Thursday, 5 August 2010
“Be reassuring......be brave.......be enthusiastic”
This call to action comes from a Master Class we held some time ago. One of the speakers, Paul Barlow (interviewed in Chapter X) encouraged the audience to foster a positive, inclusive, authentic style of leadership.
And there is little doubt that in the near future, we will all need to practise some of the key learnings from the Master Class:
- demonstrate that we understand the pressures on our people
- continue to develop ourselves and our teams
- increase the opportunities for real dialogue
- audit the communications processes
- find time to think
- simplify the strategy.
But beyond the near future, what then? Will Coaching Leadership style be the recommended way to run your business?
Here are my five reasons why the Coaching Leader will be even more effective and even more in demand in the more distant future:
- you'll be working even more internationally than you are now. Increasingly, your customers, suppliers and sources of funds and products will be in the Eastern hemisphere. A positive, inclusive authentic style of leadership will be essential for interactions across many cultures and time zones.
- Your team will not be your employees. As patterns of work continue to evolve, your virtual PA might be in another country and your team could be made of outsourcers, consultants, contractors and co-opted specialists. And by the way, they will probably be working remotely too. How will you manage people without the hidden message that you have control of their career prospects and salaries?
- Your job 10 years from now probably does not even exist yet. But the main reason that you will get it is because of your leadership style and skills. Product and system knowledge can be acquired and become redundant at an ever faster rate but leadership is always a premium asset.
- Your job will be a hybrid, a combination of functions that only makes sense in a particular organisation, in a particular market at a particular time. You might combine IT, HR and Legal in job called Chief Knowledge Officer. Or take care of Sales and Accounting as doing business becomes ever more driven by regulation. A lot of your time will be spent in new environments trying to act on unfamiliar information. Just as well you also invested time in developing a coaching culture!
- Part of your performance review will be an evaluation of how well you delivered the skills of Ambassador/Evangelist/Brand Champion. With Corporate Social Responsibility even higher on the agenda and lessons learned brutally about damage to reputation, your business will specify the number of days to be spent visiting schools, trade bodies, regulators, government and the media.
Perhaps I am wrong about the Coaching Leader of the future and my predictions may turn out to be hilariously far from the realities of life in forty or fifty years time.
But if we look at the suggested profile of a Coaching Leader (see page X), I feel that he or she will be well-equipped to achieve and deliver in a more complex, international and decentralized business.
If you do not agree, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please put a message with your views on one of our websites and thank you for reading our book.
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