As the dog days of summer hit and we attempt to have meaningful vacation time, it is normal to focus on accomplishing our goals and completing projects. Amid all our busyness, who has time to think about the future of leadership?
The future of leadership is not a distant concept; it’s actually unfolding today. What will the world be like in five, ten, or twenty years? It’s hard to predict, and if you are not investing in learning how the changes will affect you, the chances of it affecting you negatively are pretty good. I recommend reading 9 Trends That Will Shape Work in 2024 and Beyond – Harvard Business Review, 1/23/2024.
Let’s start with the biggest disruptor in our future – how AI will affect your business, team, and how you lead. It will seemingly affect everything. This quote from the referenced HBR article stood out for me:
- “Gartner predicts that GenAI will play a role in 70% of text- and data-heavy tasks by 2025, up from less than 10% in 2023”.
As generative AI is set to dramatically impact technical work, I believe the importance of people skills will soar. Fostering higher productivity and cultivating high-performing cultures will be crucial. Almost every organization struggles with creating effective communication today. In the future, excellence in communication will become even more vital; it will only grow in importance as we integrate more technical functions with AI.
Along those same lines, another factor that undermines teams today is conflict. The intensity of business is rapidly increasing, creating more opportunities for conflict. Leaders with poor conflict-resolution skills will not be successful. The Thomas-Kilmann company created the TKI assessment which helps leaders identify their preferred conflict modes. The model shows that the Avoiding mode is low in empathy & low assertive. It is the worst of all five conflict resolution modes. Collaboration is considered high in empathy & highly assertive. Leaders today, and even more so in the future, will need to be excellent at resolving conflict through collaboration.
Forbes published an article last year titled: “The 10 Biggest Business Trends for 2024 Everyone Must Be Ready for Now”. The authors suggested that organizations will increase their investment in “emotional intelligence, communication, interpersonal problem solving, high-level strategy, and thought leadership.” I believe they are correct. There will be a more significant investment and a major shift in how we help leaders develop these skills. We will see less classroom training, more on-the-job training, and unique forms of action learning. In ten years, we will see soft-skill role-play training through virtual reality.
Leaders will need to become proficient at behavior change. It will be important that leaders adapt rapidly in an agile fashion to everything that happens around them. Change will be even more rapid than it is today, and a leader’s ability to adapt will be critical. Disruptive innovation and shifting market forces will become the norm. Therefore, the best leaders will demonstrate resiliency. They will inspire and motivate their team members to constantly change and adapt their behaviors.
No one seems to doubt that the business landscape will continue to change. Some authors suggest that the future leader will “need to possess a new arsenal of skills and mindsets to lead effectively. This is because our businesses will look and operate fundamentally differently in ten years, which means we need a new type of leader at the helm of these organizations” (Benjamin Laker – Forbes)
I understand the sentiment of this statement, but I tend to disagree. Many aspects of leadership will not change but will just become more critical.
For instance, leading with one foot on today’s operating priorities and one foot on the future is essential. Scenario planning is becoming a required skill for CEOs. In the future, leaders will need to be as effective in this as their strategic planning team. Having a strong strategic perspective through strategic analysis and decision-making will be even more critical than it is today. In many ways, a leader will have to be a futurist.
Additionally, the ability to create a vision for the organization will not diminish in importance but increase as the world changes. In the future, a company’s vision may need to be adapted more regularly than it has been in the past. Enrolling and engaging large groups of people in this vision is a critical skill. Influence is vital today and will remain essential to an organization’s success in the future. Leading people to do more collaboration and teamwork that leads to innovation will be vital.
Ultimately, an organization can falter if it does not execute its strategy better than its competitors. Even though it is not very sexy, the value of leading execution will not diminish. Any leader who is not the CEO of their organization needs to be excellent at driving execution through their organization. Execution includes key leadership competencies and mindsets such as Driving for Results, Continuous Improvement, and Establishing Stretch Goals.
Lastly, the leadership competency of championing change cannot be left off the list for future leaders. Many articles and books have been written about organizations’ struggles in successfully implementing significant changes. The failure rate for ERP system implementations, for instance, is staggering.
What we know about leadership today will be relevant to how we lead in the future. Many of the most essential skills and abilities we know about today will be helpful in the future. However, many of those skills must be developed to a higher level.