Second in a Three-Part Series on the Challenges Facing Future Leaders – and the Skills They’ll Need to Handle Them
Feeling exhausted? You’re not alone. We have endured a blur of crises and other disruptions: transitioning to remote work and back, the supply-chain crisis, war abroad, social turmoil at home and inflation everywhere.
To better understand how these events are remaking work, GoForwardToWork.com, Ferrazzi Greenlight’s research institute, and BetterUp, the human transformation platform, convened a series of in-person and virtual roundtables focused on the ways it will continue to evolve in the next five years, and how leaders will have to respond. No longer titans of industry, successful future bosses will need next-generation social and emotional qualities such as resilience, empathy and vulnerability in order to understand, connect with and motivate their employees.
Volatility has emerged as the hallmark of the 2020s. By definition we can’t know what further surprises the decade holds, but that itself is an ongoing challenge. The difference between a dynamic work environment and a volatile one will be a leader’s resilience – their ability to pivot and adjust to arising challenges and opportunities.
“Traditional organizations, [are] premised on the idea that things aren't changing very much and therefore you set out hierarchies, rules and processes,” said Rita McGrath, who teaches strategy at Columbia Business School. “But in an organization that's continually needing to evolve … you need to be able to continuously reinvent your structures.”
Boundless reinvention requires bottomless resilience, starting at the top. Indeed, BetterUp’s research shows that resilience is infectious: Members of teams with highly-resilient leaders are 176 percent more so themselves. They are also 78 percent less likely to want to leave, 57 percent more likely to find meaning and purpose at work and 52 percent less likely to feel burned out.
GoForwardToWork.com has identified four characteristics of resilient teams: candor, resourcefulness, compassion and humility. Practices which can maximize these traits include decoupling collaboration from in-person meetings, making collective resilience a team responsibility and ensuring that team members have caring, supportive relationships which enable candor, transparency and risk-taking.
Leaders will have to learn to identify what drives each team member – and harness it.
Resilience is critical because of the toll this decade has taken. Job-related stress negatively affects the mental health of more than 65 percent of employees, according to BetterUp, while work-related pressure adversely affects another 60 percent. Too often in the past, leaders have dismissed such problems as a lack of toughness, but the pandemic has forced them to reconsider mental health’s centrality to productivity and other positive outcomes. The physical health crisis is receding but the lessons about mental well-being’s importance are not. We know, for example, that every dollar employers spend on mental health returns $4.
Future leaders will have to build upon those lessons. “The difference between what it means to be a good leader and a great leader comes back to the core of humanity,” said Jenn Lim, co-founder and CEO of Delivering Happiness. Bosses will have to understand not only individuals’ roles but also what drives and fulfills them. Empathy and vulnerability are the golden keys for unlocking these insights.
“People follow the human, not the title,” said Pat Wadors, Chief People Officer at UKG. “It just tightens up the network when it's a human connection versus an org-chart connection.” Emma Citrin of World 50 summed up the challenge: “How do you make people feel like people and how do you make leaders act like people for them?”
Future leaders should methodically apply pandemic lessons to work, filling holes created by distributed working arrangements and deepening team members’ connections. In more than two decades studying how to elevate teams, Ferrazzi Greenlight has identified a set of high-return practices to help engineer connections between team members, such as candor breaks, personal-professional check-ins and collaborative problem-solving.
Companies employing such interventions have enjoyed, 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. Engineering stronger connections between team members also reinforces integral qualities such as candor. “People are not comfortable calling one another out or holding each other accountable,” said Susan Mahaffey of Vonage. “But when you know the person and you're close, you're more comfortable doing that.”
Leaders will have to learn to identify what drives each team member – and harness it. “The motivation we need to sustainably fuel the work of navigating constant uncertainty comes from deep inside,” said Gabriella Kellerman, BetterUp’s Chief Innovation Officer, adding that it is “as personal as our fingerprints.” Personal-professional check-ins are one of the examples mentioned above: Leaders should ask, without prying, about how things are going at home, and what work activities team members find meaningful. It signals that the leader values the employee as a person, strengthening the relationship while also deepening their understanding of their team.
More than ever, leaders will have to connect to their employees as people in order to maximize business success. This is especially true because, as we will discuss in the final installment in the series, teams are becoming the new unit of value-generation in the workplace.
- Alexi Robichaux is the CEO and cofounder of BetterUp, the human transformation platform and inventor of digital coaching.
- Christie Smith is global lead for Talent & Organization/Human Potential at Accenture.
