Leadership Skills for the Future Research Paper

The importance of a clear leadership direction to steer organizations into future sustainable growth and success cannot be underestimated. This is because leadership is an important factor in establishing key relationships and metrics in the organization (Sweetman, 2001, p. 8).

Through the establishment of an effective leadership direction, most organizational resources can be utilized effectively towards the attainment of one goal. In this context, Blanchard (cited in Eisenhardt, 2001) observes that leadership is important because:

“Organizational management practices provide the ‘how’ in organizations—enabling departments and employees to understand the manner in which they specifically contribute to organizational success. These are the procedures and policies that clarify how each unit will achieve the overall strategy” (p. 106).

For managers to build highly effective organizations and remain successful, in light of the changing business environment, it is paramount that an inside-out preposition be observed and directed through competent leadership skills (Sweetman, 2001, p. 8).

This involves ensuring that a supportive culture and high quality management practice is observed to align operational activities with the strategic goals of the organizations; otherwise the employees would lose their drive and passion in upholding organizational vitality.

The provision of a good leadership framework is therefore the most critical element to ensuring good organizational health, but there is still a deficit of good leaders who recognize this fact and yet even fewer leaders who recognize the fact that leadership involves the forecast of organizational challenges coming in the future (Sweetman, 2001, p. 8).

Instead, there are too many managers and very few leaders in organizations, but the most unfortunate thing is that leadership often takes a back seat because of day to day operational pressures.

It is a well known fact that tuning leadership skills to reflect external future forces is an almost sure guarantee that managers and the organizations will develop into better organizations, better communities and in general a better world (Sweetman, 2001, p. 8).

Interestingly, not many leaders are prepared for future leadership challenges. According to a research study done by the Centre for Creative Leadership (cited in Martin de Holan, 2004, p. 45) on 2,200 leaders from 15 global organizations, it was established that there is an apparent leadership gap in organizations because leaders are not well prepared to tackle future challenges.

The study further confirmed its suspicions that today’s leaders do not have the capacity to meet future leadership requirements; such observations are true for organizations across the globe and in almost all levels of the organizations.

The research findings also pointed out the fact that resourcefulness is an important thing for the establishment of the best leaders because when other factors are analyzed, they can only be confirmed as important elements to the success of organizations but not reflective of the skills needed by leaders to succeed in today’s world (Sweetman, 2001, p. 8).

This fact therefore implies that leaders today are falling short of the leadership demand of their organizations. This leadership gap can therefore not sustain leadership requirements in the next five or ten years.

In some quarters, many people have identified the fact that self interest and competition will make leaders change but Eisenhardt (2001) is of the opinion that these factors are not enough to force a leadership change in organizations. To affirm his sentiments, he notes that:

“Business leaders will still need to drive revenue, increase efficiency, and resolve conflicts, but financial mandates (I win/you lose) won’t be enough. Leaders must expand their view of self and embrace the shared assets and opportunities around them — not just the individual takeaways that will reward them alone. Leaders must learn to give ideas away, trusting that they will get even more back in return” (p. 107).

The business environment is getting increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, such that more effort needs to be directed towards preparing leaders for future eventualities since the above parameters are bond to worsen in the coming years.

Problems which can be solved are still abound but there is a need for leaders to realize that they will be faced with problems where they will need to come up with a solution even when there seems to be no viable solution to apply.

In this regard, this study identifies the importance of leadership development in creating successful and effective organizations and in so doing; it exemplifies the need to develop competencies required for the future through ten strategies leaders should learn in order to assure business growth and success in future.

Importance of a Change in Leadership Skills and Management

Most organizations today are faced with endless pressures of coping with change. Change is virtually evident everywhere and is happening at an accelerating pace; thereby forcing many organizations to come up with strategies to adapt and incorporate changes in their daily operations.

In this regard, most organizations are trying to cope with new structures to enable them dominate their markets or even just stay afloat (in light of stiff competition). However, as the technological realm keeps changing, many organizations are coming up with new ways of adapting to environmental changes.

This also means that organizations which have been in operation for long ought to restructure their organizations to maintain or improve their work outflows. The type of changes organizations face across the globe are however not uniform. For example, some organizations are faced with the problem of excessive regulation by the government while others are faced with the problem of excessive deregulation.

Other organizations are faced with the problem of a dwindling market share, increased global competition, mergers or hostile takeovers, and other dramatic organizational changes which some organizations fail to come out of and die in the process of grappling with them (Hughes, 2007, p. 122).

