Early in the pandemic, Josh Bersin called it the Big Reset: “The Coronavirus is accelerating one of the biggest business transformations in decades.”
As the business landscape evolves and employees reassess their priorities, leadership is changing as well. To reset thinking on what it means to be a leader today, we asked Josh Bersin and other thought and business leaders for their perspective.
The biggest mistakes I’m seeing in leadership today are twofold: First, the one size fits all or square peg/square hole management style has proven ineffective when building a long term, sustainable growth model and often leads to high attrition. Leadership, like a coach, would be better suited looking for pockets of talent and moving them into positions where they can score, or defend based on skills. Rather than expecting all things from all people, expect individual value and position it accordingly on the field. Second observation, managing and motivating the next generation of professionals will require different styles of engagement and team driven performance/recognition. They will be less interested in being the first one in the office and last to leave, or willing to out work their smarter peers. After all, they have refined the work smarter not harder methodology – and it works. Lastly, leadership starts with the recruitment and onboarding strategies followed by having a mission that inspires the team, but transparent in terms of difficulties of the objectives.
-Gino Andreozzi, Business Development and Client Services Executive, Worldwide Technology
Leadership is all about having a plan, communicating that plan and then being flexible in how that plan gets executed. Your team needs to feel like they own the execution and feel like they are driving the plan to success.
-Bill Childress, SVP, Chief Revenue Office, NTT Data
Leadership is about convincing, not telling, people on your team to do important things they didn’t think they could do or may have initially resisted doing.
-Marcus Holloway, CEO, MTM Technologies
If you’re inspired by these perspectives on leadership today, stay tuned…there’s more to come! And if you are interested in crafting your own contribution, please email me at janis@issg.net