What does it take to earn a near-perfect approval from your people? What about having an astounding 94% of employees say they would recommend working for you to a friend? It takes true leadership and putting principles into action. Making them your walk and your talk, not just lip service or words on a poster.
If you’ve ever played a sport or even watched a great team play, you know the importance of a good coach. Without a coach, even the most skilled players likely won’t reach their full potential. It takes someone with the vision to put the best team together, move people to the right positions, and train and encourage players to be their best to win championships. I interviewed more than 140 top CEOs for my new book, The Future Leader, and asked what skills they thought would be important for leaders in the next decade. Many of their most common responses fall under the skill of the coach, or translating those sports analogies to the business world.
As with anything in the business world, things evolve and change. The evolution that we are seeing today continues to shift organizational priorities more and more toward focusing on people and bringing humanity and experiences into our organizations. This is an immensely exciting thing to see! Years ago with the advent of what many would consider modern business, focusing on utility made sense. At the time, it was just common practice, and pretty much every organization took the same approach. Then, this shifted toward productivity, getting the most out of people.
If you only had a few minutes to share a message with people, what would it be? How would you make sure it stood out and was memorable? That’s a question that future leaders will need to ask themselves as they communicate with their employees amid their busy schedules and other obligations, especially as their organizations grow. It’s also part of the reason why communication is such a vital skill for future leaders.
Most of us have had our lives disrupted by the current pandemic in some way. We have had to find new ways to connect with friends and family, we aren’t traveling as much (or at all), and we’re having to adapt to new ways of working and learning. It might feel like you have little to no control over what is happening, but as Whitney shares, “if we’re going to manage the disruption, we need to disrupt ourselves”.
Business will never be the same as a result of COVID-19. We are all being forced to challenge our conventional ideas around work. I’ve written a few articles about this looking at the evolution of work, the evolution of leaders, and the evolution of employees. In this article I specifically want to look at how organizations are evolving.
The world was changing quickly BEFORE COVID-19 and now as a result of the pandemic, organizations are changing faster in the last few months than they in the past few decades. We are having to rethink the technologies we use to work, how we design workspaces, where employees work, how we lead, and even what “work” means in general.
Whenever we have issues with technology whether it be a device, an app, or a piece of software, who do we usually turn to for help? Our kids (especially teenagers!). Teens oftentimes don’t know the inner workings of a piece of software, they can build a new device for you from scratch…yet somehow they just know how to figure technology out without having to be professional developers.
The current COVID-19 epidemic we are all experiencing is forcing organizations around the world to challenge their conventional ideas around work. In this article I specifically want to take a look at how the “leader” is evolving.
Leaders of the future must be translators which means that they are great listeners and communicators.
Unfortunately, this is a skill that leaders today are surprisingly doing a terrible job of practicing. I partnered with Linkedin to survey nearly 14,000 employees around the world and only 8% of employees reported that their mid and senior-level leaders are practicing this skill “very well.” Clearly there is lots of room for improvement!