For example, in the Philippines, there was a high demand for telecommunications services that even customers were begging existing companies to connection them, but when the industry was deregulated, the companies enjoying monopoly lost business because customers were now in a position to choose among other different companies that entered the market (Hughes, 2007, p. 122).

Some analysts have quantified organizational change in five categories that define drivers to organizational change. These categories are globalization, mergers, and partnerships, changing demographics, higher employee involvement and an advancement in the manufacturing or service technology. These forces represent the five major forces driving organizational change and are discussed below.

Changing Demographics

Changing demographical patterns dictate the kind of product development organizations need to undertake. Interestingly, demographical patterns keep on changing and consumers will constantly have different preferences on the type of goods and services they want to buy.

In this regard, it becomes increasingly important that leaders note this change factor and tune their organizations to correctly respond to them. This involves constant market research and frequent change in product developments to suit the changing consumer demands.

Higher Employee Involvement

Employees are slowly cementing their grip in many organizations and managers are also slowly embracing the need to focus on employee involvement in propelling organizational growth. In this regard, leaders ought to come up with strategies that incorporate employees in almost all organizational function such as decision making so that environmental change can be better coped with.

Technology

Technology has driven change in organizations because it has made important function of organizations like communication, inexpensive, effective, and reliable. This has enabled many people get information which they never had in the first place. This has brought with it several advantages and disadvantages but the main fact is that the influence of technology should be better managed because it is here to stay.

The biggest risk or advantage associated with technology rests on the fact that previous barriers to communication such as time, space and other temporal developments have been greatly minimized and in some cases totally eliminated, to leave organizations very vulnerable to competitive pressures, spying and other malicious activities which may be instigated by rivals (Hughes, 2007, p. 123).

However, in the same context, organizations are in a better position to get information relating to market dynamics, new product developments and the likes, which will enable them, improve their production or service delivery.

Globalization

Globalization is also another huge changing force which requires prudent leadership strategies to align organizations to take advantage of. Globalization has led to an increase in the efficiency of transportation, service delivery and the likes but with the increase in technological development, there has been a faster dissemination of information that was never previously experienced in the past.

Conversely, this has led to the shrinking of the world into a small global village. In turn, it has been easy transacting across the globe, making it very easy for consumers to buy products across international boundaries, as easy as one would from a local store (Hughes, 2007, p. 123).

This has totally changed the dynamics of doing business because many organizations have to not only worry about what their local competitors are doing but also what competitors in other countries are doing as well (Nalbantain, 2009, p. 76).

For instance, General motors cannot only afford to worry about what Chrysler or Ford is doing in the local American automobile market but also what other global companies like Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMW are doing. Also with the increased dissemination of information, a lot is now known about what Chrysler or Toyota are doing.

This has taken industry competition to another level, and just like any other industrial sector, such changing business dynamics can spell doom or prosperity for organizations which either chooses to take advantage of such changes or ignore them altogether. All in all, this depends on the leadership and management of such companies.

Mergers and Partnerships

Mergers and partnerships are also huge market forces that have totally changed the business environment because they have consolidated market powers to a few institutions or individuals (Pisano, 2008, p. 78).

Currently, many institutional investors through various financial tools such as mutual funds or pension funds have been used to control stocks in major companies and organizations, such that small investors are finding their interests in companies jeopardized by a conflict of interest from powerful investors.

Sometimes, the influence of such market investors is so high, such that, whenever they are displeased with certain managers or corporate leaders, the leaders’ position in such organizations may be lost.

In this regard, the market investors have been noted to raise the competitive bar to unprecedented levels and at the same time shortened the span for organizations to achieve success. To affirm these developments, Atlanta Focus Groups (cited in Pisano, 2008, p. 78) observes that:

“We are moving into an age of instant gratification—that seems to be true whether it’s children, clients, or whatever—they want instant gratification and you have to provide answers now! We not only have to provide answers, but the right answers. As companies change, they can’t get information fast enough and if they can’t get it from us, they will get it somewhere else”.

This just shows the level of aggressiveness such investors have and the pressures they pile on management.

With this level of environmental change, a number of analysts have come up with specific theories to explain the inevitable forces of change that force a shift in leadership styles to adapt to them. With regards to leadership and change, there are two main theories that define the role of leaders in aligning organizations for change.

