Leadership Development for a Changing World

Where are the happiest, least happy, and fastest improving countries worldwide? Visual Capitalist have broken down this annual ranking by region to answer that question.

This piece by Ronni Hendel-Giller about vertical development contains some great thinking about

a) how to envisage it

"The problem for most leaders…is that the cup of leadership knowledge is already full…They already know it; they just can’t be it. The limiting factor is no longer the content (the leader’s knowledge); it is the cup (the leader’s mind).” Increasing the cup size is vertical development." and how to support it -

b) why it's important

"our survival as a species depends on our ability to tackle the world’s most complex issues — and that our capacity for complexity must shift if we are to do so"

c) to how we can apply it

"Understanding that we can grow vertically, not only horizontally, can help us to reframe the work of becoming a more effective leader. Instead of only focusing on gaining more knowledge and skills, we can spend time on cultivating a moment-to-moment ability to see things differently — to make that which was invisible, visible."

"Today’s titans of tech and finance want to solve the world’s problems, as long as the solutions never, ever threaten their own wealth and power" argues  Anand Giridharadas author of 'Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World'

Forget about romanticised and heroic leaders. Today’s leadership, says Georgia Sorenson, is all about purpose-led companies that are organised or branded around an idea.

Leadership is really not about leaders or followers anymore. It’s bigger than that. In many ways, we have been looking for leadership in all the wrong places. Leadership involves people, yes, but ultimately transforming leadership is not about people – whether leaders or followers – but about values and ideas.

In this piece, Kenneth Mikkelsen, a profound thinker and practitioner 'who lives in many worlds' and is co-author of The Neo-Generalist is interviewed by Mike Parker of Liminal Coaching.

The deep conversation encompasses a wide range of Kenneth's thinking about the state of the world and what needs to happen if people are to lead meaningful and flourishing lives in the world that's ahead of us.

"We sense that the fabric that holds our society together is under pressure. Yet, most leaders and organizations are still occupied with exploiting what they already have and know. They rely on old maps in a new landscape. This dependency on the past and best practices makes it difficult to improvise, change course and embark on a journey of exploration when conditions change. Right now there is a lot of talk about new technologies, and how they shape the future. I'm not a techno-optimists per se. I think it's lazy thinking to say that it's all about the technology. There are much bigger things at play."...

With social impact fundamental to the values of millennials, their behavior as consumers and employees hold clues to the leadership style and societal values they'll bring as they come into positions of power.

It may have taken place in a galaxy far, far away, but in terms of leadership, there is much in Star Wars that we can learn from. The epic battles between the Jedi and the Empire have become part of the fabric of popular culture. But take a closer look behind the light sabres at the clashes between the Jedi and the Rebel Alliance on one side and the Storm Troopers under Emperor Palpatine on the other, and you will see traces of many of the ideas that shape leadership, and help to account for both its successes and its failures, explains Dr Leah Tomkins, Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies, Open University Business School.

Expectations for a corporation and its leaders are changing. Candidates, customers, and communities now want to see that a corporation has values that are aligned with their own. This is especially true for the next generation: PwC found that millennials are 5.3x more likely to stay with an organization when they feel a strong connection to the organization's purpose.

This new landscape has created a dilemma for leaders who haven't examined their own values. The simplest solution may seem to be that someone just adopts their company's corporate values as their own. But, that approach creates a dissonance between what someone truly values and what they say they value, which results in leaders who are uncomfortable, stressed, and inauthentic

Corporate International Service Learning (CISL) programmes offer leaders the opportunity to test their abilities and develop global leadership skills by applying their work based skills to a project or assignment that serves a third-party constituency. Most often, companies seek to understand the immediate responses and outcomes of these programmes through post programme surveys, but very little evaluation is undertaken to establish the longer-term impact.

The impact on the participant, and ultimately their business is a key driver for stakeholders. Being able to clearly show how new skills have been developed and what impact this learning has on subsequent behaviour and work performance is essential to ensure executive buy in and programme growth.

According to this HBR article, by Deborah Rowland there are four key factors to address to make Leadership development effective:

• Make it experiential.
• Influence participants’ “being,” not just their “doing.”
• Place development into its wider, systemic context.
• Enroll faculty who act less as experts and more as Sherpas.

