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Is Your Leadership Still Relevant? Leadership Scholars Provide Their Insight

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The world has changed dramatically in the last few years. That’s a given. But too many of us don’t realize that effective leadership has changed dramatically, too.

While leadership development is crucial for organizational success, many programs fail to catalyze real change. They’re too often based on old concepts that focus on the individual rather than the reality of the workplace having multiple leaders who must work with each other and lead their teams.

Dr. Nicole Ferry, assistant professor of the Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School, and Dr. Nathan Eva, associate professor, Fulbright Scholar (2021), and the Co-Director of Engagement for the Department of Management at the Monash Business School, join the podcast to discuss Non-Traditional Leadership Models for Our New Era. This episode was produced in partnership with the International Leadership Association as part of their 25th Annual Global Conference held in October 2023. Dan Mushalko, ILI Executive Producer, shared this article as a companion to the podcast. 

Listen to the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership: Co-Creating Our Future via Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One.

Leader Development and the Need for New Leadership Models

What you learned from that MBA program 20 or 10 (even 5!) years ago probably doesn’t apply anymore. So, what does a solid modern leadership development program contain? Look for:

Collective Leadership

No single leader possesses all the skills to manage crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. These issues require more than one leader. We need groups of leaders who can lead collaboratively in different areas. Collective leadership facilitates cooperation – handing off the leadership baton between team members or working closely towards common goals. After all, leadership fundamentally involves relationships and interactions. An overemphasis on the individual misses crucial power dynamics in organizational spaces – and underdelivers on success.

Learning from Nontraditional Sources

Old-school top-down leadership no longer fits every circumstance. To paraphrase a wise saying, “The leadership style that got us to the problems isn’t the leadership that will solve them.” New and effective ways of leading can be found by looking at unexpected sources. Indigenous worldviews are just one example. First Nations cultures in Australia are the longest continual-running societies on the planet; what’s different about how they’ve been successfully led through literally thousands of years? One possible key is that they don’t rely on a single leader but focus on the group looking after one another – caring for people professionally and personally. To start, see what you can glean from your family heritage: Italian, West African, Okinawan – all have distinct ways of leading and doing business.

Leadership Alignment

With multiple leaders and styles in any organization, it’s vital that everyone is aligned toward the same goals and overall mission. Communication from the very top is fundamental. Any leader who isn’t fully and openly sharing the company’s quarterly, annual, and long-term objectives automatically limits success.

Adapt to the New Worker

The post-COVID struggle of return-to-office versus work-from-home is one symptom of old-school bosses not recognizing that workers themselves have changed: their expectations, their priorities, their most productive work styles…all of these are vastly different now. That means effective motivation has changed, too. Maximizing your organization’s success depends greatly on how well you change to meet today’s workers.

Two core leadership qualities we develop in the Innovative Leadership Institute‘s programs are resiliency and the mind of a scientist (i.e., always learning and willing to experiment with new techniques). Those traits will amplify all of the points made above and help you continue your leadership development no matter what new changes the world throws your way!

 

Thank you for reading the Innovative Leadership Insights, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership: Co-Creating Our Future on your favorite podcast platform, including Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One.

PRESS RELEASE: Insightful New Book “Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI” Updates Leadership in the Digital Era

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In an era where technology is driving the need for transformation at an unprecedented pace, traditional leadership models demand a profound evolution.

Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI: A Guide to Creating Your Future as Leader, Follower, and AI Ally is the latest addition to the renowned Innovative Leadership series. Authored by a team of experts in the field, this book is poised to revolutionize how leaders and followers navigate the dynamic landscape of leadership in the age of artificial intelligence.

 

Key Highlights of Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI include:

• Leadership Skills for the Future: Readers will gain access to practical tools, knowledge, and strategies that empower them to take their leadership skills to the next level and co-create the future.
• Technological Synergy: The book illuminates how leaders can effectively collaborate with intelligent systems to make informed and ethical decisions, embracing the full potential of AI.
• The New Followership: Leaders can strengthen their relationship with their followers by understanding the dynamics between leadership and followership.
• Ethical Implications: Leaders are equipped to navigate the complex ethical considerations of leading in an AI-driven world, addressing several issues, including algorithmic bias issues and hallucinations.

 

Authored by Maureen Metcalf, M.B.A., Erin S. Barry, M.S., Dan Mushalko, Devon Mushalko, and Neil E. Grunberg, Ph.D., contributing author and forward by Neil Sahota, CEO of ACSI, Labs, United Nations (UN) AI Advisor, IBM Master Inventor, and author of Own the A.I. Revolution. “Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI”, along with contributions from Michael Morrow-Fox, M.B.A., ED.S., is now available for purchase at major book retailers, both online and in stores.

 

Read the full press release for Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI here.

Available for purchase at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Coming soon to Audible.

Leading with an Eye on AI with AI Expert Neil Sahota

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Neil Sahota, an IBM Master Inventor and United Nations (UN) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Advisor, contributing author of Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI shared this article as acompanion to his podcast, Leading with an Eye on AI.

Link to the entire interview:

Listen to the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership: Co-Creating Our Future via Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One.

