Every executive knows that leadership is critical to business success. However, current leadership styles and roles are not enough to tackle the tsunami of change taking place in today’s organizations. Mostafa Sayyadi and Michael Provitera set out the issues for executives in search of a better understanding of this new leadership.
The cognitive ability required to do a job well is not enough in order to be capable of leading others.1,2,3,4 Your promotion to a leadership position does not in any way mean that you become a leader. For many people who receive a promotion, there is virtually no training. Some folks go away to a two-day supervisor training. This sensitivity-type training has merit but after two days of supervisory training, there needs to be much more leadership development. New leaders must develop their personalities in order to lead, not grasp the latest management fad.5,6,7,8
Executives are often reluctant to develop organizational leadership. This reluctance seems quite logical, since the development of leadership requires the personal development of leaders and the deepening of their insights in dealing with complex issues. We found that our first training with leaders incorporated a deep dive into the realm of introspection.
When Steve Jobs rose up through the ranks of leadership, the complexities of leadership were continuously developing. As digital transformation and artificial intelligence started to emerge, the more complex leader-follower equation emerged as leaders came to use new tools for communication, such as chatbots. For example, in an international financial company in Australia, in our meetings with lower-level employees, many employees pointed out that senior managers did not understand the value of their views on the knowledge management system in the past. They also pointed out that this was the reason that many employees had lost their motivation and sense of ownership of common goals and were looking for new opportunities outside their current work environment. The results of the meetings with the lower level of the organization with the participation of human resources in the redevelopment of the knowledge management system were excellent. The level of performance and morale significantly improved. This complexity of the leader-follower equation in the future requires more effective roles for leaders in the global business environment.9,10,11 Here we introduce these critical roles for future leaders.
Leadership for the Future
Leadership roles can play an important role in influencing others.12,13,14 Marshall Goldsmith, a leader in executive education, has a person call him every day to see how he is dealing with his hectic management-consulting game plan. When we develop consultation sessions with managers, we also state that before getting familiar with the leadership roles, managers should look at leadership as a service to develop a sense of common ownership among the employees. The only way to do this is to discover the benefits of diversity, equity, and inclusion.15,16,17,18,19,20 This leadership approach creates an environment of interpersonal motivation for employees, which results in the extensive participation of human resources in organizational processes.21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29
We also distributed a checklist that determined where they stood on their own managerial issues. Once this was diagnosed, we then asked the organization to distribute a checklist of the best possible behaviors according to the adoption of the best assumptions and try to completely master behaviors separately. This stage was challenging, but in training workshops for the managers, we convinced them that this stage could play an important role in their personal development. Then, we asked them to write down how humility could play an important role in developing leadership in their organization. As a result, the behaviors of these leaders with their employees changed significantly and improved compared to before the workshop.
First New Leadership Role: Innovative Democratic Leadership
After the deep dive and the personal assessment criteria, we then describe the roles of leadership. Managers should be aware that the complexities of the external ecosystem and the emergence of factors such as digital transformation and artificial intelligence diminish their ability to force employees to follow them in the path of realizing the future. The view of creating a spark of innovation in the mind of a leader should give way to a new view that sees all employees as a piece in the puzzle of innovation in which each of them plays a role. This new perspective is strongly dependent on the democratization of the work environment, and leaders should provide as much human power in organizational innovation as possible through the expansion of the culture of participation and trust and the creation of flexible and flat structures. We decided to call them “innovative democratic leaders.”
Figure 1: The new l roles
Second New Leadership Role: Innovation Leader Search Steering Committee
Innovative leaders are at the forefront of the future. Democratic innovation leaders are defined as leaders who invite all employees to participate broadly in completing the innovation puzzle. With the new genius culture, leaders take a step further from the extensive participation of intellectual capital within the organization in the innovation process. They look for intellectual capital outside the organization and involve them in the innovation process of the organization. We believe that organizations will rely heavily on freelancers’ intellectual capital in the future, bringing new perspectives to training. In pursuit of acquiring innovative ideas from foreign intellectual capital, they will cross the limits of geographical boundaries and involve experts from all over the world in the form of remote work in organizational projects. We decided to call this important role the “innovation leader search steering committee.”
Third New Leadership Role: Organizational Excellence Keeper
The last role we suggest for leaders is the role of “organizational excellence keeper”. Always remember that small but consistent steps will lead to giant leaps. In this role, leaders should expand the continuous communication of human resources within the organization with the external ecosystem and the intellectual capital outside the organization (i.e., freelance experts). Leaders of the future should provide more opportunities for the expansion of knowledge transfer with intellectual capital outside the organization by expanding organizational communication.
In Conclusion
Resistance to setting out on this new leadership path will lead to a loss of opportunities for companies and ultimately their failure and exclusion from global markets. In embracing this change, organizations will flourish with excitement and freshness. Based on our evidence, these three roles, along with personal development and improvement of leaders’ behaviors, influenced the performance of organizations and made it easier for them to reach the peak.
About the Authors
Mostafa Sayyadi works with senior business leaders to effectively develop innovation in companies, and helps companies – from start-ups to the Fortune 100 – succeed by improving the effectiveness of their leaders. He is a business book author and a long-time contributor to top management journals and his work has been featured in top-flight publications.
Michael J. Provitera is an associate professor of organizational behavior at Barry University, Miami, FL. He received a B.S. with a major in Marketing and a minor in Economics at the City University of New York in 1985. In 1989, while concurrently working on Wall Street as a junior executive, Dr. Provitera earned his MBA in Finance from St. John’s University in Jamaica, Queens, New York. He obtained his DBA from Nova Southeastern University. He is quoted frequently in the national media.
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