BUSINESS LEADERSHIP IN THE AGE OF DISRUPTION
There’s an urgent need for businesses to lift their leadership game. It’s the only way to meet the challenges and come out the other side smiling.
T here was a time when an acceptable level of business leadership was ensuring everyone got paid and getting a few drinks in at the Christmas party.
That isn’t going to cut it in the face of the current age of unprecedented technological and environmental disruption.
Even conservative estimates suggest five percent of jobs could be displaced by artificial intelligence and automation by 2030. The most eye-watering reports suggest that could be as high as 40 percent.
There are going to be a lot of winners and losers in all this. And to be a winner will take leadership.
The shift is already underway. The explosion in online information and commercial activity has dislocated and disrupted retail, media, banking and more. It is triggering shockwaves through all sectors connected to them.
Meanwhile, the necessity for urgent action on climate change and global resource depletion is driving rapid change and uncertainty. This is spreading across primary industries, finance, transport, travel and more. It is coming in the form of regulations and taxes, new market barriers and standards, as well as new opportunities.
Climate change is also unleashing shifting and convulsing weather patterns that will reshape the way we grow, build, connect and insure what we have made.
This is particularly relevant to the industries generating most of New Zealand’s overseas earnings. Dairy is hitting the environmental buffers, especially on water quality. Meat and dairy are facing replacement with overseas and/or synthetic alternatives. New Zealand tourism has been tarnished with ecological degradation.
At the same time we are coming within reach of tech-driven retail giants like Amazon, which look set to take an even bigger bite out of High Street retail. ADAPTIVE CHALLENGES Kate Billing, co-founder of Blacksmith, an Auckland-based boutique leadership development practice, points to the work of Dr Ronald Heifetz on adaptive challenges as a useful framework for dealing with what she describes as this extended period of “increasingly complex, constant and convergent change”.
“Adaptive challenges are things like the environment and education, as well as societal challenges like poverty, technological redundancy, mass immigration and economic development,” she explains. “They sound like big systemic issues. But every human in every business in New Zealand has a part to play in either creating them or mitigating them.
“These are things in combination, magnitude and urgency that we've never had to deal with before.”
This generates what Heifetz describes as a 'state of disequilbrium' and ideally an optimal ‘range of productive distress’ – causing disturbance in everything from our societal structures to our individual mental state. Dealing with that is the challenge facing leadership. Kate says: “You've got to be able to keep your shit together and guide your people through a period where constant change is the new normal, and not change like people have ever known it before.”
How we deal with that is not just about capability. It's about taking conscious decisions to devolve power and responsibility. We must think and act more collaboratively. We must open ourselves up to a greater range of challenging experiences and complexity. We must learn to move faster together.
“Everyone is going to have to step up because we need to move quickly and be agile and adaptive,” says Kate. “No one person has all the answers. The days of command and control and everybody looking to their leaders to make decisions for them are over.”
Kate’s advice? Take control and responsibility for your own development, resilience and mental wellbeing. Jump-start conversations about career and peer development. Work to understand the local and global context your business operates in, whatever your level of seniority. ARTICULATING THE VISION David Savage of Elevate is a leadership and collaboration specialist. He agrees that the current pace and level of change is posing new challenges for leaders.
“It’s about a leader’s ability to think beyond the Business As Usual,” he says. “The ability to take people through a change process that is radically different to what they have known before. Leaders are needing to be clear on what that new vision is; be able to articulate it with real skill and empower people too, not just let them drown in it.” David cites communication as the key to collaborative success. “If communication is at a really high standard, then we can expect everything else to be at that standard,” he says. “We can expect leaders to coach, empower and grow their people. We can also expect collaboration. Collaboration falls down if communication isn’t excellent. Communication is a vehicle for everything.
“The biggest challenge around leadership and sustainability is to be able to lead people through the trauma of that disruption," he continues. "There’s good sound methodology for doing that, but it can also be done really badly, which is a real risk for an organisation. If they do it badly then they lose so much Intellectual Property. It walks out the door and goes to work for somebody else.”
Kate adds: “The next five to 30 years are a pivotal point for humanity. What is coming is a very exciting world. But there are going to be a lot of people who will not understand or want the change.
“The challenge is that they are not going to be able to fight it.”