Meet Lynn, a Customer Service Representative at ACME Corporation. Lynn’s manager is Riley, an AI (artificial intelligence) bot. Riley listens to all of Lynn’s calls in real time and provides instantaneous guidance and performance feedback. Lynn is part of the next-generation workforce and appreciates Riley’s management style because Riley provides the deep engagement and constant interaction that Lynn craves to feel as a contributing member of the team. Now, meet Pat, the human manager of Riley and a team comprised of humans and AI bots. As a second-line manager, Pat has management and leadership responsibilities to the downline reports to direct their work and inspire them towards ACME corporate goals. It is not easy when people have a variety of motivators and AI bots, well, none save what they have been trained to do.

Sound like an exciting future?

Surprise, surprise, this is very much the present. Everything described already exists. And, yes, AI systems are directing human work…and yes, human managers are directing AI “employees.”

We live in a time of rapid change, with tools that can cause a massive impact (both positive and negative). As a result, traditional leadership styles are too slow and disengaging for the workforce. Moreover, with the increasing pressure to build innovative teams and intrapreneurial cultures, leaders face the dual challenge of honing their skills and teams without many proven models to rely upon. To make life even more complicated, today’s leadership is faced with learning to manage and lead in a post-COVID world that requires managers to assess performance and steward employee well-being. Furthermore, leaders are also expected to be JEDI champions: facilitators of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace.

This is why we need books like this one on Innovative Leadership. Historically, people were thrust into management and leadership roles based on their non-supervisory work performance. More rigorous leadership programs were developed as business advanced to help prepare people for this transition. However, change has outpaced the curriculum development. Today’s leaders must understand the ever-evolving workforce and new transformative technological tools like artificial intelligence. Like it or not, the demands of today’s employees expect you to be ready (and that includes those AI bots), and there’s not a lot of time or patience for leadership to adjust and be effective.

Thankfully, while you may not need to worry about AI employees in the very near future, we do have some powerful AI and other emerging technology tools to support us as we shift into Innovative Leadership. From a data perspective, 2 leaders and managers have many data points to assess work performance. In the case of Lynn, we have our traditional metrics of wait time, resolution time, the number of levels supported, and so forth. However, thanks to AI tools, we can also better assess customer satisfaction throughout the entire call, using the science of psychographics (psychology and personality assessment) and neurolinguistics (science of language and word choice). More importantly, AI can assess the real-time performance of Lynn (or any other employee) as they interact with the customer. Depending on how the call progresses, the AI will provide instantaneous feedback and coaching to the employee to maximize the opportunity of a beneficial outcome for the call. That’s a level most managers cannot do with a single employee, let alone an entire team. More importantly, the insight the AI provides into employee performance is the most important for a leader to gauge employee performance and maximize customer engagement.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for leadership regarding tooling. The ability for introspection and honest, constructive feedback for leaders is critical. Getting this input, though, is challenging. This is where AI presents another boon for leaders: the honest assessment of leadership skills. As we move forward, there isn’t a single prototypical leader. We have different archetypes (the nine types of leaders as you will read in this book) based upon the ten core skills (also shared in this book). AI tools help leaders fairly and accurately assess these capabilities. This is crucial to help us understand our strengths and weaknesses and which type of leader we are to maximize our strengths. As we understand what an innovative leader means, we also see how difficult it is to get honest feedback from our staff and colleagues. Artificial intelligence provides leadership with another trusted source of information (beyond employee performance) to help us become innovative leaders.

Moreover, as we look to the future of work, it’s not only enterprises wondering what the jobs and leaders of tomorrow must bring to the table. Government agencies are investing heavily to adjust their workforce development programs accordingly. Singapore has created the TechSkills Accelerator (TeSA) initiative and AI Apprenticeship Program (AIAP) to provide the existing and future workforce with hands-on experience for these jobs of tomorrow. Canada has adopted Canada’s AI Augmented Workforce for their future work plan. The State of California has adopted an AI roadmap. The core tenants require full integration of AI skill development in K-12 and higher education curricula and a mandate to integrate AI tools to provide public services, including labor management and workforce development. That’s why management and leadership must be the first to understand and adapt to these changes because they will be the ones to lead the upcoming transformation of work.

To start leading your human and machine workforce soon, you must master ten critical skills. This book will share how to do that and essential frameworks to factor in contextual understanding and situational analysis. In essence, this book will serve as your sherpa as you enter the new world of Innovative Leadership. AI will be your leadership concierge so that you can maximize your effectiveness and support your employees in realizing their peak performance.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Neil Sahota (萨冠军) is an IBM Master Inventor, United Nations (UN) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Advisor, author of the best-seller Own the AI Revolution, and a sought-after speaker. With 20+ years of business experience, he works to inspire clients and business partners to foster innovation and develop next-generation products/solutions powered by AI.

 

Thank you for reading Innovative Leadership Insights, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership: Co-Creating Our Future on your favorite podcast platform, including Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One.

10 Characteristics Business Leaders Will Need In The Age Of AI

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Maureen Metcalf, CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, provided this article as a companion to her podcast with James Ritchie-Dunham, David Dinwoodie, and Suzie Lewis, Back to the Future…of Work.

Podcast intro from “Faux Mo:” and ILI AI experiment with digital twins.

 

 Link to the entire interview:

Listen to the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership: Co-Creating Our Future via Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One.

10 Characteristics Business Leaders Will Need In The Age Of AI

Most of us interact with AI in some way during our daily tasks. With all the discussions about artificial intelligence, one of the biggest questions is what leaders must do to prepare. To answer this question, I used my personal experience experimenting with ChatGPT-4; read the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs 2023 report; read the Harvard Business Review article draft “Navigating Complexity and Learning with Agility: Keys for the Future of Work” by David Dinwoodie, Suzie Lewis, and Jim Ritchie-Dunham (currently only available in Spanish); and interviewed Neil Sahoto, AI advisor to the U.N., on my company podcast (read his accompanying article here).

