Leadership of the Future

The last 20 years has seen an incredible increase in technology. Most of the principles of good leadership remain the same, regardless of how technology changes. However, technology presents new challenges for leaders.

Virtual Contact Leadership

One of the benefits of modern technology is the ability to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world. While this is a benefit for businesses looking to expand, it presents unique challenges for leaders. Many leaders have a leadership skill set that relies heavily on their personality and “presence”. Many of these skills don’t translate well into electronic communication.

Leaders need to be aware of this and work to improve their skills in communicating and leading using modern tools. They can no longer rely on the power of their personality to give them an edge. One of the biggest areas leaders must develop is the ability to communicate well through the written word.

In the past, leaders were often able to rely on assistants for written communication. However, with the ubiquitous use of email, this is no longer an option. Leaders who cannot communicate well in writing will find themself at a disadvantage.

Leaders preparing for the future should make a conscious effort in the following areas:

• Developing strong writing skills.
• Understanding different forms of electronic communication.
• Understanding the culture of different forms of electronic communication.

Leading Outside the Organization

In the past, leaders generally led people who reported to them through the chain of command. As businesses become more focused on their core competencies, leaders are finding that many of the people they are leading are in other organizations. Leaders of the past who lead through position and title will find it difficult to lead in the future. Many of their old techniques will not work across organizations’ boundaries.

This shift will require that successful leaders of the future develop a greater degree of true leadership skill. The shortcuts used by many in authority will not work when trying to lead across organizational boundaries.

Leaders in future organizations will also require a better holistic understanding of the entire business ecosystem, not just their organization. Leaders who can successfully make this transition will be in high demand, not just by companies looking to hire their skills, but by organizations looking to partner with them for mutual benefit.

The Difficulty of Earning Leadership Trust

Some of the recent high profile scandals in business will require some changes for leaders of the future as well. Subordinates are less likely to trust a leader because of position and title than they were 10 years ago. In the future, obtaining trust will require even more effort.

In the future, leaders must seek to actively measure the level of trust in their organization and take deliberate steps to improve the level of trust. Before making big changes leaders must gauge the level of trust in their organization to make sure they have built enough of a solid trust foundation to obtain successful buy-in.

While the core skills of leadership will remain the same over time, the future will require a different emphasis on particular skills. By preparing for these changes ahead of time, leaders can ready themselves today for what organizations will need tomorrow.

Creating Confidence

As a leader, you need to cultivate your team’s confidence. Your team should have confidence in themselves as well as confidence in your leadership skills. The best way to create confidence is through a series of victories. In general, people will judge the probability of future success based on past performance. As you work with your team you will build a history. If you maintain a good track record of success, you will create a sense of optimism that future, proposed projects will also be successful. If you have a record of failure, your team will probably view any new projects as having a high chance of failing.

To be effective, you need a team that is very confident in their abilities to achieve success and in your ability to choose projects that will be successful. If an individual doesn’t feel like what they are working on is going to be successful, it is very unlikely that they will invest themselves entirely in the project. Sometimes they will even start trying to plan ahead in order to have a good excuse for the project’s demise. At times, this means ignoring obvious obstacles that will provide an excuse for their failure.

When an individual believes a project will be successful, they are able to put themselves behind it 100%. Instead of looking for obstacles that can function as excuses in the future, they are proactive in eliminating obstacles that would cause a failure of the project. A team full of people looking for solutions will have a much higher success rate than a team of people looking for things to use as excuses later on.

It is the job of the leader to select projects that will contribute to an overall sense of success within his team. By starting with projects that the entire team believes will be successful, a leader is able to raise the level of confidence for the next project. Over time, the confidence of a team can be built to a point that it can easily complete a project that would have been a failure previously. A series of projects can be completed easily and successfully when they are arranged in order to build confidence, while the same projects can all be complete failures when done in a different order.

When you need to develop confidence, you should arrange projects in an order that is similar to the way questions are asked on the game show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.”  The first project should very easy. So easy that no one will have any doubts that it can be completed successfully.

Historically, nations have built monuments in memory of their success. When the Israelites crossed the Jordan river into Canaan, they took 12 large stones from the river and stacked them on top of each other to remember their success in leaving Egypt.

The world is full of triumphal arches that were built to remind people of a war victory. These were built to remind people of their success in the past and encourage them in future endeavors.

