adaptability and ingenuity.
The future is ever-changing, and our leadership needs to change with it. Cultural beliefs and practices are changing across the globe, people are growing and adapting to new norms. Whereas one culture might have put restrictions on how high a woman could climb in the corporate world even so recently as a decade ago, we now see women becoming CEOs and Presidents of companies they never would have had this kind of access to before. Demographics are shifting and people are becoming more aware of the concept that gender and belief have far less impact on success than do things such as adaptability and ingenuity. Leaders of the future must embrace this change in order to be most successful.
Three characteristics that a leader of the future will need to have are vision, emotional intelligence, and courage. Vision is a key factor in how a leader will succeed because it is inherently different than say, ideas and ambition. Everyone can have a good idea at some point, but a leader has the drive to turn that idea into a vision. They can take that idea and shape it into a vision that can be shared with all, driving a team forward towards a goal that has been set. They can implement ideas in a manner that has lasting effects and results. Without the vision to drive an idea to it’s peak and to mold it into a construct that can be implemented by the team, it is just an idea. Leaders of the future need to take their ideas and drive them to be something more than just “par for the course” or “status quo”. (Perrin, et al., 2012).
A leader of the future needs to have emotional intelligence. This is not the same as empathy or sympathy. This pertains to a leader’s understanding of the people they are leading. By becoming not only relatable but also accessible and accountable to the people they are overseeing, a leader is better able to anticipate needs of the people they oversee. They can configure the people under them into a structure that will produce the desired results of a project. They can anticipate and account for the different learning styles and work ethics of the people they oversee, focusing them into groups or teams that will play off one another’s strengths and weaknesses in a way that will enable growth from everyone. By exhibiting emotional intelligence, a leader is showing that they are committed to getting the best from the people they oversee, and that they understand that not every person performs the same as everyone else.
Courage is another key component of the leader of the future. This does not mean that a leader is unafraid of risk, but rather that they exhibit the courage to take the risk in order to achieve success. Without risk there is no real room for growth, and without growth we become stagnant. Companies fall when their leaders are unwilling or unable to take risks due to a lack of courage. If Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos hadn’t had had the courage to take their companies into the light and show them to the world, we would not have Apple and Amazon, two revolutionary companies that have driven our world forward in terms of progress and technology. If a leader lacks courage, they lack the ability to foster vision. These three characteristics are so far entwined with one another, that without any one of them a leader will find themselves lacking in ways that could prove detrimental to their effectiveness.
Leadership is different than management in a few key aspects. A leadership refers to an individual’s capacity to drive an entity or business forward through enabling and empowering its followers or workers, and by motivating them and influencing them. Management is the ability to control a group and to push those followers towards and established goal. Leadership is influence over all, and management is power to drive people to completion of a project. Leaders inspire and motive whereas managers take a concept or idea that has been presented to them and utilize their control over others to accomplish that goal. An example of this in the broadest of terms would be a leader coming up with the vision for a new course of action within a company that would allow that company to compete on a higher scale than before. Managers would come into the equation by taking teams and utilizing them to push that vision into fruition. (Nayar, 2014).
If I were a leader of the future, I would want to lead a group from an individualist culture. The reason for this is two-fold. First, individualists are better equipped to take a concept that is given to them and work towards successful completion of that goal with minimal feedback and support needed from a leadership standpoint. The second aspect of this is that individualists are independent thinkers that are more likely to prove that they have raw leadership qualities because they are less susceptible to what is known as group-think. That being said, there is no circumstances in which I would like to be a leader. I have been a manager countless times and in various fields of work, and not to brag but I’m very good at motivating people to reach their potential. I am not however a visionary. I can think of good ideas and present them to my leader but implementing them on my own is where I hit a dead end. As someone who struggles with anxiety, the very thought of people reporting to me without having the safety net of someone above me to support me is too much to handle.
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