NEW APPROACH BY LEADERSHIP SORELY NEEDED
GLOBALLY, business innovation is leading to rapid and transformational changes in technology, consumption patterns and lifestyle aspirations. At the same time, societies are looking to businesses to lead change in response to urgent and systemic social and environmental challenges next year and beyond.
These issues pose fundamental risks to the stability and well-being of societies, but also offer opportunities for adaptation. This changing context is driving dramatic shifts across whole sectors and economies, at a pace that requires not only new policy and governance frameworks, but responsibility from business and transformative leadership.
Indeed, our world faces unprecedented global challenges. Climate change is accelerating. The world’s natural resources are becoming scarcer and the issues of inequality and diversity have come to the forefront.
On the face of it, these are grim, even hopeless problems. But with a new coterie of leaders these challenges can be solved, through innovative leadership. Any company with good leadership will be able to get ahead of tomorrow’s market demands and beat the competition, while making a positive impact on the world.
The old hierarchical model in slower moving and less complex business environments, which depended mostly on only a few people at the top for leadership, simply doesn’t work any more.
In today’s more volatile, uncertain and ambiguous business environment, decentralised controls and leadership through networks of people at all levels is imperative for success.
As the global business environment evolves, the leadership skills of company leaders must also evolve. Because the economy is becoming ever more global in scope and information is exchanged at a progressively faster rate, businesses will need leaders who can rapidly adapt to change and who can assemble skilled, reliable and agile teams suited to each situation.
The authoritarian leader who makes all the decisions will become a
This collective-individual harmony may challenge the current prevailing view of individualism
Researcher at Mancosa
thing of the past. Instead of an entirely top-down approach, the leader of the future will have to use a more collaborative approach.
Leadership will have to conceptualise organisations as mechanisms that link purpose with meaning. It will have to harness the complex and often unconscious matrix of beliefs, values and attitudes to co-create a caring culture. As a result, the new leadership will enhance an organisation’s capacity for working together and producing amazing results.
This will involve things such as brainstorming sessions with employees and multidisciplinary teams to address problems and create a longterm vision. This approach will allow leaders to get the maximum use of the company’s most valuable resource – its people.
This collective-individual harmony may challenge the current prevailing view of individualism, yet it is a natural evolution from it.
As machines take over more and more jobs in 2019 and beyond, the importance of good leaders and the unique value they bring to organisations will only increase.
It is therefore incumbent on leaders to create the conditions for teams to excel, rather than using technology for technology’s sake. “As leaders, we need to get back to becoming human and become the masters of technology instead of the other way around.”
Soni is the associate director for research at the Management College of Southern Africa (Mancosa) and writes in his personal capacity.