When Yahoo completed a groundbreaking version of their web mail system, an artist was commissioned to create a sculpture celebrating the success of the developers who worked on the project. The statue is on display at the Yahoo headquarters.

While it might not be appropriate to create a sculpture or triumphal arch for every project, some projects serve as trophies themselves. The visibility of a project doesn’t always correspond with its difficulty. By picking a project that is easy to complete, but is also very visible, you will create a “war trophy” for your team—something that will regularly remind them of their success.

Once a team has had some success, the difficulty of their projects can increase dramatically. To continue the momentum, a leader should be careful not to break momentum by having a failure. However, a proactive leader should be able to turn an occasional failure into a positive learning experience. It is important to admit when something went wrong. When leadership attempts to cover a failure as if it was really a success or just ignore it completely, it often amplifies the failure instead of minimizing it.

There was a large organization that was beginning to saturate the market for its services at a particular location. The leadership decided that expanding to a branch office was the right decision. They leased a building, renovated it and began operations. It was soon apparent that there was a problem with the cost structure at the branch office. Many of the methods of doing business at the main headquarters were very inefficient when scaled down to the size of the branch office. To make matters worse, the branch office didn’t attract many new customers. Most of the clients were existing customers who had previously done business at the headquarters building.

After a few years, the main headquarters built a bigger building and the branch office was shut down. However, the organization told people that the plan had always been to shut it down once a larger headquarters was built, while much of the staff knew that this wasn’t the case. By trying to hide the fact that the branch office had been a failure, they were unable to learn from the failure in a way that could help enable successes in the future. Without this opportunity to learn, it is very likely that any future branch offices will suffer a similar demise–assuming that the organization even attempts another expansion.

Many of the team members who worked on creating the branch office left the organization. Others that stayed on staff carried the sense of failure with them as a lack of confidence on future projects.

Dealing with failure is one of the key skills a leader needs to develop. Failure does not have to be a big deal, but most people’s natural tendencies are the opposite of what needs to happen in order to turn a failure into a learning experience and not a confidence breaker.

A high level of confidence isn’t something that just happens naturally. It is something that develops over time. With a little care and planning, your team can grow in confidence. This leads to a momentum of success that will carry them over the inevitable rough places and occasional failures.

Vision and Efficiency

In any organization, effort can be divided into two categories. Effort that helps achieve the vision and effort that does not. There is some work that is difficult to correctly categorize–especially in complex organizations with a great deal of complexity. However, most of the time there is a great deal of effort expended on items that are clearly not in support of the vision.

It is probably impossible for an organization to operate at 100% efficiency. In many cases, inefficiency results, not from natural organizational entropy, but because every person has a different view of the vision.

When information is lacking, the human mind becomes creative. There have been studies to determine the reliability of testimony by court witnesses. In the study, people were exposed to a situation in ways that certain details were intentionally unknowable. However, after repeatedly being asked about the unknowable details they began to “remember”. These memories didn’t come from their actual experience. The subject’s brains were filling in details purely from imagination.

Now think about an organization full of people with an incomplete understanding of the vision. Every day they are faced with situations where understanding the vision is required in order to make the correct choice. Over time, they will fill in the details themselves and create their own personal version of the vision.
Since a good deal of this personal vision comes directly from their imagination, it is not surprising that the vision they create often is more aligned with their personal vision than the actual vision of the organization. This isn’t their fault. It is the natural way the human mind works.

There was a large church that was trying to identify better with its congregation. During a meeting of some of the staff, one of the newer staff members asked, “Who is our target market?” to better understand exactly who the organization was trying to reach.

A pastor at the meeting responded to the question by saying that the target market was people who hadn’t ever been to a church. The other staff members pointed out that 99% of the sermons preached by the senior pastor were targeted toward people who were already churchgoers and often wouldn’t even make much sense to people who had never attended a church.

The fact that the staff had to ask who they were trying to reach was a clear indication that the vision was not being communicated clearly from the top leadership. This pastor had created his version of the vision based on his personal preferences. This wasn’t something that he was doing intentionally; it is just the way the human mind works.

If each individual in an organization is creating a separate version of the vision that is heavily influenced by their own personal preference, it is amazing that organizations can function at all. But remember people are only going to use their imagination in the areas where information is lacking. If the vision is well defined and effectively communicated, the areas left to people’s imagination is minimized.

