Part 2 of a three-part series on the challenges future leaders face and the skills needed to meet them
Are you feeling tired? You are not alone. We have endured blurry crises and other disruptions, including the shift to and return to remote work, supply chain crises, wars abroad, social turmoil at home, and inflation everywhere.
To better understand how these events are reshaping work, GoForwardToWork.com, Ferrazzi Greenlight’s research institute, and BetterUp, a human transformation platform, will focus on how society will continue to evolve over the next five years, and how leaders must respond. Held face-to-face and virtual roundtables. No longer industry giants, the successful bosses of the future will need next-generation social and emotional qualities such as resilience, empathy, and vulnerability to understand, connect with, and motivate their employees. will become necessary.
Volatility is emerging as a feature of the 2020s. By definition, we don’t know what more will happen in this decade, but it’s an ongoing challenge in itself. The difference between dynamic and unstable work environments is a leader’s resilience, the ability to pivot and adapt to challenges and opportunities that arise.
“Traditional organizations [are] Things haven’t changed much, so the idea of setting hierarchies, rules and processes is premised,” says Rita McGrath, who teaches strategy at Columbia Business School. “But an organization that needs to continuously evolve must be able to continually reinvent its organizational structure.”
Endless reinvention requires bottomless resilience starting at the top. In fact, BetterUp research shows that resilience is contagious. Team members with resilient leaders are 176% more resilient. They were also 78 percent less likely to want to retire, 57 percent more likely to find meaning or purpose in their work, and 52 percent less likely to feel burned out.
Identified by GoForwardToWork.com 4 characteristics of resilient teams: candor, resourcefulness, compassion, humility. practice To make the most of these characteristics, separate collaboration from face-to-face meetings; make collective resilience the responsibility of the team; It involves ensuring that certain supportive relationships are established.
Resilience is very important because of the many sacrifices that have occurred in this decade. Work-related stress adversely affects the mental health of more than 65 percent of his employees. According to BetterUp, work-related pressure negatively impacts an additional 60%. In the past, leaders often dismissed such issues as a lack of toughness, but the pandemic is forcing us to rethink the centrality of mental health to productivity and other positive outcomes. . The physical health crisis is receding, but the lesson about the importance of mental health has not yet faded. For example, he knows that for every dollar his employer spends on mental health, he gets $4 back.
Future leaders should build on these lessons. “The difference between what it means to be a great leader and what it means to be a great leader goes back to the core of who we are,” said Jen Lim, co-founder and CEO of Delivering Happiness. Bosses need to understand not only the roles of individuals, but also what motivates and fulfills them. Empathy and vulnerability are the golden keys to unlocking these insights.
“People don’t chase titles, they chase who they are,” says Pat Wadders, UKG’s Chief Human Resources Officer. “When it comes to human connections and org board connections, it only makes the network stronger.” World 50’s Emma Citrin summed up the challenge: “How do we make people feel human and how do we make leaders act human for them?”
Future leaders should apply methodically Pandemic lessons Close the gaps left by distributed work and connect team members. Ferrazzi Greenlight has studied how to elevate teams for over 20 years and has identified a set of high-return practices that help engineer connections between her members on the team. break the candor, Personal and professional check-in and collaborative problem solving.
Companies that adopted such an intervention experienced, on average, a 79 percent increase in candor, a 75 percent increase in development, a 46 percent increase in collaboration, and a 44 percent increase in accountability. Strengthening the connection between team members also strengthens essential qualities such as openness. “People are not comfortable blaming each other or blaming each other,” said Vonage’s Susan Mahaffey. “But if you know the person and are close to them, you feel more comfortable doing so.”
Leaders must learn to identify the driving force in each team member and tap into it. “The motivation we need to sustainably drive our efforts through constant uncertainty comes from deep inside,” said Gabriella Kellerman, chief innovation officer at BetterUp, which “It’s as personal as our fingerprints,” he added. A personal professional check-in is one of the examples mentioned above. Without prying, leaders should ask how things are going at home and what work activities team members find meaningful. This shows that leaders are valuing their employees as people, strengthening relationships and understanding their teams at the same time.
More than ever, leaders need to connect as people with their employees to maximize business success. This is especially true as teams are becoming the new unit of value creation in the workplace, as we will discuss in the final installment of this series.
- Alexi Robichaux is CEO and co-founder of BetterUp, a human transformation platform and inventor of digital coaching.
- Christie Smith is Accenture’s Global Lead for People and Organizational/Talent Potential.