Five Leadership Capabilities Driving Business Success

Tips to overcome challenges and thrive in the future of work

Today’s business environment has gone through radical change over the last few years. While the onset of the digital economy has contributed to more efficient organizations, it has also brought its share of challenging uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity. Digital transformation has dramatically altered the way global organizations manage employees requiring leaders to forge a new path forward. With five generations now in the workforce, paired with advancing technology and a looming talent gap, organizations must ensure their leaders have the right capabilities to overcome these challenges and thrive in the future of work. In this article, we’ll highlight five key capabilities leaders must adopt to drive success in the new business landscape.

AI has the potential to disrupt 70 percent of routine tasks in office administration and production according to a report from the Metropolitan Policy Program. As a priority, today’s companies must embrace digital transformation and the immense benefits it offers – from creating a more productive workforce to increasing bottom lines. As a result, leaders in all functions should be digitally fluent with data analytics, AI and the possibilities of blockchain. What’s more, they must ensure their workforce has a basic understanding of emerging technologies to create greater value for both the business and customers. 

But it’s more than just being comfortable with technology. Leaders should also be able to pinpoint the opportunities new technologies can present to an organization. L&D helps leaders learn to ask important questions like: What digital technologies are emerging that I should investigate? How can we use technology to create value for my organization? Which leadership skills do I need to implement and develop in my team as a result? 

Digitally fluent leaders can sense and guide how new technologies may impact daily workflows. As such, it’s also imperative that leaders collaborate with others to explore how business strategy can evolve or be reinvented with digital technology. With data at hand, leaders can lean on data insights and analytics to make more strategic decisions.

Effective leaders understand that strategy is evolving, and therefore, they must be agile as expectations and demands change. The test-and-learn process continually revises hypotheses as conditions change, helping leaders gain from emerging opportunities and prepare for unexpected challenges. In fact, leaders at every level should be involved with shaping strategy, not just executing it. It’s essential that senior leaders seek insight from a wide variety of experiences and views of the market, as well as competitors and customers to build a cohesive and robust strategy.

To act more strategically, L&D programs have to teach leaders how to treat strategy formulation as a constant and agile process. An effective strategy is informed when leaders monitor market trends and can quickly navigate any challenges posed. 

Leaders today operate in an increasingly complex environment and have to ensure that the strategy is being effectively executed across the organization to drive growth. In this environment, leaders are often required to make decisions in which desired goals seem mutually exclusive. For example, today’s leaders are asked to help their organization achieve efficiency around the globe, while simultaneously enabling responsiveness in the local markets in which they do business. Similarly, leaders are accountable for generating profits for their individual units quarterly while also sustaining the growth of the business for the long term.

L&D plays a key role in ensuring that leaders can navigate the complexity of these situations. L&D can help leaders learn to seek both/and solutions—not simply either/or answers. In this process, leaders learn how to weigh the implications of the solutions they’re considering—including how to manage the inevitable trade-offs. Smart decision making will help leaders learn to successfully navigate complexity in today’s business landscape. 

Leaders are able to steer in complex environments by encouraging and modelling innovation: creating time and space for curiosity, creativity, and respectful risk taking. In the workplace, innovation is pervasive and can come from anywhere – whether it be incremental changes to boost product or service delivery, new ways to perform work or business processes, or radical business models that replace outdated ones. Leaders craft a competitive edge by fostering innovation.

L&D can help leaders build a culture that supports and thrives with innovation. As risk-taking will be involved, leaders need to encourage and enable curiosity among employees, allowing them to explore their creativity. This can also mean removing the fear of failure from the equation, so employees can bring new, fresh ideas to the table as they explore new opportunities without worry. Leaders should encourage active collaboration not only among employees, but with customers, suppliers, and partners to test and refine their various ideas. When leaders embrace diverse perspectives, the organization flourishes.

Leaders who value differences within the organization understand the significant results diversity and inclusion can deliver. Diversity and inclusion are not simply boxes to check off within a compliance program – they are key components of an effective business strategy – one that can overcome business challenges and engage employees. Focused leadership development programs can encourage senior leaders to foster interaction across diverse groups to enhance cross-cultural understanding, fueling creativity across the organization. With transparency across the workplace, leaders can pinpoint shortcomings and immediately address them. Leaders who value differences are aware of unconscious biases that may prevent employees from contributing their best practices to the organization. Organizational diversity creates multiple perspectives and in turn, leads to exceptional results. A holistic approach to diversity also boosts creativity, innovation, and decision making quality.

Today, more than ever, those that run businesses and supervise employees need help to aptly navigate a fast-changing playing field, and L&D plays an essential role in their leadership development. By mastering key capabilities, leaders are able to mitigate the challenges of leading businesses in today’s digital era while preparing to overcome the obstacles of tomorrow.