Archive for category: Uncategorized

You know something we don’t: the winner of the US Presidential election. We’re writing this article well before the polls close.

Regardless of who becomes America’s next Chief Executive, they’ll have to lead with a different set of skills than Presidents of the past. The world has changed far too much. In fact, we’re entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Our podcast guest, Dr. Éliane Ubalijoro, shared what is emerging, and how leaders must change to succeed within it all.

First, what is the Fourth Industrial Revolution? According to the World Economic Forum, it’s the rise of cyber-physical systems. That sounds a bit sci-fi, but it really boils down to technologies that are fusing digital with the biological and physical worlds. The factor affecting leadership: it’s evolving at a far faster pace than any prior industrial revolution, and it disrupts nearly every sector it touches. And here’s Dr. Ubalijoro’s surprising perspective on it: Africa and other emerging economies may be better positioned to take advantage of it than traditional “industrialized nations.” Their leaders are more flexible, ready and eager to embrace the new, instead of doggedly trying to hold on to outmoded leadership styles and perspectives. Those RTO mandates in the U.S. may well be a symptom, if not proof, of this.

So what does future leadership need?

Start with ethical responsibility. With societal shifts and tech disruptions, we’re all at risk. Leaders’ new role now includes acting ethically to maintain their people’s stability, motivation, and engagement. That means transparency and communication are priority practices; prioritizing collective well-being is a must. Workers, on their side, must adopt an adaptable mindset, and be willing to regularly enhance their skills. We’re seeing this play out at the root of recent strikes, including from longshoremen and Boeing employees.

That parallels with leaders having their own growth mindset and adaptability. Workers aren’t the only ones who need to continually learn and grow. As your team and industry change, you must change with it, and learn about the new tech and practices. Otherwise, your decisions become less and less relevant, endangering your organization. We saw this a few short weeks ago in a leadership development training for a national firm. The cohort brought up an assessment of jobs easily replaced by AI, with “CEO” in the top group. The students agreed; so many CEOs have barely changed, with so little human interaction and so little knowledge of the front line, “they might as well be AI right now.” (Bonus: AI would bring a lot of cost-savings at that salary level!)

Remember you’re not alone. No leader works in a vacuum anymore. The world is fully interconnected. Economies, health, cultural trends: they’re all global systems now. The COVID pandemic provided abundant proof of this: the bulk of the human population went into quarantine, slow-downs in one country would cripple an entire supply chain, pet videos surged worldwide…the list goes on. Your business and your leadership ultimately depend on many, many others.

Finally, your leadership decisions – directly or indirectly – put lives in the balance. A whole relatively new science of epigenetics posits that traumas can influence our genetics; in broad terms, they implant in our bodies, and their effects cascade through generations. Other studies, meanwhile, show that stress can shorten our telomeres, strands capping the ends of our genes. Shortening telomeres appears to shorten life. So you may, quite literally, be reducing your team’s lifespan if you stress them out (Fortunately, the counter also appears to be true: a study of meditating monks hinted that calm may lengthen telomeres).

This isn’t your mother’s Wharton MBA curriculum. But this isn’t that Wharton MBA’s industrial world anymore, either.

This article was adapted by Dan Mushalko from our remastered podcast episode Leading with Purpose and Compassion in the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Thank you for reading our newsletter, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.

We strive to elevate the quality of leadership worldwide. Are you ready? If you are looking for help developing your leaders, explore our services.

You may be an undiagnosed pracademic.

We certainly hope so; it’s vital for your survival. A pracademic is someone who integrates academic research and practical experience into their job. The case for your leadership survival is simple: the world is changing too fast for your knowledge to stay static. You must keep learning and integrating what you learn into your real-world practice, or you’ll become outdated—if not irrelevant—in short order.

For leaders, this is compounded by the fact that your team members, work environment, and society change rapidly, too—so what is expected of you as a leader will constantly shift, too.

So how can you keep up with it all?

Our podcast guests—professor emerita Gill Robinson Hickman, Deloitte dean Jorrit Volkers, and International Leadership Association (ILA) CEO Cynthia Cherrey—have some pracademic advice. All three agree that collaboration is key. There’s the obvious collaboration between academics and practitioners, which enables new leadership theories to be tested. Less obvious: you’ll learn from other leaders’ experiences each time you collaborate with a team from a different department, a consulting partner, a trusted vendor, or even a rival firm joining forces with you for an industry initiative. They bring invaluable wisdom forged by their own histories and training.

Match needs with theory. The uniqueness of teams means no one-size-fits-all approach works for their leaders. Study your team, determine their needs, and then scan the dozens of leadership theories available for the framework that will work best for your particular staff. Even the most appealing theory is pointless if it doesn’t match your real-world needs.