Here is my top ten list of items leaders will need to do well in the AI-powered future. Most are skills leaders already need to have mastered. From that vantage point, part of the question becomes: what should we stop doing so that we can delegate tasks to AI while refining the skills that require human wisdom and contact?

1. Communication

Leaders must continue to focus on basic leadership skills involving relating to others—communication, collaboration, negotiation, facilitation, social influence, and active listening.

2. Growth Mindset

During the massive opportunities created by change, we must continue cultivating our growth mindset, curiosity, lifelong learning, and ability to unlearn and stop doing things that no longer serve our mission.

3. Adaptiveness

Using what we learn through our learning and growth mindset, we need to enhance our ability to anticipate change and proactively initiate aligned change initiatives. To do this, we need to build our adaptiveness, resilience, and business agility.

4. Emotional Intelligence

Because we will ask our teams to make changes that often feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable, we need to amplify our emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, self-management, relationship awareness, empathy, building trust and psychological safety, and other skills that help us relate to and inspire others.

5. Abundance Mindset

It is easy for each of us to struggle with uncertainty and fall into fear during uncertain times. Developing an abundance mindset instead of a scarcity mindset allows us to reframe uncomfortable situations into opportunities. Collectively, we have the knowledge, wisdom, resources, skills, and attitude to meet the challenges ahead.

6. Domain Expertise

We continue to need to excel in our areas of domain expertise and understand the latest technological developments in those areas. We must remain current in our domains, whether that is finance, HR, or medicine.

7. AI Skills

As we move from focusing solely on human skills to requiring the ability to leverage AI successfully, we need to know what questions to ask AI to get the results we want. Leaders will need to know (and have teams who know) how to leverage AI to get useful information and get work done. The better we are at asking the right questions, the better our AI assistants will be at providing useful information.

8. Analytical Skills

We will need to leverage what we learn in partnership with AI-generated information. To do this, we will need strong analytical and problem-solving skills, as well as systems thinking ability and the associated mindset, 360-degree thinking.

9. Creativity

Take a creative perspective to identify areas AI will not consider or to create solutions AI would not come up with. Know where to experiment with possible solutions.

10. Risk Awareness

Understand the risks AI presents and continually evolve governance processes to address these risks.

Final Thoughts: Unlearn And Delegate

In addition to these skills, we will need to develop the ability to unlearn and delegate. AI can now do many analytical tasks people have been doing. We are currently in the early stages of AI usage, and I like to frame AI digital workers as interns. We are responsible for the actions of our interns. Likewise, with AI, we are responsible for the accuracy of our work.

AI can process data much faster than humans. When prompted properly, AI programs produce reliable information much more quickly and efficiently than humans. The results are reliable for specific applications when the AI has been programmed with specific tasks and tested.

With that in mind, ChatGPT-4 can “hallucinate” (state false facts and cite false sources). It is crucial to set parameters around assigning and checking the AI’s work. I conducted several experiments, specifically with ChatGPT-4. It provided a strong starting point for writing. But in every instance, I asked it to cite and verify sources. In other words, I treated it like an intern; I knew I needed to verify its work until it had proven itself.

My company is currently experimenting with an AI “digital twin” that our team uses for teaching videos and social media. I encourage other leaders to look into ways they can use AI to increase their productivity and enhance their impact. At the same time, there are inherent risks with any new technology. Leaders who understand the strengths and weaknesses of AI and prepare themselves and their workforces have the greatest opportunity to smartly mitigate risks while still experimenting and learning in the process.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Maureen Metcalf is the founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute. She is an expert in anticipating and leveraging future business trends. Ms. Metcalf helps leaders elevate their leadership quality and transform their organizations to create sustainable impact and results. She captures 30 years of experience and success in an award-winning series of books used by public, private, and academic organizations to align company-wide strategy, systems, and culture using Innovative Leadership techniques. Ms. Metcalf is a Fellow of the International Leadership Association. She also serves on the advisory boards of the School of Strategic Leadership at James Madison University and the Mason Leadership Center at Franklin University. Ms. Metcalf earned an MBA from Virginia Tech. She can be reached at mmetcalf@innovativeleadership.com.

 

ABOUT THE GUESTS:

James L. Ritchie-Dunham, Ph.D. is president of the Institute for Strategic Clarity, affiliated with Boston College, Harvard, and author/co-author of Leadership for Flourishing (forthcoming), Agreements (2023), Ecosynomics (2014), Managing from Clarity (2001), and many chapters and articles. He blogs regularly at Jlrd.me. His global research, surveying over 132,000 groups in 126 countries, shows (1) that you prefer abundance-based agreements to scarcity-based ones, (2) lots of people have figured out how to live this way, for decades, with far better results and experiences, and (3) you can choose to shift your agreements, experiences, and outcomes to abundance-based.

David Dinwoodie has collaborated with the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) for over 15 years as a researcher, author, educator, and coach. As Vice-President of Global Leadership Solutions, managed CCL’s global portfolio of Open Enrolment Programs, Corporate Learning Solutions, Coaching, and Assessment Services across 12 campuses worldwide, servicing 3,000 client organizations and over 30,000 individuals each year. David is co-author of the book Becoming a Strategic Leader: Your Role in Your Organization’s Enduring Success. He is an Advisory Board member for the Penn State School of Graduate Education (SMEAL) and Developing Leaders Quarterly.

