The Future of Leadership
Recently attending a webinar by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith on the topic “leadership yesterday, today and tomorrow” and discussing leadership in educational media, motivated me to dedicate this article to the topic of leadership and its role in today’s society.
The current challenges of a global, complex, changing and diverse world demand different leadership.
The leader is no longer understood as a task-focused superior being who provides structure and direction but as a facilitator who is involved in dialogue and the participation of all.
“The leader of the past knew how to say, the leader of the future will know how to ask,” is a quote from Peter Drucker. For Paul Hersey “leadership is working with and through others to achieve objectives.”
Peter Hawkins tells us that the very concept of intelligence today is evolving. The concept of intelligence progressed from the intelligence quotient IQ to the emotional quotient EQ, and currently we are moving to the WeQ, that is, to the concept of collaborative intelligence.
The leader of the future demonstrates high interest, simultaneously in tasks or objectives and in people, and his behaviour changes according to what is required by the situation.
It is advisable to analyse the level of preparation of the teams, the autonomy in the decision and the level of power, prior to choosing the leadership style or the decision-making style.
Peter Hawkins believes that the people who will be most successful in the future will be those who have the greatest skills in establishing connections.
This reminds me of a quote from Jared Weiner at APEDE’s 2017 CADE Annual Executive Conference, “Soft skills like relationship building, collaboration, empathy, and cultural sensitivity will become the currency of the highest order. People with hybrid skills – high technological skill and deep social sensitivity – will win in the future.”
Global thinking, cultural and intercultural diversity, alliance building, intelligent technological knowledge and shared leadership (the leader as facilitator) are emerging dimensions of the global leader of the future, in the global leadership assessment model of MGSCC – Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching.
This MGSCC model is an interesting evaluation to serve as the basis for a coaching process for leadership development, in a structured, measurable and inclusive process of the stakeholders or people of interest around the leader, since leadership only truly exists when it is recognised. The model provides the structure and direction and the coach is a facilitator of learning.
Fatima Ribeiro
