Leadership Horizons

Current and Future Leadership Trends

• Lois Burton • Episode 1

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Unlock the secrets of successful leadership in today's fast-paced world with me, Lois Burton, on Leadership Horizons. Dive into the pressing need for values-led leadership and learn how to articulate and embody your core values effectively. We'll unravel the complex challenges leaders face, from balancing financial targets with employee well-being to maintaining customer trust, all through real-world examples. Discover how staying true to your values can position you for future success while navigating these intricate demands.

In this episode, we also focus on building resilience and mastering essential leadership skills. Prioritize your resilience to better support your team, and enhance your adaptive intelligence, emotional intelligence, and strategic communication skills. Learn the art of embracing diverse perspectives and resolving conflicts productively to tackle complex problems. As we close, your feedback becomes the cornerstone of future episodes, ensuring that our discussions remain relevant and impactful. Join the conversation and help shape the topics that matter most to you and your leadership journey.

Leadership Horizons - Helping You Lead Beyond Boundaries

Lois Burton:

Hello and welcome to Leadership Horizons, my new podcast. I'm Lois Burton and, after two decades of working with senior leaders and executives across the globe, I'm excited to begin this journey with you. Throughout my career, I've had the privilege of working with leaders who transform organizations across every sector, from global corporations to public services, from manufacturing to the arts. With over 30,000 hours of individual coaching and five and a half thousand hours of team coaching, I've seen firsthand how the demands on leaders have evolved, and that's exactly what we're going to explore today the current and future trends and evolution of leadership. In today's rapidly changing world, the leadership skills we developed in the past are not enough anymore. The pace of change, technological advancement and new expectations mean that we need to develop skills that may look very different from what worked in the past. From my work within leadership over the years, one key lesson I've learned is that great leadership is always pushing boundaries. No one can afford to stand still. So today I want to talk about the new expectations, challenges and opportunities facing leaders, and we're going to explore two of the key trends that are reshaping leadership today and how to approach those trends, plus think about the specific skills you need as a leader to develop and stay ahead of these changes. Leaders today are navigating an interconnected web of challenges where every decision has ripple effects both across their organization and, even more significantly, often beyond their organization. So the idea of a set of leadership skills or even traditional leadership styles are no longer enough for success. We have to look at leadership in new ways. So let's start with two of the key trends I'm seeing.

Lois Burton:

Firstly, the desire for values-led leadership. This is not new, but, like many things, the desire for this has grown, particularly over the last few years. I've seen the thirst for values-led leadership grow, and it's not enough now to demonstrate credibility through your skills and experience. People want to know more about who you are and what are the values and principles you stand for. This week, I was talking to a coachee who talked about being a values-led leader, and my question to her was so what are your values? She knew them, but really struggled to articulate them, and this is not unusual. Many leaders are absolutely values-led.

Lois Burton:

However, these values are implicit rather than explicit, and you must be able to make them explicit and articulate these clearly to others for them to have faith in you. Of course, this carries some risk with it, as once you do this, your people expect you to live your values. So it's not enough just to say the words. You must be able to explain what those words mean to you and be confident that others will see those values through your actions. So what are your values? What do you stand for?

Lois Burton:

And the first action it's important to take is to identify these, identify your own most important values as a leader, and spend some time on really thinking it through and describing to yourself, so that you can then explain to others what these look like in practice. For example, if one of your values is fairness, how does that translate into how you lead? Example, if one of your values is fairness, how does that translate into how you lead? Is it about equality and inclusiveness? Again, what do those mean in practice? Does it include giving everyone equal time with you? Does it mean that you would always look at equity in how much development you give people or how much you reward them financially? Does it mean you would never ask them to do something you wouldn't do yourself, or never ask them to do something outside of their roommates? It may be all, some or none of the above. This is not about how others interpret the word. It's about how you interpret the word and recognizing that others may not attach the same meaning to any word that you do, so it's very important that we can explain it.

