Are you leading for the future?
Professor Peter Hawkins, from Henley Business School says:
“Tomorrow’s leader needs to go beyond building a great leadership team that is more than the sum of its parts. They need to effectively partner with all parts of their stakeholder ecosystem so that they can lead organisations that can do more with less resources and importantly learn and change faster than ever before.”
So, what questions does that bring up for you?
- Which stakeholders are you paying attention to?
- How does your organisation adapt and evolve?
- How does your leadership team function as a team?
- How does your purpose and mission serve the past, present and future?
These ideas apply at all levels of leadership not just the top tier, and stakeholders exist inside and outside our teams and organisations.
Developing empathy with your stakeholders for how they want to be in the future, for where they have come from, as well as their current needs will help you to serve them with integrity and clarity.
As humans we often shy away from hard decisions due to an unconscious bias towards the past or the present but if we develop an understanding for who our colleagues, clients, shareholders and ourselves want or need to become in the future then this can give us a greater permission to have the brave conversation and can broaden our shared space of psychological safety.
A challenge for future-facing leaders then becomes:
“How might create the conditions where we develop a shared understanding of the future we serve as a team, organisation and maybe as a species and work in service of it?”.
See the full video of Professor Peter Hawkins’ talk above.