Suzie Lewis is the founder and managing director of Transform for Value, and an executive fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organisation, an independent think tank at the Drucker School of Management. Suzie is a global business leader, speaker, podcast host, and executive coach with extensive experience in driving international transformation projects, preparing business leaders and employees for change, and bridging the gap between human and digital ecosystems. Her quest is to build more inclusive & collaborative environments, placing the onus on how to drive value through people as well as data and processes to drive sustainable change.

 

Thank you for reading the Innovative Leadership Insights by the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-Creating Our Future via Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One.

Kim Campbell – Perspectives from a Prime Minister: Reimagining Our Leadership To Become Good Ancestors

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Maureen Metcalf features takeaways from her interview with former Prime Minister of Canada, Rt. Hon. Kim Campbell in this article that accompanies the podcast Reimagining Our Leadership to be a Good Ancestor. This podcast is part of the International Leadership Association’s live interview series recorded in Geneva.

 

A 3-minute clip with the Rt. Hon. Kim Campbell

Full Interview with the Rt. Honorable Kim Campbell

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I was honored to interview the Right Honorable Kim Campbell in Geneva in October 2021 at the International Leadership Association Conference.

I want to start this post with a quote from our conversation that stood out to me:

“I have to be encouraged at the capacity of human beings to be wonderful. To be brave. To be imaginative. To be generous. To be kind…” – Kim Campbell

This conversation was a spirited exchange about what is working and not and the solid invitation to do better now so we create the future we want to leave for those who will bear the consequence of our actions. The following blog captures several ideas we discussed and reflects her perspectives.

We started with the topic of leading as an ancestor. It’s a concept our ancestors bequeathed to us. But, unfortunately, we may well be the ancestors that screw it all up for future generations. For example, climate change, the rise in authoritarianism, and threats to democracy are all tied together and impact the ability of future generations to flourish and achieve their potential. Kim’s quote was, “We will never have a more fair and just future until we have a more fair and just history.”

Many of the problems facing society now are grounded in ignorance. Many people don’t like narratives that challenge our position. In many cases, if a person or group isn’t prototypical (women, minority, disabled, etc.), their stories fall off the radar screen. As an example, let’s look at women. At least 60 have been presidents, prime ministers, etc., yet few people know. It is difficult for even the best to advance in their careers, /research, /and other areas. Yet many made foundational contributions to science. So what knowledge did we lose from the women who didn’t have that neighbor, or that person giving them a way onto the path? When we don’t see them on our radar, ignorance says they shouldn’t be there. They haven’t earned the right because they “don’t do that sort of thing.” Yet, typically, they’ve contributed to their field, but it’s unacknowledged or uncredited. This ignorance leads to a personal worldview that’s exclusionary. How much we’ve forgotten about Islam’s contributions to math, science, medicine, architecture – including our sheer numbers! These contributions have been undervalued because of the rise of European (Eurocentric) empires and the regression of Islamic culture resulting from religious fundamentalism.

Ignorance lets us feel superiority, hatred, disdain. It’s never a smooth ride for women. Women are the canaries in the mine when it comes to people wanting to erode liberties. Maybe things have to be disastrous to consolidate the will of good people. We can’t be complacent because it doesn’t always work out if people do nothing.

One difference now vs. the past: we’re now looking at issues where the impact on future generations is knowable, significant, and very real. Greta Thunberg: You are stealing my future and not dealing with this. , be turning their heads and saying, “Nah, can’t deal with it?”

The perversions wrought by ignorance are dangerous. They put lives at risk and undermine evidence-based decision-making. We, as leaders, can’t solve real problems with uninformed conspiracy theories. 700,000 Americans alone have died of Covid; that’s unconscionable by any measure, but the inevitable result of so many people (both leaders and rank-and-file Americans) don’t believe the science. Much ignorance results from disinformation, which is increased by social media.

Thoughts on the “Me Too” movement. Sexual harassment is still much more prevalent than many people realize. It’s not just that many men think that women’s bodies are the spoils of power (which has been the case for a long time – see the opening of The Odyssey, for example). Also, when women pushed back on sexual advances, the men sought to destroy them. This pressure still exists today –vindictiveness to destroy a woman’s career. It’s all about power: companies to pursue business irrespective of the effect on climate, politicians to destroy democratic norms, to control other people’s bodies.

With all of the discussion of the challenges, there is also hope. For example, it isn’t true that older people are less interested in climate change. Boomers are prepared to do more to deal with the issue. We can use our brains, imagination, and strength to improve lives & make the world a better place.

Podcasts may be one answer to address ignorance. They can be more civil, informative, and heard in the listeners’ time. But how do you get someone to listen, especially if it offers a different point of view? One of the values of some podcasts is they can provide a deeper exploration of specific topics as the time isn’t limited by the short form conversations in many other media outlets.

Women in politics are gaining traction. Women are not viewed the same as men – they are under more of a microscope. This view is improving slowly, but it is improving. Angela Merkel was tremendously successful in Germany. She doesn’t fit the stereotype of a powerful woman: she wears glasses, no skirts, a wide variety of colors in her jackets, etc. She has been so successful and long-running that she’s re-written expectations of a political leader.

