Lead the Future: Top 11 Trends Shaping Modern Leadership Today
Knowing Self-Aware Leadership
Hello KSKOers
The other day someone asked me what I thought the current themes were in the leadership space. I had a think about what I was hearing, reading and talking about with my guests on The Knowing Self Knowing Others Podcast and here is the list of the top 11 trends that are shaping modern leadership today.
Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!
1. Humanism
We’re increasingly looking for, wanting and needing leaders to operate with humanity. That means recognising and accepting the things that make us human: care, kindness, emotional intelligence, illness, sadness, neurodivergence, ... Our mortality hit us square between the eyes during COVID. We became aware of the fragility of life; both ours and others’. Leadership is increasingly about showing care, respect and kindness to our colleagues. Long gone are the days when leaders can get away with telling you to leave your childcare challenges at the door. Leaders need to care enough to challenge and know when to have difficult conversations. Care isn’t weakness. Care is strength. Caring leaders don’t shy away from doing the hard jobs that need to be done.
2. Authenticity, Humility and Vulnerability
Just as we expect to be able to go to work and be open about what we stand for, we expect to know what our leaders stand for too. We need leaders to be clear about what they think and believe through what they say and what they do. Leaders need to be open, honest and self-aware about their own beliefs and biases. They need to be authentic in recognising their own fallibility through understanding their strengths and weaknesses. They need to be humble about the gaps in their hard and relational skills and vulnerable in seeking opportunities for new experiences. The people around them should be in no doubt about a leader’s willingness to say ‘I don’t know’, openness to learning and commitment to growth.
3. Values and Purpose
Leaders need to ensure an organisation has a set of values that are clearly articulated and demonstrated, so that people are able to make informed choices about who they work for. To feel a true sense of satisfaction, people need to work to their values and their jobs needs to give them purpose and meaning every day. We don’t need to love our jobs all of the time, but we do need to feel valued and purposeful. Aligning personal and professional values has reached a new level of importance since COVID when we realised this was not a dress rehearsal. The great resignation that began in 2021 was a point of reset for individuals and a wake up call for leaders. We all realised that we had choices, and the power to make them.
4. Ethical Positioning and Strategy
Leaders need to ensure organisations operate ethically. They need to state their position in their strategy and live it. When leaders allow their ethical positioning and strategy to be at odds, they will be accused of green washing, pink washing and virtue signalling. When there is dissonance, employees will choose with their feet. Those people who want to work in organisations with which their values align will be heading out the revolving door. If actions don’t measure up to the rhetoric and activities don’t align with the ethical position, organisational damage will inevitably be done. The reputation of leaders, directly or indirectly responsible for the dissonance, will be at risk too. It’s essential for leaders to be candid when they get it wrong and sincere in their efforts to get it right.
5. Behaviour Modelling
Leaders shape organisational culture through their actions. Leading by example will never go out of fashion. Organisational culture is shaped by what leaders do, not by what’s written in their strategy. Ultimately, leadership is about being a living example for others to follow. Every behaviour a leader exhibits sets a standard for what is acceptable within the organisation.
Self-aware leaders understand the impact of their actions on others and they regulate and adjust their behaviour to align with their organisational strategy and operating standards. When leaders model behaviours, employees make judgement calls about what is viewed as acceptable, tolerated and encouraged. Likewise when behaviour is contrary to values, whole organisations suffer.
6. Working Location and Flexibility
Leaders need to embrace the opportunities and discomfort of tackling the question of working location and flexibility. They need to be ready to reap the consequences of their stance, both individually and organisationally. Working from the office, working from home, working from anywhere - they all have pluses and minuses for different people, different situations and different organisations. Leaders have to make decisions that ensure the ongoing success of their companies and they also have to be responsive in meeting the real life needs of their people with humanity. If they don’t, they’ll find the quiet quitters looking for jobs in more progressive organisations and slowly edging towards that revolving door.
7. Multi-Generation Working
Leaders need to work out how to better harness the richness and the breadth of their employees’ contribution. It’s likely that from about 2026 we’ll see the first Gen Alphas enter the workplace. They’ll be working right alongside Gen Z, Gen Y (the Millenials), Get X and the late Baby Boomers. We’ll have 5 generations of people working shoulder to shoulder. They’ll be coming to the workplace with wide ranging values and experience of the working and digital world. Leaders will have to guard against institutional discrimination and calling out groups of people by their age. Leaders need to be getting to know their employees better now, engaging more and listening purposefully in readiness for a new-style workforce.
8. Individualisation and Staff Engagement
Leaders have to start moving away from homogenous policy approaches to people management to more flexible and responsive ones. Leaders need to be prepared to create a working experience that is more individualised; that recognises individual strengths, areas for development, needs and wants in a more engaged way. People working to their values, seeking a clearer purpose, looking for engagement and holding organisations to higher ethical standards will be wanting something more. People policies need to change to focus on overarching principles, setting the bandwidth of implementation to support people managers respond to a more demanding workforce. The shift to ultra-digitalism will make asynchronous working the norm not the exception.
9. Recruitment
Leaders need to create new and different opportunities for people to shine. The one-size fits all interview is dead. Being quizzed by three people for 45 minutes has long since passed its sell by date. With neurodiversity now better understood, candidates seeking financial recompense for their time and coaches helping quiet leaders ace loud presentations, the standard interview no longer tells leaders what they want to know about organisational fit. Auditions, videos, written pieces, performances, week-long immersions: something new has to emerge. If AI can routinely tell from eye movements whether people are recalling memories or creating stories, recruitment might just get interesting.
10. Agility and Responsiveness
Leaders have to develop a new sense of curiosity with which to explore burgeoning markets and tools. Businesses and organisations have to keep up with the increasing pace of change. No-one wants another Blockbuster - not on their watch. Leaders have to park their egos and be ready to try and fail. They have to understand the data, spot the trends and be ready to pivot and respond if they want to stay in business. Leaders have to ensure their shift aligns with their strategy and brand so as not to loose focus and followership. Even the public sector will have to consider what it does for whom, and how it does it, if it wants to use its finite resources to achieve the biggest impact.
11. Ultra-Digitalism and Adopting AI
Leaders have to embrace digitisation and AI. They are increasingly relevant to organisations as they navigate these early years of the knowledge era. As technology and the rise of AI rapidly gain pace, leaders will face the challenge of balancing digital reliance with humanism. The traditional separation of ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ work is no longer sustainable, because one now informs the other. As AI continues to develop, leaders will have to ensure a balance between ultra-digitalism at one end of the seesaw and hyper-humanism at the other. Leaders will have to consciously focus on humanism through fostering inclusion, accessibility, and ethical practices to thrive in a digital/human future.
The Last Word
We started at humanism and through our tour of the 11 top trends shaping the leadership conversation right now, we’ve come back right around to humanism. We’ve moved from the individual as leader, to individuals leading organisations, to leaders leading individuals and back to leaders leading humans in an increasingly digital world. Leadership is first and foremost about people. It’s about building relationships with others, nurturing others, solving problems together, engaging people and collaborating with stakeholders. If you ever hear the line that leadership is a lonely place, maybe they’re just doing it wrong.
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Nia is an expert leader who talks the talk and walks the walk. She is an academically awarded thought leader in self-aware leadership and practices self-aware leadership every single day in her role as a Director in a Children’s Charity.
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