A New Decade, A New Way Of Leading Begins

5 trends in leadership development to know as 2020 gets underway

As we begin a new year – and kick off a new decade – a radically different work environment is emerging that leaders will need to adapt to. New technologies continue to shift how work is done, and employees themselves are changing as well. This decade, workers will increasingly be seeking out new resources to expand and improve upon their existing skills. As such, it is up to learning leaders to align with the new ways of learning and working, and ensure that their employees are set up to succeed. 

This year, leaders across the organization should consider how to further upskill their employees to prepare them for the future of work. In a 2019 study by PwC, 80% of the executives surveyed saw key skills shortages as the biggest threat to their business. Companies will heavily invest in this area in the next decade. Amazon, for example, recently announced that it will invest $700 million to provide “upskilling training” for one-third of its workforce over the next six years alone. 
 

Digital fluency is particularly important as technology becomes more entrenched in the workplace. Employees must develop a working knowledge of the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy and the mindset and skills required for success, no matter what their industry. Leaders can help their employees become digitally fluent by implementing a “digital fitness” strategy that equips employees with a broad base of knowledge across a variety of domains- such as data, analytics, AI, automation and blockchain- that will be critical for conducting business in 2020. 

Good leaders understand that core leadership skills are vital, enduring skills for all employees. Core leadership skills like self-management skills, interpersonal skills, communication skills and engagement skills will remain as important as ever before. Self-management skills help an employee develop a personal leadership vision while interpersonal skills help build people’s trust, resolve conflict, and gather honest feedback. Communication skills allow an employee to speak and write persuasively and engagement skills help them bring different groups together and inspire them. By developing these skills, leaders create the conditions needed for others to succeed, while providing them with the motivation and means to reach it.

The future of work is becoming more autonomous – with less structure and supervision – and employees will need to feel engaged more than ever. Research also tells us that companies with highly engaged employees report higher productivity and job satisfaction and dramatically lower turnover than other organizations. Given leaders depend on their teams to meet and exceed organizational goals, it’s paramount for leaders to broaden and deepen how they engage, inspire and motivate their employees towards making the organization's vision a reality.

In 2020 and beyond, employees will increasingly want to bring their “whole self” to work and use their unique differences and strengths to propel the company forward. They also want to connect to something bigger than themselves, and increasingly want their organizations to have a social purpose with an action plan. It’s important for leaders to listen to these changing employee expectations and work towards engaging their employees to share their enthusiasm, energy and knowledge and creativity in a way that will not only increase employee satisfaction and retention, but create the optimal environment for achieving company goals.

The ability for employees to bring their whole selves to work means moving from diversity to true inclusion. The best leaders look to engage people from different backgrounds, perspectives, interests, and values to produce optimal results. They raise awareness in themselves and others of barriers – such as unconscious biases – that prevent people from fully contributing to the company’s efforts. These leaders also create a culture that recognizes the strength in diversity and encourages cross-group and cross-cultural understanding in addition to actively seeking out varied perspectives and points of view and bringing creative thinking to problem solving and decision making. By fostering awareness of differences and encouraging interaction across diverse groups of employees, leaders help ensure that biases don’t unduly influence decisions and behaviors. 

Additionally, a focus on diversity and inclusion helps deliver key outcomes such as improved decision making and higher levels of creativity across an organization. In turn, these efforts reap big rewards and help a company’s bottom line as companies with greater ethnic and racial diversity in management are 35% more likely to have returns above the industry mean. 

As the world becomes “smaller,” collaboration rises in importance. While global collaboration has become more common, most managers are still not prepared to work with people who are very different from themselves. Such challenges include cultural misunderstanding, lack of trust, team alignment and physical distance. To mitigate these challenges, L&D should help employees build cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence is the ability to assess the ways people in one country commonly interact, determine how the ways in which people from a specific country interact differ from the behaviors of their own country and successfully manage an unsettling or unfamiliar situation encountered in a foreign country. Employees can cultivate their cultural intelligence in a number of different ways including learning through observation and adopting new behaviors. By understanding the different customs and behaviors of other countries and cultures, employees can more easily predict how others might behave and work harder to accommodate them.

These five trends in leadership development require big mindset shifts by leaders who might not already be preparing for this faster, more inclusive and engagement-centric future. Learning and development teams have the opportunity to help prepare both their leaders and employees for this very different world. L&D professionals have the opportunity to prepare their leaders and their workforce for the future by both creating an agile learning culture and putting the learner at the center of the learning experience:

To capitalize on emerging opportunities and tackle unexpected challenges, leaders and employees across the organization need to be voracious, agile learners. To make that a reality, it’s up to learning leaders to help build and shape a culture of continuous learning to make it second nature for employees to adapt to uncertain situations by quickly learning about a new skill, trend or behavior by using their experiences of the past, as well as the present. With the potential for an economic downturn and the possibility of continued layoffs in industries like retail and media, continuous learning is a must for remaining competitive and providing ongoing value for a company.

Without a concerted effort to continually refresh and renew skills, employees run the risk of falling behind. Learning leaders can help employees adopt an agile learning mindset by building learning opportunities into daily job activities or providing formal development opportunities for learners so that they can gain the experiences that will help them in unfamiliar situations.

Building that culture of continuous learning requires finding the elements that make it work for everyone. And that requires putting learners at the center of the learning experience. That’s a bit of a mindset shift for learning leaders, but in a future that revolves around engagement, inclusion, and continuous learning, learning experiences simply must fit with learner expectations. The key to doing so is understanding how employees learn and what drives them. In our research, we’ve uncovered that today’s employees are learning all the time, every day, and they’re doing so on their own more than they are accessing their company’s learning portals. We also know they value relevance and guidance above all else, and that makes sense when you consider they can get tailored recommendations from Netflix or Amazon at a moment’s notice. 

They expect the same from their learning opportunities, so learning leaders need to focus on building flexible and adaptable experiences tailored to a learner’s specific needs. Learning pathways are one way to make that happen: With learning pathways, organizations can create very targeted learning experiences for specific roles, levels, competencies, or strategic priorities. From short, laser-focused lessons, to deeper dives into a topic, learning pathways are one way to help employees access content when and where they need to so that they can learn at their own time and pace. 

While the workforce might not immediately be radically different in 2020, the learning landscape will continue to see constant disruption. To make sure employees are well equipped to succeed in the workplace of the future, L&D must have an action plan in place to weather the impact of these trends and ready them for the year ahead. 

Larry Clark is managing director of global learning solutions at Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning. He leads the team of learning solutions managers around the globe who partner with clients to design and develop learning experiences unique to each organization’s needs. His background includes more than 25 years of experience in learning design. Previously he served as vice president of Comcast University’s Talent & Professional Development College, where he oversaw all leadership, high-potential and executive development, as well as learning and development for all enterprise functions across the organization. Prior to joining Comcast, Larry spent 12 years in a learning role with Microsoft, and began his career in the learning and talent profession working as a learning and management consultant for companies including Learning International and Zenger Miller. Connect Larry Clark Follow @HBPCorpLearning