5 Leadership Trends You Can’t Ignore.

Five critical traits your leaders need as we emerge from a pandemic into a complex world of work

As always, the Brave Insights team have been keeping a close eye on the leadership shifts emerging in our work with clients,  and combined with our insatiable curiosity for leadership literature, blogs and podcasts, we’ve identified five leadership attributes that are being called for as key to an organisations’ success. As the world emerges from the pandemic, it is becoming increasingly complex and many of the previous assumptions that we have grown comfortable with are being challenged. 

Is your organisation ready to support a shift from traditional leadership to a more progressive practice of leadership? We've outlined the five key leadership practices required to secure your organisation’s future and your talent.

1: Practice reflective & compassionate leadership

There is a need for more reflective leadership based on authenticity that creates greater engagement. Traditional forms of leadership based on authority and power are increasingly failing to produce the necessary performance desired by many organisations. Greater complexity, remote forms of working and evolving social and cultural perspectives demand a refashioning of how leadership is exercised, generated and consumed.

Are your leaders able to:

• Practice high-quality reflection both during and after action to create authenticity?

• Be experts in how to communicate with feeling and compassion?

• Be vulnerable and own their mistakes?

2: Support team members to thrive (not just survive) 

The COVID-19 pandemic has further emphasised the need to care for your people across all domains. Working at home has been a mixed blessing with some thriving working at home and others finding the lack of interaction challenging. Either way, the workplace has changed irrevocably and leaders will need to find new ways to ensure that their teams are thriving.

Are your leaders able to:

• Develop a trusting not doubting relationship with their team members?

• Provide opportunities for team members to communicate and create the conditions required for them to be happy at work?

• Seek to understand and challenge existing frameworks in a way that supports team members to excel and grow?

• Accept some people work better at home and need a more flexible application of how work is achieved?

3: Cultivate a growth mindset

To prosper into the future, organisations must be able to adapt rapidly to the ever-changing environments that they operate in. The status quo management style of the past may deliver short-term results but will ultimately leave you and the organisation in a state of decay.

An organisation with better adaptability starts with leaders who have a growth mindset that drives them to constantly seek how to both “do things better” and to “do better things”.

Are your leaders able to:

• Build an adaptive culture that is a critical need for successful organisations?

• Learn to embrace their own and also the failures of others as opportunities to make the organisation better?

• Be comfortable asking questions and remaining curious?

4: Develop leadership in others

The quality of leadership in your organisation is the single most important factor in the difference between success and failure. Yet most organisations under-invest in the development of their leadership capacity, and too often (wrongly) prioritise their investment by focusing on individual leader development. We call this the Fundamental Leadership Development Fallacy (FLDF). Instead, organisations need to look at how leadership is distributed and empowered across the organisation and undertake collective leadership development through team coaching and facilitation.

Are your leaders able to:

• Able to help your team navigate tension and conflict to make progress that's important for the organisation, not just their team or job role?

• Share leadership and when needed distribute leadership across the team?

• Foster the growth of leadership and leaders from within their team?

• Put the team before the individual and utilise a team approach to developing themselves and their leadership?

5: Provide opportunities to grow

Talent management and succession planning are two of the hardest development functions to get right in an organisation. With the competitiveness of the current employment market, team members will vote with their feet if they are not given development opportunities and pathways into the future.

Are your leaders able to:

• Demonstrate an understanding that every team member has talent and is making a valued contribution to the organisation?

• Clearly articulate and support the organisation's performance management system?

• Understand that talent development should continue through an entire career?

• See development as greater than just career advancement to keep their team purposefully engaged and challenged?

Next steps:

Leadership has never been easy, and as these observations suggest leaders are required to do more, in more complex circumstances. Expectations are higher than ever before and, without support, leaders are struggling.

Brave Insights specialises in helping leaders and organisations to develop the capacity to grow and meet these demands through our provocative and supportive approach to leadership development. Please contact us to find out more.