Tomorrow's leadership: collaborative, complex, compassionate

Tomorrow's leadership: collaborative, complex, compassionate

The way organisations currently develop their leaders equips them for yesterday's predictable, process-driven workplace, but not for today's complex, uncertain business conditions, says HR expert Kevin Wheeler.

Today's leaders aren't prepared to face complex challenges like the BP oil spill, acts of terrorism, the global financial crisis and ash clouds, he told the Australasian Talent Conference in Sydney last week.

To handle them, he says, leaders "don't need the stuff we're teaching... they need the stuff we're not teaching", including ethics and creativity.

Leaders have been taught that "pretty much everything is solvable in an Excel spreadsheet; that if you're just a good financial manager everything will be just fine; if you learn basic communication skills you'll do great; create a vision... and you'll be a good leader.

"It doesn't work. It doesn't work, and we're seeing it every day in the turnover of leadership around the world, and in ineffective leadership" he says, pointing out that average CEO tenure is less than three years. "The old models of leadership are failing."

Tomorrow's leaders

While yesterday's leaders were taught how to make decisions in reasonably probable situations and ensure people acted within expected boundaries - while being "emotionless and controlling" - in the new world, Wheeler says, "leaders need tons of expertise no one human can possess".
"There is no CEO smart enough" to handle today's challenges alone", he says..

The leadership model that is emerging, Wheeler says, is:

concurrent- leaders can't act alone. Some should co-lead at the same time based on their skills and experience;
collaborative- leaders need shared ideas and collective decisions; and
compassionate- emotion is allowed in the new model, along with personalised decisions based on individual needs and desires.

And, he says, leaders will need to:

deal with ambiguity- "There are no clear answers in this world, so leaders need to develop skills in dealing with ambiguous situations and solving unknown problems." Wheeler says they can learn to do this through simulations, scenario planning, leveraging social networks and using portals of information.
deal with complexity- they must learn to simplify things and reduce them to simpler, essential lessons. Leaders should leverage group knowledge and crowd sourcing to solve problems, and identify mentors and advisors they can access quickly.

"It's about opening up and letting people share - that's the only way to deal with complexity. If BP opened a website asking for solutions to its problem it would find them."
deal with interdependencies- leaders need cultural competence, and to learn to collaborate, embrace consensus decision making, build alliances and relationships, and leverage social networks.
foster creativity- they should explore and experiment, be open to the new and different, and build diversity into everything, Wheeler says.

Responding to questions after the session, Wheeler agreed that the emerging model of leadership is "a more feminine model".

He predicts there will be a huge influx of women into leadership roles as organisations start to realise this, and that "the age of women has dawned".

HR Daily Article May 2010