The classic management competencies of the past were planning, organizing, influencing and controlling.
But no longer.

Managers who stay with those abilities have a degree of success, but they are not able to lead their teams in innovative ways to stay ahead of the competition.
In today's business world, top managers have moved away from a maintenance mindset to a leadership and innovative mindset.

In a slow moving business world the attribute most admired in a manager was to keep control, steady the ship and maintain the status quo. But the modern business world is anything but slow. Management is no longer about looking at what we have and then planning accordingly, organizing resources, influencing people to comply with the plan and controlling the process. Today's managers have to lead from out front. They have to have the ability to move ahead into the future, to enable those who report to them to see the vision, and then to support those people as they make the vision a reality.

Why the change?

The old business structure is best understood as a pyramid. The power rested at the top and filtered down through larger and larger levels until the instructions from the top reached the mass of the workforce on the bottom tier.
Today's business looks different. For one thing it has flattened so that individual managers are required to supervise teams far larger than they did in the past. The management superstructure has been whittled down to the bare essentials.

Modern business realizes that the actual activity takes place at the workforce level and this is the level that needs to be fed. The function of the other levels is to support, empower and enable the productive level to produce.

So the modern manager is not a controlling. The modern manager is an enabler, empowerer and supporter. These competencies in management ensure that the place where the actual money is made, at production level, is given all that it needs to function optimally. The pyramid has been inverted. The largest layer, the production section, is at the top, and the management levels are underneath, lending support to that tier.

Planning, organizing, influencing and controlling still take place, but they are now in the domain of the workforce or the production tier. The function of management is to support and enable those competencies in the workforce so that the workforce can respond quickly and efficiently to the minute-by-minute production needs without having to refer to a cumbersome management structure for permission to divert from the status quo.

The workforce must be enabled and permitted to control, plan and organize within themselves for the greatest efficiency, while management ensures those competencies exist, support, coach the workforce to think for themselves and respond to immediate needs, and co-ordinate the efforts of the various teams to ensure optimum productivity.