It is time. It is time for courageous, ethical, human, compassionate, inclusive AND results driven leadership. The world can no longer get ahead and improve with what we have. Things are too complex, too uncertain and has changed too much to ever go back or stay where we are.
People need hope, they need development, they need encouragement, they need their ideas included and listened to, they need to feel they matter and they belong.
But where do we start on this challenge? For the last 6 years I have been researching leadership in the future of work context and developing leaders in practice. I have learnt that there a few key mindsets and practices required for leaders and leadership to be effective and new ways of leadership development to achieve scale and impact.
First, we have to change our definition of leadership. For me leadership is a set of mindsets and practices, not traits and competencies. This is my definition:
Leadership in the new world of work treats organisations as complex adaptive systems made up of humans. Leaders intentionally shares power, co- creates, integrates and collaborates with others to ensure the organization can respond to adaptive and emergent challenges in an agile way.
They continuously develop and transform their own and others’ abilities, using diversity, curiosity and design thinking as a leverage, in order to make sense of, adapt to and innovate strategically in ambiguous and fast changing contexts.
They use ethical reasoning to ensure consistency in values and ethics, and they use judgment and perspective to gain insight and make sense of events.
They build sustain theirs and others’ resilience and energy through emotional, cognitive and change agility.
Second, we have to update how we develop leadership in our organisations. Here are my 7 principles:
- Design – the design of any leadership approach has to be co-created with participants using human centred design and aligned to the context, strategy and culture of the organisation. Real organisational challenges need to be embedded in the design.
- Participants – leadership development has to be eco systemic and with flatter and empowered structures be delivered to all leaders at all levels. These leaders need to be assessed in terms of their readiness, commitment and learning trajectories on the adult development scales and their learning adjusted accordingly.
- Method – to deliver ongoing learning journeys for increasingly mobile and virtual leaders, digital and omni-learning approaches need to be used.
- Learning – learning needs to address all moments of learning moving the learner from learning to performance.
- Content - learning needs to move away from competency based approaches and focus on deeper work to address mindset, character and values development as well the need for behavioural and competencies for the new world of work. Leadership development has to address the human-machine collaboration challenge that requires stronger human approaches and skills. Leaders need to be given experiences and be given the opportunity to immerse themselves in experiments.
- Facilitators need to be selected that understand the new way of learning and how to use technology. They need to be versed in transformative, dialogic , critical and connectivist methodologies.
- Results and learning needs to be tracked in real time and adjustments made to individual journeys as well as to programs to ensure ongoing improvement and impact.
Are your definitions of leadership and your leadership development practices producing the leadership we need for a complex, uncertain world?