Go beyond credentials to proof. Many theories look great on paper, but reality grinds them down to fantasy. Look for theoretical frameworks that include fieldwork in their development process. The best leadership academics test their ideas, tweaking them to accommodate real-world findings. In practice, this means the same researcher’s leadership theory will most likely change through the years. That’s a great sign.

Ultimately, it all boils down to staying informed. To quote author Roald Dahl, “Read and read and then proceed to read some more.” Leadership research constantly grows, evolves, changes, or encounters a brilliant new disruption; a single day’s panel offerings at the ILA’s annual global conference reveal sheer legions of leadership ideas, theories, and frameworks. Feed your brain with as many as you can; you’ll soon distill those that are best for you and your organization.

Leaders can no longer simply cruise into the future. It’s up to you to shape it. By integrating cutting-edge theories into your practical experience, you’ll be a natural pracademic guiding your team into its best tomorrow.

This article was adapted by Dan Mushalko from our remastered podcast episode Deloitte’s Dean Explains Why Your Old Leadership Style Doesn’t Work Anymore.

Thank you for reading our newsletter, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.

We strive to elevate the quality of leadership worldwide. Are you ready? If you are looking for help developing your leaders, explore our services.

With election season running hot, issues such as migration (or illegal immigration) are prominent in campaign speeches for candidates of all stripes vying for all manner of office, from dogcatcher to president.

The harsh reality for them all: no single nation, much less a single leader, can solve these issues. They surround the world, so it will take new kinds of leaders to craft real change and viable solutions. Our podcast guest, Ajay Bramdeo, the African Union’s ambassador to the European Union, sees the need for several special qualities in our next leaders.

First, the new generation of leaders must recognize that solutions aren’t simple. Humans have been interdependent since…well, since there were humans! Intertribal, interregional, international: our web of commerce, culture, philosophy, and more is now a Gordian Knot of complex relationships. This fact alone means effective leaders must be inherently collaborative, relying on multiple allies with their perspectives and expertise to unravel solutions. And – a new term for us – they’ll grow their own global acuity: the ability to see beyond one’s own immediate environment to understand the broader impact of decisions.

Think of this first point as a variation on the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) concept, except here complexity is not negative. It’s simply the reality of our human web, taking a little more effort to understand.

Second, leaders – politicians in particular – must grow beyond consensus and embrace disagreement. Nearly 200 years ago, in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Hans Christian Anderson warned us about the dangers of everyone blindly agreeing with a leader who demands consensus. Instead, effectiveness now requires inclusive leadership, which means engaging with diverse perspectives and experiences. Abraham Lincoln proved the principle by including his political enemies in his cabinet and ranks of advisors. Actively listening to the resulting disagreements and valuing diverse opinions pulls a leader out of their tunnel vision, revealing multiple innovative solutions.

Finally, and perhaps most difficult, we’ll need to foster moral and ethical leadership. Today’s leaders face enormous pressures: rapid social change, budget deficits, powerful political interests, and more. Is it any wonder presidents and prime ministers end their terms of office with far, far more gray hairs than when they began? Their stress is real.

Yet that very stress can lead to stumbles in morality and ethics. Leading with integrity, fairness, and responsibility takes extra effort, so our leaders will need exceptional internal strength. This goes along with abandoning the need for popular consensus; effective global leaders will need a deep moral compass, committed to doing what is right even when it is not popular, convenient, or likely to win the next election. They’ll be thoughtful rather than reactive.

In this way, other leaders will know they can be trusted. Only with that trust can they come together, providing our wounded world the solutions it now craves.

Whether it’s managing your shift at the factory or running for high office, the question is: are you ready to become the new leader we need for tomorrow?

This article was adapted from our remastered podcast episode Africa’s EU Ambassador Redefines Leadership: How You Have Global Impact.

Thank you for reading our newsletter, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.

We strive to elevate the quality of leadership worldwide. Are you ready? If you are looking for help developing your leaders, explore our services.

You’re more like a global leader than you think. After all, you face very similar challenges.

National financial crisis? You’ve faced budget woes in your business or NPO, too. Job creation and unemployment? Talk to your own HR department about how hard recruiting has become. The list goes on.

The scale is different, but the leadership qualities are the same. Here’s how our podcast guest, former Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, breaks it down.

You may roll your eyes seeing this for the thousandth time, but empathy remains vital in any leader. It’s foundational, Papandreou insists. It enables you to connect with your teams, customers, and partners in meaningful ways. On the business side, that keeps your team motivated and engaged, your customers loyal, and your partners close. For government leaders, it means you’re actually serving your constituents (a quality may seem rare these days). The action takeaway: regularly engage with all your stakeholders. You’ll be ahead of the curve when crises strike.

