5 Major Trends Shaping The Future Of Leadership

Leadership in service to people

Much has changed over the last two years that will impact how people lead and engage teams, how work gets done, and how people stay connected. It’s not just the Covid-19 pandemic that changed everything, we also have a more globally connected economy, where supply chain shortages can impact an entire industry, five generations in a workforce that is more diverse than ever, and societal issues such as racial and gender inequality that have to be addressed. As a leader in large global companies for 20 years, now coaching and working in small businesses, I’ve seen first-hand how some of these changes are occurring and how innovative leaders are navigating it.  

The five major leadership trends I’ve seen, center around how to focus, align, and execute work in a business environment that doesn’t have the same in-office touchpoints that we previously had along with an expectation from employees to contribute to something meaningful.

Career Paths Focused on Impact

For most of my career, I followed a more traditional career path of developing a functional skill and working my way up a career ladder. What I see now is, people working to build skills around a passion and then find ways to contribute to a cause meaningful to them. As leaders, we need to get to know our people and encourage them to pursue their passions, whether directly in support of their current job, broadening their knowledge in a different part of the business, or serving in the local community. We help people grow their careers by growing their impact.

New Ways to Collaborate

Part of our role as leaders is to bring people together to make decisions, solve problems, and coordinate work across different teams. Although this has been slowly changing over the last decade from face-to-face conference rooms to incorporating video and digital collaboration tools, there’s been a steep change recently that we won’t return from. I’m working with three different companies now, all in different sizes and industries. They are all finding new ways to collaborate and innovate with digital tools such as collaboration threads on Slack or Microsoft teams, project management on Asana, or virtual white boarding with Vibe. Although they are getting much better, the tools are not new. 
 

What’s changing is how, we as leaders, use them to engage with people virtually around the world with a more empathetic approach. We pause to listen, spend time asking thoughtful questions to better understand perspectives, and get creative with activities to find ways to relate to one another. This doesn’t replace the face-to-face connections that we need at times, but it does open the door for us to effectively engage in ways that provide much more flexibility in the workforce that will remain.

Guide with Purpose with Customer Insights

The purpose of a business is to serve customers. With digital platforms, access to global markets, and restrictions on travel, we’ve had to create innovative methods for staying connected with our customers and keeping up with their changing needs. Like many leaders, I used to develop a vision statement to align teams towards a north star that incorporated what we do as a business to serve customers. A vision provides a destination but that’s no longer enough, people also want to know why. The why comes out in a purpose statement centered on your customers. It’s the problem you solve for them, the reason why they buy from you. The best way to bring your purpose statement to life is through real customer narratives that you’re continuously updating to keep current. If you don’t have the same level of engagement with customers or lose the direct insights through a digital interface, you risk being disconnected from their true needs.  

To address that, you can leverage the data you have around how customers interact with your business and use that information to create feedback loops that guide improvement. Whether that be a product roadmap or customer service process, you need to mine your digital connections and combine that with personal interactions to create a complete picture of how you can best serve them. As leaders look to inspire, leveraging data, keeping the customer front and center with a clear purpose, and developing customer narratives around evolving customer needs will be critical to keeping employees engaged and aligned.

Create Room for Diversity

The workforce is more diverse than ever and all of those different perspectives increase a company's ability to find innovative solutions and stay competitive. To move from diversity to inclusion, where people are bringing their best to work every day, you need an environment that allows people to be themselves and space to leverage their strengths. The most effective leaders in the future will use purpose and values as the guide, but allow flexibility in how work gets done to achieve the best solutions. You can lead by example by listening and learning from others, as they share different perspectives and new ways of thinking, and in doing so demonstrate one of the most important skills of the future, empathy.

Leaders as Generalists

Not only is today’s workforce more diverse than ever, but the problems organizations face are also more complex, cutting across global borders, intersecting rapidly changing technology, and interconnecting with important social and environmental issues. Leaders will need to bring everyone together and frame problems so they can be solved, incorporate broad stakeholder perspectives, and will need a broad understanding of issues and how work gets done. That requires learning agility to develop a basic understanding of different functional areas in addition to topics where leaders may be specialists. 

The other benefit is the ability to build trust with a broad set of constituents. Competence is foundational to trust and the ability to connect to perspectives of people from diverse backgrounds and fields will help bring people together. So, perhaps the most important skills of future leaders will be the ability to continuously learn and the humility to realize that there’s something they can learn from everyone.

Eric Strafel is the author of THE FRONTLINE CEO and Founder of the consulting firm SUMMi7, which helps businesses grow profits and scale innovation with mission-driven purpose. He was the President and CEO of Aviall, a global provider of new aviation parts, supply chain management, and other services to the aerospace aftermarket, which was acquired by Boeing. Previously, he held leadership and program management positions at L3 Communications, Honeywell, and Precision Conversions. Visit https://summi7.com/ Connect Eric Strafel