The evolving landscape of leadership.
Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed a profound shift in the nature of effective leadership. What once revolved around competence – defined by a reliable set of skills like planning, decision-making, and team development – has now evolved into something deeper and more dynamic: capability.
Historically we have paid attention to outward things like planning, decision making, developing others, leading a team, and so forth. Capability is more of the “inner game” way of thinking about leadership, said Randy Chittum, PhD., a leadership consultant.
When senior executives are surveyed, a great number of them refer to increasing complexity as a major challenge for their organization. When things are truly complex (unpredictable), all the old leadership lessons are insufficient. “In this world, we need leaders who are present to emergence, who are adaptable, and can shift as things evolve,” Dr. Chittum said.
However, doing this requires that leaders can see what they might not have seen before. Further, leaders in this world need to understand how their own internal sense-making keeps them seeing what they are used to seeing.
Repertoire Magazine spoke to Dr. Chittum about how leaders can move more into the inner way of thinking.
New ways of fostering trust
The most obvious area of change for leaders over the last five years is in managing remote workers and teams. Less obvious but connected is leading culture and having staff feel “a part of” the organization even within the remote framework, Dr. Chittum said. “In many places, staff have been reduced to a metaphorical ‘pair of hands’ with less energy and commitment to the purpose and the cause,” he said.
But the challenges go beyond remote work. “I suspect that many people changed their feeling about, and relationship to, our institutions in general,” Dr. Chittum said. “This includes work. The nature of the pandemic likely shifted our values to more family and personal well-being.”
Remote work environments mean leaders must think about fostering trust and communication in new ways. Dr. Chittum said some client organizations, and leaders, do this better than others. “I think it is easy to lose sight of the fact that in most cases, leaders and employees enter into this new world in the context of a pre-existing relationship. If I already had trust and good communication with my leader, it seems easier to hold on to that, even as context shifts. The opposite is also true.”
More practically, Dr. Chittum has seen a lot of well-managed organizations take tactical approaches to helping people be in the same space at the same time more often. Those seem to include some days when everyone is in the office and some meetings (typically offsite) where bigger issues are tackled. “In many ways, this is not unlike what we did before.”
Again, the bigger challenge for many is that the changing work dynamics have made us accustomed to new ways of being together. “Like always – it is hard to help people shift out of what they know and expect.”
Empathy and compassion in the modern workplace
People need and want more empathy from their peers and leaders. Given how much meaning we get from our work (at least in the U.S.), having people appreciate us feels critical. And it feels much harder to do in a remote world.
“If empathy is basically defined as the ability to see the world through my eyes, that gets much harder when there is a whole part of your work life (at home, with family, etc) that I don’t have access to,” Dr. Chittum said.
To that end, compassion might be a more important characteristic than empathy. Can leaders have grace for their employees and assume the best of intentions? The counter to this is companies that do things like monitor the number of times your computer mouse moves in an hour. “That kind of transactional thinking quickly destroys trust and empathy, and compassion,” said Dr. Chittum.
The next decade
How to adapt to constant change and uncertainty in the marketplace is the question of the next decade for leaders. Dr. Chittum said adding to the challenge is that the new political eco-system is a great cause of uncertainty and change.
“The mistake most of us make is we love our certainty and are thus prone to create ‘false’ certainty even when none exists,” he said. “We do this for psychological reasons but with real life impact. Part of the reason we love our certainty is that our lazy brains can stop thinking. Certainty equals a clear path forward in our minds. Michael Bloomberg said, ‘we are more certain than ever, but less informed, and far less thoughtful.’ I think that sums up the challenge pretty nicely.”
Comfort with emergence is a key leadership capacity for our times. This requires intense presence to what is truly happening and constantly reassessing that reality. It sounds simple, but requires a different energy and focus than many leaders are used to. “I recently asked a team of executives to individually write a response to this question – ‘what is true now,’” Dr. Chittum noted. “Unsurprisingly, there was very little agreement on something so fundamental.”
The further challenge is to embrace presence and emergence with a sense of optimism and possibility. Noticing is a key capability and responding to what is noticed is a key leadership competence. “If we ruminate rather than reflect, we get drug down an emotional intelligence hole, from which we are incapable of leading anything.”
A delicate balance
In the book “Good to Great,” author Jim Collins talks about how successful companies have an enduring purpose, stimulated by big goals (what Collins called BHAGs – Big Hairy Audacious Goals). “I suspect companies today still need both of those things, and the ability to shift out of either or both as new reality comes online.”
Given that both are good and useful AND that either or both can be over-used (in relationship to the other) – a set of early warning signs could be valuable. “How will we know if we’re over-playing one of these against the other?”
What looks like innovation is often a response to emergent thinking. “Those who can see what others cannot (and see it sooner) are more likely to seem innovative. And good innovation often protects the core,” Dr. Chittum said. “One of my favorite ‘both/ands’ is to honor the past and innovate for the future.”
Randy Chittum, Ph.D. has spent his 25-year career working with leaders and executives worldwide in a variety of organizational settings. He works at all levels of the organization, specializing in leadership development (individual and team coaching, leadership workshops covering emotional intelligence, coaching for managers, managing change and transition, and branding and personal presence), and organization development (team and system level interventions) including strategy development and learning to collectively think differently to support sustainable change. Learn more at still-leading.com
One underutilized skill
Dr. Chittum believes one of the most underutilized skills for today’s leaders is quitting. Behavioral economists have a smart way of thinking about quitting, he said. “It happens when the combination of sunk cost combines with opportunity cost. If the sunk cost doesn’t outweigh the opportunity cost, we should quit. This is a more practical approach to emergence and again, requires constant care and attention to what is shifting around us.”