I sincerely appreciate the Right Honorable Kim Campbell taking an hour to talk about what she is thinking and exploring and what she invites each of us to consider. I was left with the questions:

How can I be a better ancestor for future generations? How can my choices leave the world and the world of work a better place? What resonated with you from her conversation?

Books to look out for Time and Chance: The Political Memoirs of Canada’s First Woman Prime Minister

About the Author

Maureen Metcalf, the CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, is dedicated to elevating the quality of leaders globally.

Are You A Future-Ready Leader?

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Maureen Metcalf originally published this week’s article for the Forbes Coaches Council. Maureen is the founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute as a companion to Howard Tiersky’s podcast Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance.

Across the globe, leaders are grappling with the future of work across a broad spectrum of considerations — ranging from mandating vaccines to what hybrid work looks like — to attract and engage employees to run operations.

I have seen lots of articles on the future of work. This article addresses the future of leadership. As work changes, leadership must also change. Helping leaders become future-ready has been an important topic for me for over a decade. I started a company focusing on helping leaders “innovate how they lead” to keep pace with their industries and stakeholders. Post-Covid-19, the leadership required to succeed has changed. Leaders must rethink their mindset (also known as their leadership algorithm) and their actions. Here are some of the changes that will be needed.

Organizational Impact In Place Of Personal Recognition

Many traditional leaders are guided by the desire for personal success and peripherally by organizational success. The future-ready leader’s vision of success provides humble guidance based on performance and the value of the organization’s positive impact. This leader seeks to maximize organizational success over personal recognition. This shift is significant as employees are increasingly making job choices based on the company’s alignment with making an impact. According to a January 2021 McKinsey article, “Future-ready companies recognize that purpose helps attract people to join an organization, remain there, and thrive. Investors understand why this is valuable and factor purpose into their decision making: the rise of environmental, social, and governance (ESG)–related funds is just one of the ways they acknowledge that purpose links to value creation in tangible ways.”

Collaboration In Place Of Command And Control

Traditional leaders relied heavily on a “command and control” style, where they had most of the answers. Now, the future leader leverages the team for answers as part of the decision-making process. An example is companies surveying their employees to ask them how they want to work post-Covid-19 rather than leaders dictating policy. Leaders who ask and respond by balancing business requirements and employee preferences find more success than companies that dictate policies. According to a report by Monster.com, in what’s being called the “Great Resignation,” 95% of workers are considering changing jobs. With this level of workforce pressure, the stakes are high to get the return-to-work policies right because employees are more mobile, and attracting talent is increasingly challenging.

Experimentation Over Simple Solutions

Leaders who pick a direction in a “black/white” manner often tend to stay the course dogmatically. Future leaders perceive and behave like scientists: continually experimenting, measuring and testing for improvement and exploring new models and approaches. These leaders understand they need to make quick decisions and move into action before they have sufficient information. However, this fast-action leaves them at risk if they cannot refine their direction based on what they learn from their initial steps. Therefore, they take the smallest decision and action possible so they can learn and refine their approach. Agility becomes foundational.

Growth Mindset In Place Of Fixed Mindset

Leaders who focus on being technically correct and in charge put themselves at a disadvantage compared to the future-friendly leader who continually learns and develops self and others. With the volume of change, leaders need to continue to learn about their industries, businesses, and leadership craft. They need a growth mindset and need to help their organizations become learning organizations.

Engagement Focus In Place Of Autocracy

Leaders who managed people by being autocratic and controlling must shift to focus on motivating and engaging people through strategic focus, mentoring and coaching, emotional and social intelligence and empowerment. With a tight labor market, companies struggle to attract and retain employees required to meet customer expectations. Employee engagement is higher when leaders use a range of engagement modes and tools to drive success.

There’s a strong connection between employee engagement and company profitability. In a Gallup study of nearly 200 organizations, companies with the highest levels of employee engagement were 22% more profitable and 21% more productive than those with low levels of engagement. In addition, 94% of the companies on Hay Group’s list of the World’s Most Admired Companies believe that their efforts to engage employees create a competitive advantage.

Multi-Stakeholder Model In Place Of Profit Only

Traditional leaders who tend to the numbers and primarily use quantitative measures that drive those numbers need to expand how they define and manage performance and broaden their focus. The future-focused leader continually balances customer satisfaction, employee engagement, community impact, cultural cohesion, social responsibility, environmental impact and profit. This leader is balancing a broader range of stakeholders with nuanced expectations.

Movements like conscious capitalism expand the definition of capitalism and encourage leaders to be more aware of the impact their decisions have on the broader stakeholder community they serve. Similarly, the increasingly popular ESG movement requires that leaders consider the environmental, social and governance impacts of their decisions. Increasingly, large institutional investors are focusing on companies with healthy ESG performance records. From Citi’s 2020 ESG report, “The events of 2020 are a stark reminder that companies like ours have a role to play in helping tackle the world’s toughest problems — and this sense of responsibility drives our ESG agenda,” said Jane Fraser, Citi CEO. “We don’t see ESG as a separate effort. Instead, it is embedded in our daily efforts to support our clients, colleagues and communities, and our work as a bank. We take great pride in our work and are delighted to share it with all our stakeholders in this report.”

Final Thoughts

As leaders, we are the stewards of our organizations, employees and stakeholders’ expectations. Therefore, we need to build future-ready leadership mindsets and skills required to lead in a manner that promotes success short- and long-term for our broad range of stakeholders.

