Key Leadership Trends 2022

Leaders & top leadership experts share their thoughts

Today, more than ever, organizations need competent leaders. When the pandemic-led disruptions changed the world of work, leaders had to navigate uncharted waters to survive and thrive. And now with new challenges emerging, leaders should be ready to work under more pressure with resilience and adaptive skills as their hallmarks. As we enter a new year with a long list of lessons learned, HR.com reached out to leaders and top leadership experts to find out what they believe are the key leadership trends for 2022, and what leaders can do to prepare for the changes ahead.

Leading with Intention: Leadership in the workplace has often been organic or even accidental. You would encounter people in the office in meetings or in casual interactions and those conversations would often give you the opportunity to lead that person. Now, in a hybrid work environment, those organic and accidental interactions will be fewer and less frequent. In 2022, leaders who bring intention to their interactions with employees will achieve higher levels of success in a hybrid work environment. They understand the need to plan ahead, have a strategy for leadership, and then execute that plan instead of 'just letting it happen.'  There are a lot of managers and leaders that excelled when everyone was in the office. But are they prepared and equipped to lead a remote and distributed team? Without intentional effort, it will be very hard to do. Those who lead with intention will realize the most success.



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Clear & Concise Communication: The most important leadership trend in 2022 is being a clear, concise communicator. McCormack’s Brief Lab found that most people don’t have long attention spans when the communicator doesn’t quickly get to the point: (1) They spend just 30 seconds reading an email; (2) They tune out after 15 seconds when colleagues are speaking; (3) They stop listening to presentations in a minute or less. Since people don’t have long attention spans, brevity ensures they hear the full message. In all your communications, strive to be concise. Focus on what’s most important and leave out extraneous details. Make sure your message is crisp, brief, and poignant.



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A New Form of Business Control: What do Wells Fargo, VW, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, 1MDB, and hundreds of other organizations have in common? They experienced major losses due to a lack of proper business controls. Yet they had all the traditional controls in place—leadership, policies, audits, government compliance, and so on. And it’s not just enterprises. The US Chamber of Commerce estimates that one-third of all business failures are due to employee theft. In this era of low employee loyalty and shifting ethical attitudes, leaders must implement a new level of business control over and above the traditional controls that are proven to not work.



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Leading the Human-Empowered, Tech-Enabled Workforce. In 1946, Albert Einstein warned the world: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” The situation has since worsened with the rapid expansion of automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Thus, in 2022, forward-leaning leaders are working to correct the imbalance by aligning the best attributes of humanity and technology. They are exploring new methods to integrate the uniquely human abilities of their employees (e.g., creativity, collaboration, communication, and compassion) with the capabilities of advanced technologies (e.g., data collection, integration, analysis, and forecasting). They are striving to empower, not replace, their workforces.



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A Global Mindset: Setting a global mindset for businesses right out of the gate will be one of the top leadership trends for 2022. With remote work now being the new normal, the concept of “thinking big” will reach limitless status. In the new year, every leader will need to enter the business arena with the mind frame that opportunities and top talent are no longer limited to their local borders. Having a global mindset helps to build a strong foundation that allows people to build great things together and speed up innovation, from wherever they are.



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The “S” in ESG stands for Stakeholder – not Social: The last two years have been a wake-up call as we have braved the twin crises of a global pandemic and climate change. 2022's leaders must recognize that organizational success – high levels of productivity, well-functioning supply chains, human health and safety – is dependent on an interconnected network of social, political, economic and cultural systems. Leaders have a responsibility to support employees, customers and communities – and must understand that ‘stakeholder’ also includes a whole intricate system of suppliers, partners, distributors and government entities working tirelessly to ensure that company success is distributed widely and felt meaningfully.



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HR Departments Investing in Leadership Development: In 2022, we’ll see HR departments investing in leadership development in an unprecedented fashion, offering ongoing people-skills development like improving emotional intelligence and effective team building. Previously, these trainings were only offered to senior leaders, but companies are investing more and more into frontline manager development, in the flow of their work, to impact teamwork and to generate higher levels of performance, particularly in a remote/hybrid world. These trainings are being coupled with another growing trend for HR: employing continuous talent management software. Platforms that provide tools like goal tracking, weekly check-ins, and engagement surveys, will be integrating with coaching and development. As managers learn to provide more effective feedback, manage for results, and empower teams in psychologically safe environments, they will gain a serious competitive edge over their rivals. 