Corporate International Service Learning (CISL) however, is more than just a training course. CISL programmes are an experience that impact participants profoundly. They take participants across international borders to learn skills, gain knowledge and develop new behaviours by challenging them to apply their skills and expertise on real-life issues that have a social impact.  New data from Emerging World’s 2017 CISL Impact Benchmark Study backs up this claim with long term impact data on these experiences at all the levels on the Kirkpatrick framework.

What would a sustainable, universally beneficial economy look like? "Like a doughnut," says Oxford economist Kate Raworth. In a stellar, eye-opening talk

"Forty years ago Mrs Thatcher came to power, is the UK economy at another historic moment of change?" questions the BBC in this article.

Citing data such as flat levels of income since the financial crisis and the rise of temporary contracts, the article questions whether  the UK economy is about the undergo a massive change.  It reports that notes several opinion polls point toward embracing socialism ahead of capitalism.  But also acknowledges that the difference between 1979 and 2019 is that right now there is an absence of consensus on what an alternative vision looks like.

As leadership development professionals, we all want to design programs that have an impact and shift the way that people think and act. Measuring that impact effectively takes time and careful consideration, quite often it is overlooked or given less attention. Yet undertaking a good quality impact assessment not only provides learning professionals with more compelling data that can be used to secure ongoing stakeholder buy-in, but also the ability to learn and continuously improve programs.

Many leadership program evaluations focus on short-term feedback mechanisms in which participants are asked to rate their learning experience shortly after completing it and appraise what they have learnt. While these types of evaluations serve a purpose, providing quick data points that can be used to suggest (hopefully) positive impact, they do not assess the longer-term impact and capture information on changes in behaviour and results that happen as a consequence.

"Executives at purpose-prioritizing companies believe that their customers are more loyal and their employees more engaged. They see themselves as market leaders with a brighter future than their competitors. And they indicate that they are reaping major rewards for their efforts. They also indicate that they will continue working to embed purpose across their organizations" says this report from EY and HBR.

There is a'purpose gap' however between what organizations believe to be the case in terms of the importance of purpose and how their companies live up to that belief.

For those new to the term, SOGIE, an abbreviation combining sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression, has become one of the main reference terms to describe the LGBT (or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community. It is now being introduced in many legal doctrines, in UN documents, and it is becoming popular in social media.

Its usefulness lies in its inclusiveness: The term “LGBT” is specific to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, but SOGIE refers to characteristics common to all human beings because everyone has a sexual orientation and a gender identity. Everyone also expresses their gender, not just lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

In order to develop the leadership they require, employers need to ensure the leadership skills of all of their staff are refined – not just for the individuals identified as potential leaders. Ashleigh Wight reports from Skillsoft's 2018 EMEA Perspectives conference. When it comes to leadership development, it’s easy

To develop great leaders, put them in tough, global situations.

The best way to develop leaders capable of guiding their companies in a complex, dynamic and global world is to put them in complex, dynamic and global situations. That means experiential, immersive learning, often in unfamiliar or uncomfortable settings.

When it comes to leadership development, organizations are becoming smarter by increasing the amount of resources and energy given to exploration strategies, while continuing to deliver results through exploitation strategies. What remains to be a challenge for many companies, is how to adequately prepare corporate leaders to be effective in the exploration domain. Simply put, how do leaders become explorers within their companies? And why is it so important?

In this article The New York Times reports on Laurence Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, the $6 trillion investment firm's, plans to tell C.E.O.s in a letter that businesses must serve a social purpose or risk losing BlackRock's support.

The author of the article, Andrew Ross Sorkin, compares and contrasts this approach with Milton Friedman's much referenced views on the responsibility of corporations to make money for their shareholders  made in the 1970's.

There are very clear differences but also some similarities depending upon interpretation.

"Yes, we are capable of doing two things at the same time. It is possible, for example, to watch TV while cooking dinner or to answer an email while talking on the phone", writes James Clear

"What is impossible, however, is concentrating on two tasks at once. Multitasking forces your brain to switch back and forth very quickly from one task to another.

This wouldn't be a big deal if the human brain could transition seamlessly from one job to the next, but it can't. Multitasking forces you to pay a mental price each time you interrupt one task and jump to another. In psychology terms, this mental price is called the switching cost."

The Global Purpose Survey undertaken by Imperative in collaboration with Linked In has some interesting findings. It studied over 25,000 Linked In users from across the globe to understand their connection with purpose.