If half of an individual’s personal view of the vision is coming purely from their own imagination, it is likely that half of the effort they are expending is not in alignment with the true vision of the organization. If everyone in the organization is filling in holes in the vision, then it is likely that half of the organization’s effort is being expended toward the focused vision and the other half is pulling the organization in different, random directions.

Much of the benefit of a large organization in the first place, is the efficiency that comes from having many people all expending effort toward the same goal. When a significant portion of the effort is being expended in random directions, much of the value of having an organization is lost.

When a leader regularly communicates a clear vision, the amount of wasted effort is minimized. In addition, the more effort across the entire organization is focused in the same direction, the more synergy will exist between individuals and departments.

Setting Goals

I was working for an organization that was attempting to go through a re-branding to become more relevant to their customers. They had hired an outside consulting firm to come in and help walk them through the branding process.

After talking with several of the employees, it became clear to the consultants that the employees didn’t all have the same view about the two and three year goals of the organization. To help get a better understanding, they scheduled a meeting with the CEO to ask him what his goals were.

Several of the employees were pretty excited about finally understanding the direction that the organization would be headed and counted down the days until the consultants would meet with the CEO. When the consultants came out of the meeting they were asked about the goals for the organization. They responded:

“We asked, but you aren’t going to like the answer.”

Evidently the CEO told the consultants that he didn’t like making goals clear for the employees. His reasoning was that if the organization missed goals he had set, people would be disappointed. He felt that would hurt his leadership more than keeping people in the dark about where the organization was headed.

This isn’t as uncommon as it sounds. Many people in leadership don’t set goals for the very same reason, but they aren’t self-aware enough to understand why. This CEO was able to articulate his reason for not setting clear goals, which was a step better than most leaders, but it revealed a misunderstanding about how to motivate people.

Most individuals would rather play a game where they understand the goals of the game and come in second, than play a game where they don’t know what they are trying to accomplish and come in first.

When I was a kid, I was playing with a demo video game in a store. Another youngster came up, took the other control and we started playing a wrestling game together. I pushed buttons as fast as possible in order to try to win. After the first round he leaned over to his friend and commented, “This guy is really good!” referring to my skill at the game. I turned and asked, “Which player am I?”

I was winning, but I didn’t understand the game. I didn’t even know what player I was. This was much less satisfying than other games where I understood the rules—even when I lost horribly.

People want to be challenged. This doesn’t mean you should set goals that no one can reach, but don’t be afraid of setting and communicating your goals to the people you lead. This is your job as a leader—to show people where you are going and how you are going to measure your progress. If you don’t give people these goals, it is hard for them to really get satisfaction from their job.

Leading through Example

As obvious as it seems, many leaders forget that their actions speak louder than their words. I was managing a department at a medium sized organization that had a casual dress code on Friday. One of the vice presidents decided that casual Fridays were a bad idea and mandated that everyone wear corporate casual every day. For my department, that was inconvenient because we saved most of our dirty work for Friday when we were wearing jeans.

However, even if it was inconvenient for our department, I explained to everyone that the organization was trying to maintain a professional image. No one in my department liked the change, but they were fine with adhering to it.

The second Friday after the change, all of my staff was in the office and wearing the corporate dress code. In walked the vice president who had made the change. He was wearing the same casual clothes that he had prohibited two weeks earlier.

When he left our department, all of my staff turned to ask if they could dress like that as well. We stuck with the mandated dress code for several months before it was finally repealed.

While the vice president had enough authority to get away with not following his own rules, he should have known better. Even if he had a very good reason for it, he should have been more aware that saying one thing and doing another is very poor leadership practice.

If you are going to ask others to adhere to a certain level of conduct, you should expect to adhere to it yourself. If you want your staff to be in the office by 8 am, you should be there before they arrive. If you tell your staff not to park in the customer area, your leadership will suffer if you decide that your importance makes you exempt from the rule.

People can follow what you say without actually following the intent. When this happens, the effectiveness of your organization is decreased. If they don’t see you following your own set of rules, they may follow them to the letter, but don’t expect them to go the extra mile to try to understand the intent.

Management Systems

A lot of leaders know what they want from the people they lead, but are not particularly skilled in getting the desired results. Often leaders in this position end up blaming the people they lead. Most often, the fault lies with the leader’s inability to focus effort toward a particular result.

A successful leader finds ways to focus effort toward their desired results. There are many ways to do this, but most of them boil down to measuring the results you want to impact. Management is often the art of taking abstract concepts and communicating them in a clear quantitative way.