Supervisory theories demonstrate the person-oriented form of leadership while strategic leadership theories focus on the skill level of the employees (Pisano, 2008, p. 78). Whatever, the application of leadership theories, it still remains a fact that both leadership theories enable the leaders align organizations to successfully implement change strategies.

Managers and leaders directly fall under the category of strategic leaders and their input is identified as crucial to motivate their employees to adopt to change because the forces of change ought to be tackled from a comprehensive point of view.

Leadership Skills for the Future

Challenging Assumptions

An organization can be barred from developing if its leaders are still stuck in conventional business practices. It is therefore important for leaders to challenge the current assumptions of business processes to increase the level of creativity among their employees.

A failure to do so may lead to the discouragement of employees from coming up with new ideas to carry put business processes which are out of the “normal” business practices.

Leaders can be able to instill a new culture of “thinking out o the box” by encouraging employees to envision beyond the constraints of traditional business assumptions since incorporating this new business culture can lead to both management and employee innovation (Hippel, 2005, p. 6).

The management of various organizations can employ transformational learning theory as a means to instill this new skill in the organization.

Transformational learning has majorly been used in adult education and rarely been used in an organizational context but its application is bound to work because it has been proved to work in aspects such as cross cultural experiences, interactive leadership and development, and active research projects by managers and leaders (Hippel, 2005, p. 6).

Transformational learning should therefore be encouraged in the organization but this ought to be done in full support of the management, through the reaffirmation of accommodation of cultural diversity, training and development and action research.

This initiative does not however mean that the existent rules and policies of the organization be changed because it only requires the leaders to change the way the think of workplace experiences and how they interact with the employees (Hippel, 2005, p. 6).

In this context, transformational learning will assist employees develop the culture of questioning existing assumptions, plus other people’s assumptions to come up with new ideologies which are in line with the changing organizational environment (Hippel, 2005, p. 6).

Transformational learning will also help leaders embrace critical thinking, develop empathy, and create more opportunities for employees to explore their own creative skills and challenge existing organizational paradigms (Hippel, 2005, p. 6).

Encourage Risk Taking

Leaders should be educated on the importance of taking risks and the need to adopt good strategies while doing so. This strategy is good because it will enable managers steer the organization into increased profitability and increased market share within a short time. This entails the training of lower level employees to stop operating within safe zones and instead break their boundaries and take up new challenges.

This will initiate the development of new ideas like new mergers and acquisitions, as a strategy to penetrate new markets; or the employment of new strategies to improve product development to keep up with the changing business environment.

Many leaders usually opt to let their employees operate within conventional confines because they are normally afraid of getting compromised if risks are taken (Hippel, 2005, p. 7). It is therefore important that leaders go out of their way to discuss possible outcomes of their actions to instill a sense of confidence among employees, to take up new risks.

This should be done by employing approaches that tend to ask questions like: What do you think will happen if you do that, or don’t do that? How would you handle it? Where would you go? Why would you suggest that? When do you think that’s appropriate?

Who would you ask? Such kind of questions will enable the employees to start thinking without the management’s involvement and in the process, develop the confidence to take up new risks and know how to handle the different outcomes.

Inspire Employees

Inspiration especially comes after leaders have come up with prudent leadership strategies which need employee support to work (Hippel, 2005, p. 6). Most often than not, if it is a service oriented industry, the leadership may have to reach out to the frontline employees to undertake the new strategies because they are the first point of contact consumers have with the organization.

Such employees may just have the magic touch to implement the leaders’ new strategies. This initiative is important because in a changing business world, leaders have to come up with new strategies to adapt to changes in the business environment and implementation is normally important in making such strategies work.

However, this does not happen without inspirations on the part of the employees because they may fail to share the same vision the leadership team has and therefore fail to carry out leadership strategies effectively. In this regard, the employees need to feel like they have the capacity to drive organizational success but the inspiration should come from the leaders, to ensure such confidence among the employees is effectively present.

This is however, not an easy task on the part of the management because they have to carry out effective strategies to forge a partnership between the employees and themselves.

One of the most basic way leaders can achieve this goal is ensuring there is a favorable working environment for the employees so that employee morale can be high and teamwork fostered. Complimentarily, the management can come up with a plan to reward well performing employees, probably through the establishment of an employee recognition program, tied to success and employee performance.

Clearly Defining Expectations

When coming up with new leadership strategies or when changing existent organizational practices, it is important for leaders to let employees know their expectations in undertaking such measures.

