Marco Houwen (Zentrapreneur) : Hire or Inspire ?
The mission of zentra.global is to support individuals and organisations to thrive in complex times through an honest introspection and authentically driven action. Our holistic approach on personal leadership unleashes the untapped potential of companies and its talent.
Can you present your company in a few words?
Creating a company to advocate for “Being before doing” in business was a long time in the making. Already during the years when I was running tech companies, I felt that there must be more to business then top-down management and success at all costs. In my book, “So you’ve got a DAO!”, I first pondered on the mindset leaders need, to successfully run hierarchy less organizations. The mission really started to materialize end of 2020, when I made a simple observation: Most entrepreneurs and senior executives, do not create their companies, their legacies, based on who they are but rather on who they are told they are by multiple layers of external conditioning. And this strive leaves them utterly unfulfilled. Zentra.global uses its unique personal leadership framework the “Eternal Art of Being” to support seasoned leaders and their organizations finding the continuous success they are looking for.
"Putting people before process makes process execution a self-fulfilling prophecy."
What are the main trends that influence your activity?
In times where skilled talent shortage holds the growth of national economies hostage and organisations struggle to find the external talent needed, we are left with few choices: The first one is to hire ever further away from our homebase by knowing all too well that we are already now struggling with the implementation of viable homeworking schemes, or secondly, we start to leverage the inner hidden potential of our companies, the existing talent already present. Assessing the level of inspiration of the talent inside and finding a way to make inspiration the cornerstone of our company culture, might well be the only way to overcome the resource shortages we are facing now. The overwhelming question is: “How can one leverage the talent inside when our long grown company culture does not support inspiration on all levels of our organisation?”
How does your company adapt to these new developments?
We implement: “People before Process” in organisations. The idea of a separation between our professional and personal realities is, in big parts thanks to Covid19 lockdowns, non-existing anymore. At zentra.global we address this new reality through fostering personal leadership at the three essential pivots in organisations: company strategy, teams and/or departments and the individual himself. We are using our organisational framework, “Personal Leadership of Inspired Organisms”, to support companies in the implementation of a meta-language allowing all involved parties to align around a handful of simple yet extremely potent principles. In today's absolute uncertain circumstances the only certainty we can achieve is through consistently focusing on our personal leadership inside our organisations and ourselves. As the godfather of management consulting Peter Drucker said: “Personal leadership is the only leadership that is going to matter in the 21st century!”