In fact, build on that engagement; you’ll soon recognize interconnectedness and networks that may have seemed invisible before. Human societies have been globally interconnected for thousands of years; international trade has been around as long as civilization. Just as societies don’t work in a vacuum, neither do our businesses. The undeniable proof stared at us during the supply chain crisis a few years ago. When you embrace the fact that you and your organization do not work in isolation, you can build relationships and networks, making them stronger and more resilient, ready for the next disruption.

Collaboration and cooperation logically follow from that. Competition still has its place, but our economies are evolving so there’s more benefit from friendly competition than cut-throat. Indeed, as global issues multiply, it’s easier to solve them when companies in entire industries work together. On a smaller scale, if your team is missing expertise, collaboration with another team will bring a solution faster than waiting four years for your assistant to get a degree in that missing field.

One of the most powerful lessons learned from Papandreou’s experiences is the value of dialogue. More than once, he’s seen how open communication transforms adversarial relationships into productive partnerships – even between nations at odds for decades. It helps both parties discover shared interests, paving the way for collaboration on resolving those old sticking points. For your own leadership, dialogue also helps you see differing perspectives – which sparks new insights and fosters innovation.

You may never be asked to save the world, but when you exercise the same skills that international leaders use, you’ll be better equipped to save your little piece of it.

Which global leaders, current or past, have inspired your leadership journey? What tools have you learned by observing them? Share in the comments so we can have the value of dialogue here, too!

This article was adapted from our remastered podcast episode Cooperation, Leadership, & Empathy: George Papandreou’s Path for Meeting Challenges.

Thank you for reading our newsletter, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.

We strive to elevate the quality of leadership worldwide. Are you ready? If you are looking for help developing your leaders, explore our services.

Your work is a whirlwind. The avalanche of new tech, intricate global connectivity, and overnight societal changes all make for a rapidly changing world. And that’s just what you face each morning – what will work life be like in 2050?!

Clearly, your leadership style will have to change to keep up. Fortunately, our podcast guests offer no-nonsense guidance on how you can adapt and future-proof your leadership growth. Here’s what futurist Susan Cannon and leadership consultant Mike Morrow-Fox recommend.

Specific leadership skills to nurture now to build future-ready leaders include:

– Continuous learning and innovation. Change has become so rapid, it’s common for business analysts to quip that firms can easily tumble “overnight” if they don’t keep pace. To keep your success on the rise, develop leaders who are constant learners and innovators. This skill ensures adaptability with both industry changes and global challenges.

– Cross-cultural competence. As the COVID pandemic’s supply-chain collapse proved, all organizations have dependencies beyond local and national boundaries. Cultivate leaders who can expand those boundaries both internally (by managing global teams, for example) and externally (building relationships and networks internationally). And, of course, even our purely local teams now have members with a wide array of cultural backgrounds, so managing them requires similar skills to leading a multi-national team.

– Agility. With changes coming rapidly, timelines for decision-making are shrinking. We no longer have the luxury of taking our time to collect all data possible before finalizing a path. Agility or quick-decision-making becomes a make-or-break skill. Corollary to this is abolishing the fear of failure; if you have to make rapid decisions, some of them will be wrong. Learn, tweak, and try again. Punishing failure is not an option!

– Emotional intelligence. Tired of hearing EQ on these sorts of lists? Perhaps it keeps appearing because it’s really important! Think of it this way: as tech, and AI in particular, become more prevalent in the workplace, the unique skills only humans can perform become more important. Beyond the fact that workers are more engaged when they believe their bosses care, EQ enables you to discover what motivates your team members more effectively. From both a personal and a business standpoint, improving leaders’ emotional intelligence makes perfect sense.

– Proficiency. Some researchers limit this to technological proficiency. That’s fairly obvious; with technology changing so rapidly, your leaders need to be able to keep up so their teams can use these ever-emerging tools. But proficiency in soft skills is doubly important for leaders; the uniqueness of each team member becomes more important as technology highlights the talents only humans have – talent you need to keep on your team to ensure success.

Many ways exist to help your leadership team develop these skills. Check with your HR department; they may well have relevant programs in their catalog already. If not, recommend educational and professional development courses or consultants (such as those services provided by the Innovative Leadership Institute) that address future-ready leadership development. You can also be hands-on at no cost by being a mentor and coach for those around you or by identifying senior leaders who would love to take on this role. And, of course, you can allow staff to carve out time each week for experiential learning: moving out of their day-to-day comfort zones to work a few hours in a different area of your organization.

2050 may feel like the far future, but the changes leading to it are arising even as you read this. Equip yourself and other leaders with the skills to make it a successful journey.

What steps are you taking to prepare for tomorrow’s leadership? Lift others up by sharing your wisdom in the comments.

This article was adapted from our remastered podcast episode Leadership 2050: Two Experts Uncover How to Become Tomorrow’s Leader, Today.

Thank you for reading our newsletter, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.

We strive to elevate the quality of leadership worldwide. Are you ready? If you are looking for help developing your leaders, explore our services.