About the Author

Maureen Metcalf, CEO, the Innovative Leadership Institute, is dedicated to elevating the quality of leaders globally.

Photo by Memento Media on Unsplash

140 Top CEOs Say These Are the Most Crucial Challenges for Future Leaders

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This blog is provided by Jacob Morgan, author of the book, The Future Leader: 9 Skills and Mindsets to Succeed in the Next Decade, as a companion to his podcast The Future Leader: Skills and Mindsets to Succeed in the Next Decade.

Leadership has always been challenging, but the future of work will bring fresh challenges to future leaders. Over the next decade, leaders will have to face obstacles and challenges not faced by current or past leaders. But what are those challenges?

As part of the research for my book, The Future Leader, I interviewed over 140 top CEOs from around the world and surveyed around 14,000 LinkedIn users. One of the questions I asked was about the challenges future leaders would face. From their varied and insightful responses, I broke the challenges down to two main areas: futurize and humanize.

Futurize

Future leaders can’t afford to lead their organizations by looking in the rearview mirror. They need to futurize, or bring their organizations into the future. But of course, it isn’t that simple. There are numerous challenges that fall into this category.

Short-Term Vs. Long-Term Thinking

Many leaders think quarter by quarter to please their shareholders and investors. We’ve been conditioned to think in the short term and expect fast results. Future leaders need to be focused on long-term success for both the organization and the people. This requires courage!

Adapting to Technology

New technology is coming incredibly quickly, and it often seems like once we’ve finally mastered something, it’s outdated and there’s a flashy new solution. Leaders need to pay attention to technology and be able to change their perspective to understand what new developments are most important and what else is coming down the pipeline. Technology is not just for IT professionals.

“Today’s leaders need to either decide to embrace new platforms and technology or be prepared to be left behind.” John Legere, Former CEO, T-Mobile

Keeping Up With the Pace of Change

The world is changing incredibly fast, and future leaders will be challenged to keep up. They need to embrace change, stay agile, and be open to new ideas. Whether we look at climate change, globalization, technology, demographics, cyber security, geopolitical issues, competition, or any of the other numerous trends shaping our lives and organizations, it’s clear that change happens quickly and happens all the time. We will experience more change in the coming decade than we have experienced in the past hundreds of years.

“The pace of change is faster and while you don’t have to know everything, you do have to know how to get it. The commitment to being a lifelong learner, I think the premium on that is much higher now for our leaders.” William Rogers, CEO, SunTrust Banks

Moving Away from the Status Quo

Just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean it will still work in the future. Leaders need to be confident and bold to take risks that move away from the status quo just because that’s how things have always been done. Leaders must move away from the mentality of “follow me to greener pastures because I’ve done it and I’ve been there,” to “follow me into uncertainty, I don’t know the path but I have a vision of what we can create and together we will make it happen!”

Humanize

We tend to put a lot of emphasis on technology, but a company can work without technology; it can’t work without people. The challenges of humanizing involve balancing humans with technology and ensuring your people are prepared to succeed in the future. We can’t forget that business still fundamentally operates and exists because of people. What we are seeing now with COVID-19 is a very clear example of that.

Leading Diverse Teams

Not everyone in the world looks and thinks the same, and your organization should reflect that. Diverse teams bring in new perspectives. Future leaders need to put together teams of people with different backgrounds, genders, races, sexual orientations, and belief systems to work together towards a common goal.

Attracting and Retaining Top Talent

People are an organization’s biggest asset, but many companies face the challenge of finding and keeping great employees. Instead of job candidates trying to convince organizations they are the best choice, now leaders and organizations must convince potential employees they are a great place to work.

“We’re moving from an era of lifetime employment to lifetime employee ability where if your people don’t feel that they learn and progress and they’re up to speed in their areas of expertise, they will leave you because they will become themselves obsolete.” – André Calantzopoulos, CEO, Philip Morris International

Reskilling and Upskilling Employees

How we work and the tools we have are changing rapidly, and many employees find themselves not having the right skills to do their jobs or thrive in the future. Leaders face the challenge of knowing how best to upskill employees and give them what they need for future success.

Doing Good

People want to be part of organizations that care about more than just making money. But in many cases, the leaders and shareholders are conditioned to think more about profits than doing good in the world. Future leaders need to make sure their work is improving the world and then share that message with others.

Making the Organization Human

With automation and a focus on efficiency, many organizations fall into the trap of focusing on results instead of people. Each individual matters, and future leaders need to understand their employees as people, not just cogs in the machine.

“A leader of the future will have to be astute enough to balance automation with the human touch. They have to decide what types of tasks to automate so that they can spend more time on high-value activities. But also decide which businesses will continue to benefit from human judgment.” – Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairperson, of Biocon

These challenges are widespread and require serious effort. Based on the survey I did with LinkedIn looking at 14,000 employees around the world, most leaders and organizations aren’t ready to face these challenges. The good news is that we still have time, but we need to start now to develop future-ready skills and mindsets.

 

About the Author

 Jacob Morgan is a four time bestselling author, keynote speaker, and futurist who explores leadership, employee experience, and the future of work. He is the founder of FutureofWorkUniversity.com, an online education and training platform that helps future proof individuals and organizations by teaching them the skills they need to succeed in the future of work. Jacob also hosts the Future of Work podcast, a weekly show where he speaks with senior executives, business leaders, and bestselling authors about how the world of work is changing.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

 

Better Leadership, Positive Peace and More Positive Cultures

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Mike Hardy, Board Chair of the International Leadership Association and Professor at Coventry University, Centre for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations, provided this blog as a companion to his podcast Better Leadership to Promote the Positives in Peace and Culture.

