practical implementation of empathetic leadership

Empathic leadership will generate more openness and unleash the potential of your team. Here's what you can do to implement it.

1. active listening, regular brainstorming, masterminds at lower levels of the organization

• Regular 1:1 focus on employee needs.
• Open door policy in practice, not just in theory. 
• Implement a 360° feedback culture.

2. personalization of management style

• Adapt communication to the employee's personality.
• Flexible approach to work organization.
• Individual development paths based on employees' real ambitions and goals - let yourself get to know them, maybe somewhere there is a potential that perfectly matches your business ambitions.

3. building psychological safety

• Transparent communication of errors, starting with management.
• Celebrations of wins - including small and indirect successes.
• Asking for opinions (and listening carefully to the answers).
• Zero tolerance for toxic behavior.

Foundations of leadership

1. Change your perspective - stop being a supervisor, start being a gardener creating conditions for growth, see the true potential of your employees and where they will take you - don't limit the effects with the limited possibilities of your own imagination of the team's potential.
2. Trust is the foundation - without it, no tools or processes will deliver the expected results. At the end of the day, you can't be everywhere and with every problem - by trusting, you give credit that is repaid through the most valuable currency in your company's long-term economy - the intrinsic motivation of your employees and the commitment without which no valuable organization has ever been built.
3. Empathy is a super power - in a world of AI, automation, immense competitiveness and a crisis of authority for senior leaders (often unavailable parents or dehumanized sources of inspiration), young Generation Z people need confirmation that they are understood and can count on their leader - this generates confidence and unlocks real power in your teams.
4. Act authentically - employees will immediately sense the falsity in declared values that are not reflected in daily actions. Remember that after the words, it's time to make it credible that you are a walking example of the principles you proclaim. Don't be afraid to say "I don't know" and ask for opinions. By doing so, you show that your team's perspective is important to you, and by doing so, you generate more proactivity and enthusiasm in your team. At the end of the day, you can always make a decision according to your intuition or knowledge. 

True leadership is not about controlling people, but about creating an environment where people can grow and achieve things beyond your collective expectations and the level you currently represent.

The prerequisite for a true business offensive that lasts for years is self-reliance on the part of your employees and trust within the organization. Otherwise, your business will be as strong as the attention distracted from dozens of problems in which you are simultaneously grabbing the reins, shoving yourself into a besieged fortress, blocking development and making yourself a perpetual full-time employee in your own company.

Summary:

• Remember that effective leadership in modern organizations requires moving away from excessive operational control to transparency, fostering confidence, and creating the right conditions for proactivity and long-term growth.
• Building a culture of trust and team empowerment leads to measurable business results - a decrease in employee turnover, an increase in the creative potential of employees and better financial results.
• Empathic leadership and a learn-it-all approach (continuous learning mindset, growth mindset) instead of know-it-all (belief in one's omniscience) are the foundation of the culture of successful organizations.

Sources:

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/psychological-safety-and-the-critical-role-of-leadership-development

[2] https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/global-talent-trends

From this article you will learn:

• What methodology works when building a B2B brand based on the 4 pillars.
• How to translate strategy into concrete operational activities and measure their effectiveness.
• How to use data and feedback for continuous brand development.

Most B2B companies make the same mistake - they treat a brand as a logo and a few social media posts. Meanwhile, a strong brand is a system that translates into concrete business results. I will show you how to build this system step by step.

Protip

A strong B2B brand is not a matter of chance or creativity - it is the result of a well thought-out strategy and consistent action.

Stage 1: Building a brand strategy

Strategy is your roadmap and reference point for decision-making. At Tigers, every employee knows the brand strategy and everyone is an ambassador of it. The key is to base it on the authentic values of the organization - in our case, these are Growth Mindset, Operational Excellence, Accountability and Transparency.

Grzegorz Chojnacki

Senior Digital Marketing Specialist

Strategy is not fallow plowing, but hard work that will direct your business and help you make a decision. What decision? Where to direct the main efforts in your business, what to focus on, and what to... let go!
It may sound like heresy, but trying to meet every customer need can lead a company astray. The best example here is Tigers and our focus on digital. When our clients need something outside of our playing field that we play on, we launch a network of trusted subcontractors and coordinate the work, but we don't do it ourselves. Sometimes it may seem like a difficult decision, but in reality it's not. We know what we are best at, and we stick to it.
There are, of course, more decisions and mini-decisions to be made: who to communicate to, where to communicate, how to communicate, what brand personality to choose, etc. A strategy will allow you to summarize the various decisions and be consistent at every stage of your business' existence.

Stage 2: Implementation of the strategy

The best strategy without smooth implementation will remain just a document. At Tigers, we focus on operational excellence - that means clearly defined processes and systematic action.

The key is to establish a repeatable operational rhythm. We identify specific activities, their frequency and the people responsible. This way, everyone in the organization knows what to do and when to do it, and the brand grows in a predictable and scalable way.

Oliwia Jasinska

Senior Account Manager

Translating strategy into real-world communication activities in B2B doesn't have to be a fear-inducing challenge. We start by understanding what different target audiences need - this is the stage where we precisely define their needs and challenges. Every brand has unique audiences, so it's crucial that the strategy includes a variety of formats and content types that best address these needs and support the audience at each stage of their decision-making process.
Communication activities can include expert publications, materials that support business decisions, or engaging content that showcases the team's experience - the choice of form should always be driven by the brand's goals and the expectations of its customers. It is also worth tapping the potential of internal experts, creating employee advocacy programs that add authenticity and increase the reach of communications.
It is important that each social media activity is part of a broader plan and systematically measured for effectiveness. Taking into account the various stages of the decision-making path and regularly analyzing the results allows not only to optimize the strategy, but also to effectively achieve the brand's communication goals, while building its credibility and relationships with customers.

Step 3: Analyze actions

B2B marketing is not a separate department - it is a process that permeates the entire organization. Therefore, it is crucial to collect and analyze feedback from every possible source.

We conduct systematic research activities on many levels. Quarterly NPS surveys among customers show us their level of satisfaction and loyalty. In parallel, through e-NPS surveys, we monitor the satisfaction of our employees. After each bidding process, regardless of the outcome, we collect detailed feedback - for both winning and losing tenders.

All this data goes into our operational system. Using artificial intelligence, we analyze the collected information, identify patterns and trends, and then generate specific recommendations of actions to implement. This ensures that our strategy is constantly optimized based on hard data and real market needs.

Step 4: Iteration and optimization

Expert-level marketing is about constantly testing hypotheses and drawing conclusions. It is crucial to combine repeatable activities with a precise system for measuring their effectiveness. That's why we define specific KPIs and milestones for each initiative, which allow us to verify progress and, if necessary, correct the course.

Forget one-size-fits-all solutions - success is a series of small improvements based on hard data. Every change we make is measured and analyzed for its impact on the goals we set.

Want to learn more about how to build a strong B2B brand? Contact us - we can help you create and implement an effective marketing strategy tailored to your needs.

Summary

• Building a strong B2B brand is a process that requires a systematic approach and continuous optimization.
• The key to success is a combination of four elements: a well-thought-out value-based strategy, an efficient implementation system, comprehensive data analysis, and continuous improvement of operations.
• At Tigers, we have found that the best results are achieved by: clearly defining a strategy known to the entire team, establishing a repeatable rhythm of operational activities, systematically collecting and analyzing feedback, and accurately measuring results and optimizing processes.