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Servant Leadership, an Unrealized Ideal. 2022 will be the year that servant leadership goes from a pipe dream to an applied reality. Now that everything else has changed, we will rethink leadership competencies. We will finally let go of traditional command-and-control management and animal-based motivation theories to embrace Robert Greenleaf's definition of the servant-first leader who focuses on satisfying people's highest priority needs. Leaders will discover that servant leaders achieve results by promoting optimal motivation and flourishing through three competencies that support the basic psychological needs required for people to thrive: encouraging choice, deepening connection, and building competence.



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Adapt, Make Mistakes, Learn Quickly: Leaders will be less knowledgeable, in the best way possible. The employee market has seen immense change in recent times, and leaders will need to operate under a beginner’s mindset. They will ask questions more frequently and trial run various solutions to learn how to best approach a scenario. Leaders will rely on their agility and adaptability more than ever in the fast-shifting environment. They’ll be more willing to adapt and make mistakes, as it provides them the opportunity to learn quickly and equip themselves with the maximum chance for success.



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Adopting a ‘Growth and Change’ Mindset. 2021 was a year of great change in the workplace, and taught leaders important lessons on how to keep employees happy and business booming. The top trend I foresee in 2022 is ensuring that leadership is committed to adopting a ‘growth and change’ mindset. This will guarantee leaders are leveraging disruptions and preparing teams to meet unforeseen challenges. It can be easy to become overwhelmed by the unexpected changes, but it’s important that leaders develop their teams to anticipate these new hurdles, embrace change and keep business growing.

 
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We’re Entering the Age of The Great Appreciation. This means that leaders who recognize the true stars of their organization and all their hard-working team members end up being successful in the years to come. Showing that effort is appreciated day in and day out will be the key to helping people thrive, keeping great talent on the team, and building amazing things!
 


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Leading Through Deeper Human Connection: Leaders at every level of the organization are struggling to meet personal and professional demands in an increasingly volatile and complex environment. The most successful organizations will recognize the inextricable link between wellbeing and human performance and take a more holistic (whole person, whole life) approach to create more adaptive and resilient individuals and teams. This requires leaders at the top to demonstrate greater levels of empathy for the challenges their teams are facing, vulnerability about their own challenges, and adoption of new behaviors, training, and policies that activate a caring culture that focuses on what matters most to human beings.
 


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4 Trends Take the Lead in Businesses of All Sizes: The global pandemic was the catalyst that changed everything in business and our personal lives. These changes have come at warped speed for business leaders, and these trends will continue into 2022 and beyond. The following four trends are taking the lead in businesses of all sizes: 1. Social issues are influencing local and international relationships. 2. Developing an artificial intelligence capability to streamline operational work while redefining and training staff for more complex global program and project work. 3. The new expectations to deliver results faster. 4. Developing leadership skills to create an agile culture and a diverse, high-performing team.
 


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New Challenges Represent the New Normal or Not? In 2022, leaders will need to ascertain whether new challenges represent the new normal or a momentary departure from what is normal. They should also ask: 1. Do my people know that I care about their wellbeing, and how can I be the best boss they have ever had? 2. How should I adapt to lead teams who may have never met each other in person? 3. How do we need to broaden and diversify our talent pools as resignations and the war for talent intensify? 4. How do we manage succession planning while improving the diversity of our leaders? 5. Should we be an industry leader or a fast follower in ESG, and how do we avoid getting caught in the middle?



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Realign Missions Toward Value Generation: Transformation has been a big part of both adapting to the economic changes of the pandemic and leveraging those changes for organizational growth. Those companies targeting budgetary or cost savings as the focus of these efforts will have missed a great opportunity to realign their missions toward value generation – which I believe is the only sustainable strategic advantage for these volatile times.



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The Successor’s Leadership Playbook 

Succession planning and career mobility are even more significant needs now than they were pre-Covid. There is no doubt that in 2022, we will see greater efforts towards training and developing the leadership bench for the future... and those successors will need a Leadership Playbook. Upskilling on a competency is a necessity, but it does half the job. For sustained behavior adoption, leaders will need to anchor their upskilling into their daily leadership practices. Your leaders will need to build SOPs (standard operating procedures) for how they are going to fit that newly learned skill within their current structure and system and how are they going to operationalize it on a consistent basis. Engaging a bench of potential successors into this practice and having them share from their personal leadership playbook will create consistency in leadership practice critical for 2022. 



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