When employees comprehend the management’s expectations when employing new strategies, and are provided with the right tools for undertaking the strategy, they are bound to have an increased sense of job satisfaction when they accomplish the set goals (Hippel, 2005, p. 6).

However, organizational leaders should take an extra step of designing the road map to the attainment of this success and also tie specific rewards for employees who achieve the desired goals.

This will enable employees have an increased sense of reinforced expectations, such that, even if the management chooses to have yearly reviews or undertake periodic performance reviews, the employees would take up such an initiative positively (Hippel, 2005, p. 8).

In ensuring such an initiative goes through, it is important that the leaders identify at least five core values that the organization’s success thrives on. Afterwards, the leaders should outline the type of organizational behaviors which are in line with such values to develop and maintain a “can do attitude”.

In some cases, it may be essential for the leaders to analyze the performance of each employee to ensure their actions represent the values of the organization, or are in line with the achievement of the strategic goals of the organization.

Rewarding Achievements

It has been affirmed through existing literature that successful leaders appreciate and reward the input of their employees (Hippel, 2005, p. 7). In ensuring future organizational growth is sustained, leaders must put in place specific incentives to motivate employees to improve their performances or maintain outstanding performances.

The type of incentives to give should however vary because some employees may be motivated by financial rewards; some may be motivated by an expensive vacation holiday or a change in the working schedule to be more flexible; while others may just be motivated by the mere verbal recognition of performance.

It is therefore important that leaders select an appropriate plan that best suits their employee groups so that high performance is achieved (Hippel, 2005, p. 7).

To recognize employee performance, the organizational leadership team can come up with a bonus plan for outstanding employees, alongside providing financial rewards.

Alternatively, management can take the employees out for dinner (depending on the type of organization), allow employees to leave office at noon on four Fridays of the year, contribute to an important cause like a charity event in the name of performing employees, take employees for a movie, have a party for the employees’ families, purchase a gift card or a prepaid credit card or even distribute a fruit basket to motivate the employees.

Regardless of the rewarding style or program, the end result is a win-win situation for both the employees and employers because the employees will have a stronger sense of job satisfaction thereby improving their work performance; which will also be beneficial to the employer.

Participative Decision Making

Future leaders of any successful organization ought to incorporate a participative decision making style which should often mean the inclusion of a bottom up approach to management.

This should be done by the creation of an appropriate environment that encourages the thriving of such a strategy (Hippel, 2005, p. 7). A participative leadership style is especially important because leaders may not necessarily have the comprehensive forecast to anticipate the outcome of every decision they make.

When allowing other people to help in the decision making process, it becomes very easy for the leadership team to tap into the potential of every employee present in the deliberation team.

For instance, a supervisor may be in a position to make a better decision about how to come up with a good reward plan for the employees than a general manager would. A good leader should then make a final informed decision, based on everyone’s input, then take the responsibility for any type of outcome anticipated (Day, 2006, p. 26).

Creating a Corporate Training Plan

Research studies have affirmed the fact that if leaders want to sustain organization growth into the future, they ought to have a comprehensive corporate training plan (De Meyer, 2002, p. 60). This strategy facilitates initiatives by management to teach important corporate management principles which should be adopted to increase organizational performance.

Although to some, this strategy maybe a deviation from the conventional management practices, studies done by McKenzie survey (cited in De Meyer, 2002, p. 60) have shown that an employment of this strategy has made many leaders improve their leadership skills to tackle future challenges.

Adopting an open system of Leadership

Leadership through open system enables organizations to incorporate factors affecting the external environment and the business into the overall business strategy (De Meyer, 2002, p. 60). This leadership skill is important for future managers because it helps the leaders learn from the external environment and adapt designs or plans that are supposed to counter the anticipated environmental changes.

This leadership approach recognizes the role of organizational strategy in influencing the business environment and in this regard, the organization can set the trend in the industry and beat future competitive pressures. Also, in the same context, the organization will be able to better adapt to environmental changes and anticipate any new business developments.

This kind of strategy will also be beneficial for the leaders because they will be able to build an appropriate environment for learning in the organization because it’s been affirmed from research studies that employees learn best in dynamic environments. This will happen through the interaction of employees from creative exchange of ideas stimulated by the external business environment.

The external business environment also helps the leaders to motivate their employees to think more strategically, especially in taking advantage of future business opportunities and avoiding any future pitfalls as well.