Lois Burton:

I work with many of my coaches on this, and with the transcript of this episode, I will include an exercise that I used so that you can have a go at doing this yourself, and I'd love your feedback on it. You can have a go at doing this yourself and I'd love your feedback on it. So values-led leadership is a starting point, and understanding that if you can articulate this, it then needs to inform your actions is equally important. And this brings us on to the second trend that I want to explore today, and it's your ability to manage complex demands and what often feels like contradictory challenges. This has always been part of the leader's role. However, in recent times, it's become even more important, and leaders who are able to do this whilst maintaining the values that they hold, and being seen to maintain the values that they hold, are going to be the successful leaders of the future. So it's a trend that you really must get to grips with and think about how you're going to approach. Let me share a recent example of what this looks like from my work with a senior leadership team and the challenges they're navigating.

Lois Burton:

So this team was challenged with developing a greater market share and implementing substantial financial savings whilst managing their employee concerns about job security and capacity and workload, still maintaining their customer trust, the quality of their output and staying ahead of their competition Again, a number of things that can feel really contradictory. And again, it's not new. This has always been part of the leader's role, but the severity of the demands and the required speed of response from leaders and leadership teams has greatly increased. So the team that I was working with had to grapple with a number of different areas within that context. So they had to increase productivity across their distributed teams, and productivity had significantly dropped over the previous 12 months. They had to manage their integration of hybrid working and the tension between supporting remote work preferences while fostering team cohesion and culture and, within that, managing equitable experiences between in-office staff and remote staff. They also had to support their employee well-being in a diverse environments and their mental health whilst driving performance targets and simultaneously cutting costs and making savings. They had stress levels which were perceived to be higher than they'd ever been and were contributing to the difficulties. They'd got vacancy freezes coupled with salary freezes and managing that in an uncertain economy, and they were also thinking about balancing their automation, their adoption of AI, with their workforce development.

Lois Burton:

Does it feel familiar? I know this is familiar territory for many of you. So what kind of solutions are there and what kind of skills do you need as a leader in order to navigate these? Kind of solutions are there and what kind of skills do you need as a leader in order to navigate these? Firstly and this sounds really obvious, but actually often isn't you must become clear on what you actually intend to achieve. What's the ultimate goal?

Lois Burton:

The team I'm working with were in chaos when I first started working with them. They were rushing around, they were having meetings with everyone, endlessly talking about the different issues I've just highlighted, endlessly talking about how stressed everyone was, and although they were having ideas, they weren't coming up with planned and credible solutions. They were struggling to think what to do first and very often coming up against the barrier that they thought, gosh, these are just seemingly insoluble problems. So they were doing a lot, but they weren't actually achieving anything, partly because they weren't taking that step back and giving themselves time and space to think, time and space to think. Again, it sounds really obvious, but I do often say to people I work with that you're paid to think above all and then to act, not the other way around. If actually, you're spending your days in constant meetings that are not achieving very much, or you're constantly battling with trying to keep up with your emails, that's not conducive to thinking. To keep up with your emails, that's not conducive to thinking, and so often for leaders at this point in time, they have to think about what they do differently in order to give themselves that time and space to think in order to really get to grips with these big demands and complex problems.

Lois Burton:

So with this time this team, we started by setting aside the time for the team to think, and that was a challenge in itself, and I'm sure many of you recognize this. Just even finding a bit of time to sit down with your whole team and do some collective thinking feels often impossible, but making sure you do it and getting past that sense of impossibility is absolutely crucial. So when we did find the time for the team, we began by laying everything out and getting clarity on what the actual goals were before starting to think about action and ideas and prioritization. Again, it sounds so obvious, but they hadn't done it. So the team realized that productivity was the real goal and that they also needed to have a measurable target on this. It wasn't just enough to say, oh, we've got to become more productive, we've got to get our productivity levels back up. What does that mean? By how much? Short-term, long-term and this target had to be one that they could communicate with confidence and also communicate some ideas, practical ideas about what would foster productivity, plus where the roadblocks were and how to remove those.

