Kick-start 2023: Be a Future-ready Leader
IF you have a motorcycle, then you know that to make its engine run, you need to kick-start it by pushing a ratcheting lever with your foot. Figuratively, “to kick-start” is to kick off a project or initiative, i.e., start a process and get things in motion. To kick-start also means to make something happen more quickly or improve on it.
The year 2023 is coming up and after almost three years of the pandemic, many organizations, including associations, are gearing up for business. The “living with Covid” world will continue to bring massive disruption, change, and uncertainty. As a leader, you can’t guarantee certainty, but you can give your organization more clarity and confidence.
This was the premise of a webinar I attended recently which was conducted by Australia-based futurist Gihan Perera who enumerated three processes to gain clarity and confidence for your organization:
1. Understanding and accepting reality. The future isn’t used to be and is different from what you’ve expected before. In understanding reality, you need, not only to know about yourself, but also what’s going on around your area and what’s happening to the rest of the world. Assessing internal and external factors and pressures is key to clarity and confidence building.
In an organizational setting, a scenario planning tool you may use to assess external factors is “Pestle”— acronym for political, environmental, social, technological, legal and economic. This provides information on challenges you may encounter in fulfilling your proposed activities and prepare for actions and solutions to mitigate them.
In the context of associations, accepting the reality that your members will expect more from you in the days to come will enable you to plan ahead and execute with confidence.
2. Exploring possibilities. Knowing the challenges and meeting them head on is one thing; looking for possibilities that are equally important for you to grow in the future is another, as different people have different goals and expectations.
You can’t be future proof, but you can be future ready. Future-ready leaders find the right balance between the needs of their people and the goals of their organization. They treat their people first, but know that performance also matters.
W hat new skills should I focus on? What matters most to your members now? These are some of the questions you need to answer.
3. Setting priorities. You won’t be able to do everything you’ve planned to do so prioritizing is a must. Perhaps the “AHA” (for “Action-habit-as if”) approach may help.
Action sets the tone on the “what” and the “how to.” W hat are the things most valuable that you can do in the short term to make an impact? Habit provides you with the discipline of doing something each single day until this becomes your nature. The “as if ” gives you another persona or a role model to emulate. AHA creates the momentum to make things happen.
In a fast-changing world, you can’t do many things all by yourself. The old style of top-down leadership is obsolete. The new environment is full of complex problems that need diverse thinking to find solutions. Future-ready leaders don’t build better followers; they create more leaders.