Leaders can be able to correctly apply this strategy by carrying out environmental analysis through research and adopting future forecasting tools like actuarial analysis in predicting the future business environment (De Meyer, 2002, p. 60).

Ensuring Flow Is Observed

Flow is sometimes referred to by athletes as zone but it refers to the total absorption of attention into the human activities taking place in the organization (De Meyer, 2002, p. 61). Through this analysis it can be said that flow captures employees’ consciousness in undertaking business activities.

Future leaders need to align themselves to instill flow among employees because flow instills a sense of self discovery among employees and motivates them to break their performance limits by challenging their set goals.

This creates a new reality for the employees because it puts them on levels which they have never been in. In fact, such a strategy is very useful to align employees with future environmental changes since it makes employees much more flexible and adaptive to new changes (De Meyer, 2002, p. 62).

The importance of leaders ensuring a sense of flow in the organization cannot be underestimated because there is an increased need, now and in the future, for organizations to retain high performing staff and ensuring flow is present in the organization to enable leaders retain top talent.

Leaders, who create a good work environment that promotes flow, gain from increased job satisfaction by the employees, and increased job performances, leading to an improvement in the organization’s bottom line (De Meyer, 2002, p. 62).

In the past, job satisfaction was privy to the employees concerned and not many managers were interested in it in the first place; however, currently, job satisfaction has become an important managerial objective.

Leaders can also get an added advantage of improving the career growth of employees because it has been proved that employees who experience flow are able to learn and grow in their careers; in addition to having a higher sense of enjoyment and a stronger sense talent utilization.

To create a sense of flow in the organization, the managers ought to set clear, challenging but attainable goals that will guide the actions of the employees (De Meyer, 2002, p. 62). Also, leaders ought to establish a sense of feedback mechanism, set challenges that match individual capabilities, establish a focus on the goals, minimize self consciousness and cede control to the employees (De Meyer, 2002, p. 62).

Extending Influence beyond Organization and Departments

It is important that future leaders look beyond their organizations’ and departmental performance and look at the organization as apart of a wider global economy. Many factors nowadays influence an organization’s performance, like fiscal and monetary policies, and it is important that leaders acknowledge the influence of external forces in changing business processes.

Globalization has especially reduced the influence of departments in the attainment of overall organizational objectives and also reduced the impact a single organization would have in the market.

Currently, departmental focus continues to dwindle and an organization’s influence as a single entity also continues to fade away. The market place is therefore slowly being dominated by conglomerates and therefore leaders need to extend their influence to such organizations.

To achieve this objective, it is important that leaders network with other like-minded people to forge partnerships and agreements that accommodate divergent inputs from various organizations.

Leaders also need to be open to the prospects of outsourcing certain organizational activities and also be open to the idea of accommodating external parties in organizational processes. In the same regard, they can also restructure the organization to reduce segmentation but maintain specialization. This strategy will integrate business processes but also increase the level of operation.

Conclusion

What differentiates ordinary leaders from extraordinary leaders is the possession of insight and strategic foresight. Constantly, such leaders pry on what the future holds and they deliberate the outcomes, not only by themselves but with other employees as well. In some instances, such leaders seek to explore new channels which have never been tried out before.

Regardless of the approach taken by these leaders, they all acknowledge that a problem exists and they disrupt the status quo to solve it.

When such leaders declare the future or seek to influence the future, they inherently create a problem for their organizations and move into the future which has no apparent blueprint. In this regard, there are no guarantees that the future can be well comprehended and that the employed strategies will work, anyway.

This study identifies that declaring the future; which is uncertain to everyone requires the input of all organizational stakeholders to take a risk and walk through the proverbial uncertain future without fear. This summarizes the concept of risk taking discussed above, because such an action involves a deviation from conventional organizational practices which is encouraged in this study as well.

In this regard, chances of the generation of new thoughts, new needs, and developments of new competencies and skills will be upheld because an outstanding leader stands for something bigger than the existent problem (which is an uncertain future). This is therefore bound to become the new value system for the organization and it will create a platform through which everybody can share their input.

It is therefore important that leaders inspire and motivate their employees towards the attainment of this vision because when this is done, the employees’ organizational commitment is bound to increase and they are able to undertake new actions and be proud of their accomplishments.

References

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Martin de Holan, P. (2004). Managing Organizational Forgetting. MIT Sloan Management Review, 45(2), 45–51. Print.

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