Lois Burton:

The difficulty when there's such a lot of complexity is that you start in the wrong place, which is what this team had done, and they were addressing the symptoms without a clear idea of the goal. Secondly, we established short and long-term objectives and we talked a lot about, within that, what was within their control and influence and what wasn't. Because, again, it's within their control and influence and what wasn't. Because, again, it's no use focusing on things that are outside of your control. You've got to focus on things that actually are within your control and influence. So the example for this team is that they knew that they couldn't change the policy on vacancy freeze or salary freeze in the short term. So they had to focus on helping people to manage within that environment and still produce within that environment, rather than endlessly debating the issue, which was what had been happening. Thirdly, they had to establish how they, as leaders, were going to work together in order to achieve this and what skills they needed to develop in they, as leaders, were going to work together in order to achieve this and what skills they needed to develop in order to do so. This is so important.

Lois Burton:

The temptation to ignore your own needs as leaders and leadership teams in order to concentrate on the needs of others is a recipe for disaster. So, whatever you do, don't do this. Over the years, I, time and time again, talk to people about the need to put your own oxygen mask on first, and it's even more important right now. If you're not prepared to prioritize yourself and build your own resilience as an individual leader and as a leadership team, you can't hope to help others manage their levels of resilience, and these are essential in order to manage the increased demands. This is just the start for this team, however. Establishing the clear goals and getting their own house in order at the beginning was vital, and in the last months since our session, they have increased productivity in two of their key teams by 3%, which is a great start. They've also, as part of that, established peer support groups for team leaders, and the feedback from these has been positive. One piece of feedback that they got was from a team leader who said I was just about to fall over. However, the first group meeting gave me much more confidence that I was doing some things right, and it also gave me a new way of talking to my team. I think these groups are brilliant. Thank you for starting them. So, again, small start, but a very important one. The temptation this team had fallen into was just to plunge into action without a goal and a plan or any form of cohesion, and they were just trying to sort things out piecemeal, and this was a recipe for failure for them. So taking that step back, rowing back and starting in the right place has given them the ability to get the right direction of travel actually happening and starting to see some success even in a short time happening and starting to see some success even in a short time.

Lois Burton:

So in the next episode, I'm going to explore some of the particular skills which leaders need to develop in order to successfully rise to the challenges and opportunities, and I'll be going into these in more depth and I'll also be talking to my interviewees about these skills and how they're developing these skills and which ones they see as being the most important. But before we finish today, I just wanted to go through what these skills are and what we will be covering in subsequent episodes. So the first skill I want to talk about is greater agility, adaptability and flexibility what I understand as adaptive intelligence and this includes the ability to see patterns in chaos, make decisions within conflict or rapidly changing information, set clear goals but be flexible with strategies as situations evolve. And you also need to understand, within this skill, how you balance short-term pressures with long-term sustainability and develop your skill in adjusting strategies very quickly based on the emerging data and circumstances, although it might evolve, but the goal does need to stay clear. But the strategies will need to be adaptable and you'll need to adjust them quickly, having the capacity to manage the ambiguity while maintaining the clear direction, and having the courage to be bold and go beyond what you know and what you've seen before and take calculated risks when necessary. So that's the area of adaptive intelligence.

Lois Burton:

Secondly, enhanced emotional intelligence. We know about emotional intelligence. We know about its importance for leaders. However, today's leaders need to enhance their emotional intelligence even more, and particularly in the following ways. You need to be able to cultivate a deep empathy and ability to understand diverse employee experiences. This has a really big impact on productivity, and your ability to demonstrate this as a leader will help more than anything to keep people engaged and motivated around your leadership.

Lois Burton:

You need to develop skills in reading and responding to the unspoken concerns and emotional undercurrents. People don't always tell you, as a leader, exactly what they're thinking and feeling. You need to be able to read the room and pick up when people do have unspoken concerns and emotional undercurrents, and then start having a dialogue around that. You'll need to have the ability to maintain your own composure and inspire confidence during uncertainty. I'm sure many of you sometimes feel like you're clinging on with your fingernails, but you have to maintain that outward calm in order to inspire confidence in others and we're going to say more about you in a little while.

