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What does leadership look like in the future? I know this might sound like a theoretical/ research-oriented question. But let us keep that question engaged for the time being. 

We all know that technology has been growing at an incredible speed and we are all catching up to some extent. This is indeed a lovely concept for continuous improvement. We apply this to almost all tangible areas in front of us. Project management and agile culture teaches us to do this in the name of sprint retrospectives and project debrief. 

The idea never fades – it is about continual and never-ending improvement. I can go a bit theoretical and quote the Japanese concept of Kaizen, but I will stick to the question on mind today. What does future of leadership look like? 

Future of Leadership 

The current pandemic surely has taught us a few business lessons in operation. One thing that immediately comes to mind is the wider acceptance of working from home philosophy. 

I can recall a time where working from home was treated a luxury. That slowly transpired into an understanding that a company can get more done if it was open to the culture of remote working. 

Having said that, there is often a question of team building and camarderie which is a difficult balance to achieve when people are working from home. 

Where does the future of leadership stand in such a situation? 

Collaboration

I have been a huge fan of the collaborative model of working. It is often a stupid assumption that one person can do everything. This is beautifully elucidated in a startup where a founder defines a huge part of initial working of a startup. 

This however is more pronounced when a startup moves on to its scaling up stage. The first and foremost question asked in many investment rounds is about the team. To be honest, one can never have enough collaboration. 

There have been certain accusations that meetings do take a lot of time. They tend to, we also talked about some ways of keeping these meetings to time. But they are certainly the guiding blocks to set the tone for collaboration.

As a leader, it is not just a desire to work collaboratively, but a mandate to actively create collaborative working cultures. The question however is – is this the requirement of a current or future leader? 

Delegation 

We talk about delegation a lot in leadership. Delegation without corresponding authority is meaningless. For a leader, there ought to be a fair mix of ownership and the resources to contribute to the full extent of this ownership.

We talked about micromanagement and its detrimental effects in a previous post. Whether it is the future leader or current, we will have to ensure that this is constantly kept under control. A leader is not out there to do all the jobs, but to find the most effective ways of getting things done. 

Need for trust

This is not necessarily a situational/work from home scenario – but the need for trust is on the increase. I have seen some managers treat work from home as a luxury. For some businesses, I may agree that it might appear so.

But the demand for delivery never reduces. As a leader, it is imperative to fully trust the team to deliver. Instead of treading on the path of distrust, we have to move from a level of belief. This is about the belief in people and their inherent nature to do good work.

If however, we tread on the path of doubt and distrust – not only are we risking a bad culture, but we are forcing people into a defined format. And there is a very clear danger of such things failing in the very near long term if not for the short one.

Training future leaders

Whether it is the present or future of leadership, it is inadequate if we are thinking in the short term. Yes, the pandemic has put us in a difficult situation, but we will have to evolve and come up with ways to make businesses succeed. Business success is sustainable only when the team is built up with individual leaders. 

If we are not doing everything, we can bring out this leadership among the team – the question is – are we doing a good job in the position of a leader?

Towards the end of this post, I come up with a question – are we really talking about the future of leadership or the current trend? To be honest, it all sounds like the current common-sense approach to me. Really, the true essence of leadership is in listening to what the team wants to ensure that business goals are met. If we can do that quite well, then we certainly are headed in the right direction.