The Future of Leadership

As Michelle Bostian, the head of our counseling department, and I have been preparing to teach a leadership class with 12 of our employees, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on new trends in leadership. One article that I found particularly engaging is a white paper on the future of leadership produced by the Center for Creative Leadership or CCL.

Appropriately, the article is titled, The Changing Nature of Leadership, and it points to the leadership needed in what has become known as the newly emerging VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world in which we are living. The challenges leaders face are more complex than ever, and there are many reasons for this, not the least of which is information overload, which leads to viewpoints often supported by questionable information, and social disruptions which are changing long held opinions about the role of women in the work force, and new ways of working such as the use of technology, ranging from software to robots, and the use of artificial intelligence in decision making.

With so much more complexity, CCL reports that the challenges leaders are facing go beyond their individual skills and that today’s leaders are finding that they are relying much more frequently on interdependent work across boundaries along with a greater reliance on teamwork and collaboration.

The White Paper points out that leaders of the future will need to focus more on participative management, building and mending relationships and managing change in a more volatile and ambiguous environment. It also emphasizes that the concept of leadership is moving from being regarded as a defined position to a more collective concept that is developed throughout the organization through interdependent decision making.

Bottom line results will continue to be critical in any leader’s work, but the days of the heroic leader who steps into the room and takes over are numbered. The job of today’s leader is to create space for others where a sense of safety permeates the culture and people can generate new and novel ideas; where seemingly different departments and people can come together to share their thoughts; a place where people can feel that they can affect outcomes, be more productive and accomplish more than they could alone. Leaders in the new organizational cultures will be more effective and employees more satisfied as decisions and innovation are achieved through teamwork and collaboration.

In order to be more effective, leaders will need to learn how to develop teams, teach the skills of collaboration, value employees, and create safe environments where ideas and innovation can flourish. The days of work just for pay, firm hierarchies and factory line thinking are over. For leaders and their organizations to be successful today and into the future, they must embrace the talents of people across their divisions and adopt new skills and innovative ways of thinking and leading.