I was recently approached as a woman in leadership for my thoughts on what the future of leadership looks like. I wanted to share what I said and would love to hear your opinions too.
With the pace of work, rarely do we have the chance to do things differently, or even to implement changes and insights from new learnings. Deadlines are tight, there often isn’t time to adjust how a whole team works and ‘failing fast’ is often something people say, rather than being something people actually want to do. However, our collective experience of working during the pandemic gave us time to adjust and it forced us years into the future – overnight we became the future of work!
We were handed a gift during the pandemic. We were all able to work in a way which many think is how we will work in the future – remotely, working anywhere at any time, highly collaboratively and focused on problem solving rather than just more of the same. Our gift was being able to experience the future of work ahead of when we should have, almost as if it was a beta test, from which we could take the learnings to help us enrich our future of work having already experienced that future – ah the benefits of hindsight.
And it gave leaders the biggest gift, to collectively experience what it takes to be a successful leader in the future and from there to define the future of leadership. I believe we need to lean into encouraging problem solving, celebrating empathy and promoting optimistic solutions.
Where once leaders could look over a divider, or walk into a kitchen to find a team member, during the pandemic they had to track them down on Slack, WhatsApp, schedule a meeting at… crikey knows what time because diaries were so slammed. Leaders had to change quickly, and it was a very bumpy ride for a lot of us as we struggled to balance empowering teams and trusting that they weren’t sitting on the sofa watching a soap opera during working hours. But many leaders thrived and realised the opportunities open to them and their teams to work differently, to work better.
Firstly it demonstrated that hiring is more than important, it’s a binary foundation to growing your success, or eroding it.
In many teams, there are people whose roles are repetitive – keeping-the-lights-on – with some call to support value-add projects in the short term. But how can we now dive deeper into discovering an individual’s natural talent, beyond the skills they have acquired in their career?
We need to create spaces for these individuals to learn, environments where they can challenge what’s gone before or become routine, and ultimately understand more about the person, not their job description.
Putting myself into my team’s shoes was one thing, but it was more important that I didn’t presume my experience was also theirs; that I didn’t presume that they were coping well and that they would speak up if they weren’t.
Empathy has also been instrumental for me in problem solving. It’s driven me to ask questions that give me a broader, more contextual, understanding of the issue, and helped me realise, faster, what the solution really needs to be.
I firmly believe that problem solving is a critical skill for future leaders, requiring them to be both detail-oriented, with an ability to also look at the data – and see a much broader picture. As leaders, we need to step back from being ‘helpful’ and making ourselves feel good by solving problems for people and instead ask the right questions of our team to help them identify the best outcome.
Add a touch of optimism to the mix and we have the perfect blend. For me, optimism alongside reality is critical for a future leader because our only constant in the future will be change and we must be optimistic about our ability to manage, and deal with, this.
If you’ve worked for a leader who is positive, forward-thinking and optimistic they see opportunities that can often be closed off to others. If this leader also empowers their teams by providing them with the autonomy to self-lead, the results will be delivered far more effectively. It’s certainly working out this way at Wise & Zeal.