For example, the factory manager knows that he wants to lower the number of accidents, but having fewer accidents is a fairly abstract concept. However the number of days since the last accident is a very concrete concept that is easy for everyone to understand. That is why many factories have a large sign that shows the number of days they have gone without having an accident. It helps measure the concept of having fewer accidents in a way that is understood and measurable. Many factories have found they can lower the number of accidents simply by making people aware of how well they are doing at achieving the goal.

The trick is to find proper thing to measure. There was an IT department where the manager decided to measure the number of trouble tickets they closed each week. This metric was used as part of the employees’ performance review. However, if everything was running just fine with no problems, there were no trouble tickets to close.

Once employees realized that their performance looked bad when things were running perfectly, they began unplugging certain pieces of networking equipment for 15 minutes at a time. The users would log a bunch of trouble tickets and the IT staff would plug the equipment back in and close all of the tickets.

In this case the manager was basically measuring the number of problems that were fixed. If an IT department is functioning well, the number of problems from system outages will be very low. The manager basically created problems because that is what was being measured.

Making metrics visible keeps people focused on the desired results. A skilled leader can identify the measurements of success and come up with creative ways to make those metrics concrete and noticeable.

Cultivating Respect

Respect is something that is earned. It doesn’t just happen because you are in a leadership position. If your subordinates respect you simply because you can fire them, you are a very poor leader.

You earn respect in different ways. The biggest way to earn people’s respect is to do what you say you are going to do. I’ve seen many moderately skilled leaders lose a tremendous amount of respect simply because they didn’t follow through on what they said they would do.

The Honest Leader

I once worked at an organization where the CEO was trying to increase the skill level of his management staff. Many of the people in management had a rudimentary education when they started at the organization and were doing very little to expand their skills and knowledge.

The CEO told all the managers that he wanted them to be continually pursuing their education and that he expected every manager to take at least two college classes each year at a minimum. He made it clear that year-end raises would be tied to meeting this goal.

No one heard any more about this requirement. I took several classes toward a second masters degree that I was planning on taking anyway, so I was prepared to document my educational efforts for the year. In December, my manager (a vice president) stopped me in the parking lot and told me that they had decided to give me a 2% raise.

I was kind of surprised because it had been made clear that we would only be getting a raise if we had documented our educational efforts for the year. Assuming that I must have missed the instructions on where to document this, I wrote up a summary and sent it to my manager stating that I wanted my raise to be based on the educational achievement as we had been informed would be the case.

Basically, the reply I got back made it clear that year-end raises were in no way impacted by our meeting the educational goal. Later, when talking with some of the other employees who had been there much longer than I, it became clear that the educational goal was treated almost as a joke. They had been around enough to know that, like many other goals and policies before, it was just a passing fad that wouldn’t ever actually be implemented.

This type of behavior is one of the easiest ways to damage your credibility and respect as a leader. If you have to change your mind for some reason, you should make it clear that you are changing your mind. Think twice before ordering something if you are not completely sure you will follow through.

The Competent Leader

Another way to cultivate respect is by being really good at what you are managing. This doesn’t mean you need to be an expert in everything every one of your subordinates does, but if your conversation makes it clear that you haven’t even spent the effort to understand their job, it will be very difficult for them to respect your expertise.

Your direct reports are going to run into roadblocks and difficulties in their work. While you don’t need to help them work through every single issue, being able to understand the problem and point to solutions will go a long way in building respect. This isn’t something you can fake. If you don’t understand their job, you will probably lose more respect than you gain by trying to help.

The Leader Who Cares

A third practice that will help you gain respect is to take a genuine interest in your employee’s success. If they feel like you are trying to help them achieve success, not just in their current job, but over their whole career, they will respect that you care beyond just the fact that they work for you.

Respect isn’t something that happens automatically and it is easier to lose than to gain. These three practices (follow through, being an expert, and caring about your employee’s success) will go a long way toward helping you build respect.

Don’t be Reactive

The best leaders I’ve worked with are the ones that know when to wait. Early on in my career, I tended to respond to things quickly—especially when I was angry or upset. This is the exact opposite of what the leaders I respected did.

Mature leaders know that some problems go away if they are ignored. There are some leaders who try to take this to an extreme and never deal with anything. The correct balance is somewhere in the middle. There are very few times where putting off sending a scathing email or administering a harsh verbal rebuke will give you cause for regret. On the other hand, it is pretty frequent that haste to respond to a loaded situation will make you wish you had taken more time to think about it.