Lois Burton:

You also have to be able to build trust through authentic communication. People do need to believe what you say, and the way you communicate is vital to people believing what you say, which brings us on to strategic communication your ability to articulate complex ideas clearly across different audiences and build your skill in fostering transparent dialogue about difficult topics. Again, you can't afford to ignore the difficult topics and not speak about them. And going right back to where we started about values-led leadership if people have faith in your values, they will be much more willing to engage with you in a transparent way about the difficult things. You need the capacity to build alignment around contradictory priorities. You need the capacity to build alignment around contradictory priorities. So people will see those contradictory priorities and it's your job as a leader again to be able to explain to them how they all matter and how you can align together around these. And the ability to communicate in a whole host of different environments, both virtually and in person small groups, big groups, one-to-ones and, say, online, virtually standing in front of the room. Your ability to communicate, with impacting all of these environments, is again a vital skill that is even more important today than it's ever been.

Lois Burton:

The next skill is around complex problem solving. The days of a solitary leader who just gathered in intelligence and then made solo decisions are very long gone, have been for a long time, but again, in today's world world, bringing in diverse perspectives and working together to solve complex challenges is the way forward. It's the core to success, as is your ability within that to facilitate productive conflicts and debate. We so often avoid conflict. Not all conflict is damaging if it's. If you know, if you're thinking about bringing in those diverse perspectives, that inevitably means that there's going to be conflicting views, and if you can try and think of this as and one of my favorite metaphors is that productive conflict is actually the group, the grit, and in the oyster that produces the pearl. So you have to have a bit of grit in your teams in order to get the best possible solutions, and you as a leader have to be able to facilitate that. You need the capacity to build coalitions across different stakeholder groups again, bringing in different groups, different people, everyone who has a stake in this is going to help you to the best possible solution and then understanding how to leverage that collective intelligence effectively. So not just the talking, but how you then translate that into action.

Lois Burton:

The next and unavoidable aspect of leadership is digital, and so leaders don't have to be able to understand how to do everything in the field of technology, but you do need to understand of how the technology can enable new solutions. There's a lot of fear, as we know, around new technology, particularly AI, at the moment, and so your understanding, so that you can then skillfully promote digital adoption while managing the resistance and the fear within that, is crucial. You have to be able to balance the technology and the human factors and enable people to see the benefits the new technology can bring, but to actually reassure them that human beings still matter and we still need human beings in every aspect of our world. So, as I say, getting to grips with this, understanding it and then communicating it skillfully is a really important part of leadership today. The final thing I want to talk about, and something we will be going into in a lot more detail in subsequent episodes, is resilience. There's such a lot at the moment and, as I said, there's always been a lot, but there's even more at the moment and so you're going to need to focus on your resilience even more than you ever have and build an exceptional sense of resilience within yourself. So this can include your energy.

Lois Burton:

Now, how do you increase and sustain your energy, your optimism and your motivation, particularly when things are tough. Digging deep and finding your courage when you need to be bold and take calculated risks. Digging deep and finding your courage when you need to be bold and take calculated risks. Staying calm when everybody around you is either in panic or in chaos. Dealing with the personal uncertainty, fear and challenge. Don't you know? Don't try and push that away. We all have personal uncertainties, all have personal fears and find these challenging. And dealing with your own fears will help you help other people to deal with theirs, making sense of all the conflicting priorities you have and enabling focus on what's important and maintaining that focus even in the most complex and high pressure situations.

Lois Burton:

Focus, I think, is one of the most important areas today and it's one of the things I spend a lot of time talking to the people I work with about. Stop self-sabotaging. We can all self-sabotage, so we need to know how we do it, we need to know what triggers it and we need to have strategies to stop it. And, overall, getting things done, moving things forward without burning yourself out, and focusing properly and seriously on your own work-life balance, which all of these things will help you improve your confidence as a leader and your confidence in your ability to seize the opportunities we have and navigate the challenges. So, as I said, we'll be looking into these in more depth in subsequent episodes and I will be talking to different leaders in different sectors about how they're navigating all of this.

Lois Burton:

So I'm really delighted you've been with me today. I hope this has been a helpful starting point for you and I'm looking forward to getting any feedback. So please do send me feedback and anything you'd like me to cover. Please put some suggestions forward, because I really would love to cover things that are going to be important for you. So I look forward to your feedback and I will see you next week when you tune in for our next episode. Bye for now.