Leaders come in different shapes and forms. They may subscribe to a single style of leadership or a combination of the best practices in people management. Whatever the case, one thing that you have to consider as a team lead, manager, or officer of your company is how your leadership principles are influencing the people around you. The goal is to keep your followers or employees motivated, guided, and engaged.
Thus, here’s an infographic that can help you lead your team and your company to success in 2019 as it discusses the future of leadership development across industries. Also, it will explain the modern dynamic of leadership wherein artificial intelligence (AI) and other smart technologies work together alongside the human workforce.
Companies need qualified leaders to create and implement policies, which can help the organization respond to existing or future business challenges. However, it appears that within companies, there’s a shortage of high-quality leaders to steer the business toward success.
Leaders who are either unskilled or unprepared are found in 51% of organizations, according to research on the state of leadership development across industries.
Despite the presence of training programs for leaders, there seems to be a gap. This does not only affect a company’s level of employee engagement and productivity but can also undermine its ability to survive as a business organization.
While majority of companies or a good 89% of them agree that developing leaders is a worthy business activity, only 10% of C-suite executives think that their leadership programs produce results that are helpful for their organization.
Studies say that the most effective leadership initiatives are those that are properly directed. They also describe successful companies as being able to adapt their leadership development practices according to their business goals, needs, or challenges.
Just as business models are unique to every organization, companies also need to determine the right types of actions or behavior that managers should exemplify. This way, they can inspire employees to work harder and smarter, which can help drive better business performance for the company.
Speaking of leadership effects in the workplace, managers have been cited as one of the reasons that employees leave the company. One in two employees are said to have quit from their job to get away from a boss who is an ineffective communicator or is not approachable.
Survey findings seem to support this lack of communication and people handling skills among 69% of managers, with 37% of managers claiming that they don’t find it easy to talk to employees about their work performance. The downside to this is that employees do not receive enough guidance that will make them efficient and engaged in their work.
Needless to say, these statistics can translate to costly turnovers, which we can all agree are likely to hamper business operations, tarnish a company’s image, and reduce morale in the workplace.
In this section, we’ll delve deeper into leadership trends that have the potential to make an impact to the modern workplace, including your own organization.
It used to be that senior employees were the first to be promoted to leadership or managerial positions in many companies. However, the entry of millennials into the workforce merits that you re-evaluate your leadership development initiatives, especially since millennials are expected to make up 75% of the global workforce by 2025.
Instead of relying on age or length of service as basis for promotion, you should come up with other ways to discover leadership talent or capacity across all of your employees, whether they’re Gen X, baby boomers, or Gen Y. The key is in using relevant strategies that can attract, engage, and retain workers across these generations.
You need to be the best manager you can be for your employees. There are several ways that you can promote workforce engagement, starting with building relationships with your employees. To realize this goal, you need to focus on certain soft skills, such as emotional intelligence and people skills, as employees feel comfortable toward someone who’s able to relate to their concerns, sentiments, or challenges.
Ideally, performance management processes should be two-fold. As leaders, you have to help your employees set clear goals and the means of measuring their progress over time.
In return, employees should feel welcome to give their honest assessment of your leadership style, so that everyone in the organization can help build a collaborative environment.
No matter how far-reaching technologies may become in the future, they cannot replace employees as the most valuable and capable asset of the company. Thus, it’s only wise that you invest in their further learning as having employees who can work to their full potential can help your business grow.
At the same time, you should be in touch with the need for employees to experience a work-life balance. Free your employees from unnecessary meetings, after-work emails, and additional activities to prevent them from feeling overwhelmed.
As mentioned earlier, leadership only becomes significant when it’s in line with the thrusts of the organization. When you have a full understanding of what the company believes in and hopes to achieve, you will exert efforts to stay in that direction and, as a result, inspire the same kind of response among the members of your team. Moreover, a unified approach on how to accomplish business targets can set your company apart from the rest of the industry.
There’s no question that coaching is an integral part of leadership development. Through mentoring, you get to know the individual talents in your organization as well as their attributes, including strengths and weaknesses. This will give you a chance to groom high performers for more challenging tasks or to rally behind underachievers, so they feel included in the team.
For your coaching to really matter, you’ll need to study your employees’ learning styles. Make sure that you’re sharing the right content through proper delivery channels to bring about authentic learning in the workplace.
The rise of new technologies and creative minds are giving way to unprecedented shifts and disruptions in the market, which can prove to be challenging for businesses. These scenarios call for you to be strategically agile in your leadership style, so you can help your organization to be more responsive toward emerging demands and opportunities.
In a culture of agility, you’re supposed to keep track of global trends and analyses how these may affect your own industry. As leader, you should be able to educate your employees about current market conditions and influence your employees to be more interested in ideas, which can bring about improvements or innovations for the company.
Having both the talent and the technology to serve customers is fast becoming a norm in many business organizations. In the same way, you should take advantage of technology to help you in different areas of talent management, such as trainings, assessments, and other employee development activities.
Through AI technologies, you can gather valuable amounts of data about your employees. These can range from determining your employees’ leave pattern to analyzing your agent’s speech nuances during client calls – all of which can give you insights on how to help your employees perform their tasks better.
The times we’re living in are evolving so fast that companies need to come up with brilliant solutions to avoid getting left behind. In 2019, your role as a company leader will be more crucial than ever, especially in addressing the demands and preferences of all types of working demographics. You’ll need to build your leadership skills, so you might want to check out the People Handling Skills Seminar of Guthrie-Jensen Consultants to help you master the fundamentals of effective leadership.
Filed Under Leadership & Management