Of all the consequences of effective and ethical leadership, a positive impact on peace and peacefulness for us all is the one that matters to me most. The quest for better leadership is a continuing one, and the needs and urgencies for positive impact grow with intensity each year.

As Board Chair of the International Leadership Association I have watched, this year, with humility and astonishment how teams of scholars, business leaders, practitioners and (some) policy makers have strained sinews to elaborate and articulate how those with influence can use it better, and how those with reach can reach more and further.

At the close of the ILA’s Ottawa Global Conference in 2019 I observed how this quest for improvement must be a movement and not a moment. This continuing work needs to be distracted by moments but never stopped by events. We could not have foreseen the unprecedented events of 2020, the challenges for communities and policy-makers alike. But we must remain true to our commitment that better leadership can push us all towards a better world. And we must not be too worried about precise and constraining definitions; better leadership must not just be about doing the right things…but it must also embrace doing things in the right way –a commitment to ethics as well as effectiveness. In the same way a better world must include conditions more likely to deliver both a positive peace and more positive cultures.

A positive peace is far more than the mere absence of violence and conflict. It is a way of being, a set of attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peacefulness in and between communities and societies. Like bad leadership it is often much easier to point out the negatives, the absence of peace. Similarly, positive culture is more than a description of characteristics and identities. It is a set of values, behaviours and attributes that enable and promote human flourishing, reinforce collaborative compassion and peaceful co-existence. We are still struggling to secure both. Both are critical factors for human flourishing –with peace and in peaceful times we can begin to address many of the sources of human insecurity- but often we remain more aware of its absence than its existence. And a positive culture is also elusive –a culture that promotes civic awareness, and participation, social equity and the well-being of a community, hence peacefulness for families and neighbourhoods, can often be more difficult to observe than a malevolent culture that strengthens some groups to initiate and perpetuate exclusion and at times violent conflict.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare our vulnerabilities, divisions, falsehoods and brutal inequalities. Since this global human crisis took its toll on all of us – the forces of division and hate too have been placing the lives of vulnerable communities including religious and ethnic minorities, migrants, women, children and youth, in peril. Even old people and those with disabilities have not been spared. It is especially disheartening to witness a surge in hate speech, xenophobia, racism and many forms of discrimination. These deep fissures in the fabric of our societies weakens our resolve for peace and question what it is about our culture that creates so much room for insecurity.

So, our agenda for better leadership is more vital than ever as a part of a change agenda that promotes the positives in both peace and culture. I have been drawn to a powerful thought from this moment for our movement; a thought captured in a big question:  When this is all over –how do we want the world to be different?

As we battle the COVID-19 pandemic, and the many associated challenges of rising job-losses, deepening economic inequalities, the alarming increase in hate crimes across the world, we need to look beyond the moment and look to how culture and its development can help create a better world of tomorrow.   We need to face up to the real and gloomy conclusion that the distrust and fractured relationships in our neighbourhoods that feel so current in our culture have a common core: a real and hostile divide between people who are regarded as different; a dehumanisation of the “other”.  We seem to have a culture that looks to hold someone else responsible for the moment in which we find ourselves. Despite the crises that we face, we are nowhere near being able to answer this question about how we want the world to be. We know where we do not want to go and be: our social capital –relationships and networks in our communities that encourage calm and harmony, must help rebuild the confidence that the generations that follow will have more not fewer opportunities. And we must restore the beliefs that we once had by default that our created health, education and even financial systems, cherished institutions and welfare state are more than illusions. We must actively banish the dark forces than breed exclusion and divide.

Positive peace and positive cultures matter: a more equal, inclusive culture supports a safer, kinder and more prosperous society. Specific policies to meet the urgent needs of less advantaged groups can deliver a fairer world and lay the foundations for economic recovery and build resilience to future crises.

This is a moment when the convergence of energies towards better leadership and those towards positive peace can create provoke some positive change for the lives of people worldwide. This is not a small agenda -and it is quite a backdrop for our work in growing knowledge and understanding of leadership for a better world. A future world with positive peace and positive culture will help us to re-emphasise our belief in the importance of hope, and it will be through hope we can see evidence of a better future. But even hope will not bring the different world we wish for… that needs direct actions and a new direction and these require more effective and strongly ethical leadership.

Better leadership has two important roles to play: it must help us all to make sense of the turbulences and uncertainties, help shine a clarifying light on our challenges, and it must help us manage the changes that we need and that are taking place.

No small job then! And a compelling reason to make sure that you attend the ILA’s 2020 Global Conference –“Leading at the Edge”

Leading at the Edge
22nd Annual Global Conference
5-8 November 2020 | A Live Online Virtual Event
http://www.ila-net.org/2020Global

 

About the Author

Professor Mike Hardy is the Founding Director of the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University, in the UK. After a distinguished career, he returned to the academic world in 2011 as Professor of Intercultural Relations at Coventry University. Mike is active with UNESCO and the UN Alliance of Civilizations; he is currently lead advisor to the World Forum for Intercultural Dialogue in Baku, the World Peace Forum in Indonesia and directs the RISING Global Peace Forum at Coventry. Professor Hardy has been twice honoured, awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2001 for his peace-building work in the Middle East, and appointed a Companion of Honour of St Michael and St George in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, in June 2010, for his work internationally in Intercultural Dialogue. Mike is a trustee of The Faith and Belief Forum the leading interfaith charity in the UK and Board Chair of the US-based International Leadership Association.