There are times where a situation calls for immediate attention. The skilled leader will keep an eye out for those types of situations before they happen and make a decision about what to do ahead of time. This allows you to respond quickly, but not be reactive—you’ve spent the time in prudent thought ahead of time, so you are not acting on impulse.

Some of the situations where a swift response would probably be necessary are extreme insubordination, breach of ethics, etc. Sometimes a delayed response will send the wrong signal to your team. Most of the time, delaying in order to act wisely will be to your advantage.

Is Your Vision Clear?

Many leaders assume that everyone understands their vision. Often there is a big gap between their vision and what the people they lead see as the vision. Unfortunately, many leaders don’t take the time to actually find out how well they have communicated their vision.

When the vision is unclear, people tend to default to doing whatever seems best to them. If they are effective at communicating their version of the vision to people they lead, you can easily end up with a direction where each department or organizational unit is heading in a very different direction.

I was sitting in a meeting at a medium sized organization that was having a discussion about branding strategy. One of the vice presidents gave his opinion on a branding issue and then casually mentioned how it aligned with the vision. The only problem was that the vision he articulated was in the complete opposite direction of what the CEO was trying to do.

The problem wasn’t that the CEO didn’t have a vision. He just hadn’t communicated it effectively to the rest of the organization. I’m sure he thought he had communicated the vision, but the test of a well-communicated vision is whether or not the people responsible for implementing the vision understand it.

A very simple way to test your organization’s vision alignment is ask people to write down the vision anonymously in a short paragraph. It doesn’t need to be a long drawn out thing, but this feedback will give you a much better idea of how well aligned everyone is. Keeping it anonymous helps people concentrate more on articulating the vision and less on worrying about getting it wrong. After all, you are really testing your performance, not their ability to remember.

Once you get the feedback, read over each and every vision statement. If you notice that most of them miss something that you consider to be important, that is a good sign that you need to do some more vision casting in that area. It is very likely that you’ll find things that aren’t part of your vision. These are areas where you may need to apply some course correction to make sure everyone is headed in the same direction.

If everyone comes back and states the vision exactly as you feel you’ve communicated it, consider yourself fortunate. Most of us will find that there is some room for improvement in conveying our vision.

Teaching Teamwork

Teamwork is not something that is easy to teach. While you may know certain teamwork principles, it is something that needs to be developed in each team on its own. If you take 5 people from separate organizations and try to put them together into one team, there will be a certain amount of learning that takes place, regardless of how skilled each individual is at teamwork.

When it comes down to it, most of learning to work together as a team is learning to communicate with and trust your fellow team members. When you are creating a team, keep this in mind and try to create an environment where people can learn how to communicate and trust each other.

Often, you can improve your team by creating a temporary environment that requires everyone to learn to communicate and trust each other. Many of the infamous corporate games and simulations help attempt to achieve this. You just have to know what you are trying to accomplish. Corporate games and team building exercises get a bad name when they are done without any particular end in mind. If you don’t know why you are doing them, there are probably better uses of your time.

One of the easiest ways to improve communication and trust is put people in a difficult situation and let them work their way out of it. In day to day business settings, we have a lot of ways to avoid communicating directly or learning to trust each other. You want to look for a situation that doesn’t lend itself to these types of avoidance mechanisms.

Here are a few ideas of ways to help create a temporary environment to help your team grow:

Take an afternoon and go work on something together where it is easy to see what you’ve accomplished. For example, take your team out to paint walls at a local charity. Painting works well because it is easy to see how much you’ve accomplished. Many of our business activities are difficult to quantify, so we are deprived from a real feeling of team accomplishment in our day-to-day work. Painting is also good because it gives people a chance to talk while they paint and get to know each other better outside of work conversations.

Do a ropes course or something similar together. This gets everyone working together in a hands-on way and solving problems. With the right activities, it can really help strengthen the trust in a team. I’m not just talking about the activities where you close your eyes and fall backwards and let another team member catch you. There is a lot of benefit in just forcing people to work through problems together in a different type of setting.

Do one of the survival simulation type games. In these types of simulations, your team has to work together to rank the most important objects to take with them after an airplane crash or similar disaster. The point is that they have to reach a consensus about what items to take, and they aren’t allowed to just take a vote and go with the majority. This forces people to explain themselves and helps them work through conflicting opinions.

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