 

Leadership 2050 – What Qualities Will We Need?

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Paradoxical leaderThis blog post includes excerpts from chapter 13 or an upcoming book edited by the International Leadership Association: Building Bridges series in June 2015. The chapter was written by Susan Cannon, Maureen Metcalf, and Mike Morrow-Fox to explore what leadership looks like in 2050.

Effective leadership qualities can be paradoxical—requiring effective leaders to be passionate and unbiased, detailed and strategic, hard-driving and sustainable, fact-focused and intuitive, self-confident and selfless—often simultaneously. Such complexity is rarely found in leaders, even under optimal conditions. As we move toward 2050, new contexts and conditions are poised to emerge that will create challenges beyond the abilities of most leaders or any single nation to manage. This powerful contextual shift—a time of great stress and constraint—can potentially drive a new, more complex stage of human culture and consciousness to meet these challenges.

Historically, as new stages of human culture and consciousness have emerged, the requirements for effective leadership have shifted accordingly. Such a shift is already underway in small pockets; we expect its significance to increase in the next few decades. This shift will call for and catalyze what researchers and scholar-practitioners of adult developmental maturity (developmentalists) call “Strategist” leadership skills ). Strategist leaders have a world-centric, truly inclusive capacity to see, make meaning, and respond in a way that facilitates consistent, flexible, holistic, meta-systemic, broadly collaborative, and transformative problem-solving that endures even during times of times of stress and constraint. In this chapter, the authors describe research-based probable futures requiring more Strategists.

This perfect storm of increasing complexity, accelerating change, and near-constant uncertainty is creating conditions that exceed most leaders’ mental and emotional capacities. While technology advances exponentially, our laws, culture, and social contracts are moving linearly. The same is true for conventional approaches to leadership development. Four recent global studies on the future needs and gaps of organizational leadership concluded that current leadership lacks the higher-ordered skills and capacities to meet the complexity of today’s challenges. For example, current leaders lack the ability to function in environments with a high degree of ambiguity and uncertainty, build cross-cultural strategic relationships, facilitate collaboration between diverse groups, or sense the crucial and unspoken undercurrents and relational dynamics in a meeting. The systematic cultivation of such higher-ordered capacities in leaders requires more than training—it means they must psychologically evolve to a more complex way of being.

The stages of a leader’s growth have a direct correlation, and thereby a natural fit, with stages of cultural evolution. The new leader that emerged with each cultural stage had the requisite capacities and developmental maturity to reach beyond what came before. For example, someone seeking to become a term-limited chief executive of a Modern era nation-state democracy must have the more complex, nuanced, and emotionally intelligent capacity to gather support and communicate with the electorate and representatives in a way that a Traditional era bloodline monarch, ruling by fiat, would not need or understand.

This emerging cultural stage of development structurally correlates to the Strategist leader.

According to an HBR article, Seven Transformations of Leadership by Torbert and Rooke, 4% of leaders test at the Strategist level. Characteristics include:

  • Perceives systematic patterns and long-term trends with uncanny clarity.
  • Can easily differentiate objective versus subjectively biased events.
  • Exhibits a strong focus on self-development, self-actualization, and authenticity.
  • Pursues actualizing personal convictions according to internal standards.
  • Management style is tenacious and yet humble.
  • Understands the importance of mutual interdependence with others.
  • Well-advanced time horizon: approximately fifteen–twenty years with concern for legacy.

photo credit: www.flickr.com Hartwig HKD

References

Brown, B. (2011). Conscious leadership for sustainability: How leaders with a late-stage action logic design and engage in sustainability initiatives. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Dissertations and Theses database. (UMI No. 3498378)

Cook-Greuter, S. (2000). Mature ego development: A gateway to ego transcendence? Journal of Adult Development, 7(4), 227-240.

O’Fallon, T. (2013, July). The senses: Demystifying awakening. Presented at the 2013 Integral Theory Conference, San Francisco, CA. Available at https://metaintegral.org/sites/default/files/O’Fallon_ITC2013.pdf

Rooke, D., & Torbert, W. (2005, April). Seven transformations of leadership. Harvard Business Review, 83 (4), 67 – 76. Downloadable at https://hbr.org/2005/04/seven-transformations-of-leadership

Development Dimensions International & The Conference Board (2014). Ready-now leaders: Meeting tomorrow’s business challenges. Global leadership forecast 2014|2015. Retrieved at http://www.ddiworld.com /DDI/media/trend-research/global-leadership-forecast-2014-2015_tr_ddi.pdf?ext=.pdf

Gitsham, M. (2009). Developing the global leader of tomorrow. Ashridge and EABIS report. Available at http://www.ashridge.com/Website/IC.nsf /wFARPUB/Developing+the+Global+Leader+of+Tomorrow+Report+-+2009?opendocument

IBM Corporation (2010). Working beyond borders: Insights from the global chief human resource officer study. Available at http://www-935.ibm.com /services/c-suite/chro/study/

Leslie, B. (2009). The leadership gap: What you need and don’t have when it comes to leadership talent. Center For Creative Leadership. Available at http://www.ccl.org/leadership/pdf/research/leadershipGap.pdf