Developing Future-Ready Leaders

The world underwent a drastic change since the pandemic. Workplaces were the most affected with remote work, work-from-home, and hybrid work becoming the new normal. Further, deep technologies like artificial intelligence and automation are further transforming workplaces like never before. Modern-day workforce expects employers to build meaningful experiences that are highly personalized, responsive to their needs, and constantly improved.

To remain relevant in today's rapidly changing and fast-evolving digital world, and build future-proof careers, employees and organizations have to become more agile in the way they look at skills of the future and align them with their future needs and aspirations. Whether intentional or unintentional, to be a leader also implies being a coach to others. It is the job of leaders to nurture and develop future leaders.

People- An organisation's biggest asset

One must understand that people are and will continue to be an organization's biggest asset. And businesses that give in similar efforts, focus, and invest in internal training and initiatives to foster and improve employee experience, will become the real heroes of tomorrow. Doing so, can not only help organizations increase retention but also ensure enhanced efficiency thereby strengthening the bottom line.

Some of the key trends that HR leaders should focus on in order to develop future-ready leaders include the following:

n Implementing Talent Analytics: Regular use of talent analytics is gradually becoming an essential segment for organizational growth. Usual leveraging of data can assist HR leaders not only in anticipating attrition risks ahead of time, but also help them take action in quick retention and organizing succession planning discussions.

n Reskilling and Upskilling: Reskilling and upskilling are highly essential when it comes to fostering leaders of the future. Developing and structuring a company strategy that focuses on teaching employees through learning and development to reskilling groups of people who constantly work together to boost their collective intelligence can further help businesses adapt and grow in ever-changing times.

n Diversity in Recruiting: When three aspects – digital, domain, and data come together, industries, companies, and individuals end up transforming. This is why, having a range of multilingual employees – especially those with sound knowledge of their functions or industries followed by an awareness as to how to go about harnessing the probability of digital technologies at scale and an understanding of how to leverage and interpret data – holds high significance today.

n Leadership Skills 2.0: To continue evolving in an unpredictable future, organizations must focus on developing leadership that is diverse and future-ready. Probably, betting on high-performers followed by an evaluation of individual talent versus experience and focusing on aspects like behavioral skills such as curiosity, learning agility and risk-taking abilities stands to be a game-changer and will guarantee a strong future-ready pipeline to shape the organization's future.

Creating space for strategic leadership

Coaching and mentoring is a crucial skill that empowers leaders at all levels to make the shift from operational leadership to strategic leadership – from reacting to responding and obviously from surviving to thriving. There exists a direct correlation between a leader's ability to mentor and the amount of time that leader has, to be able to focus on the more strategic elements of the team and organization. As leaders end up strengthening their coaching skills, they usually end up spending less time managing their own tasks, coming up with answers, or controlling the work of their team members.

Shaping learning cultures

Leaders who resort to powerful coaching approaches towards leadership, help create a new understanding and help foster accountability in their teams and organizations. Such skill development becomes contagious as team members apply such learned skills actively, thereby seeking the same benefits they have experienced.

The effects of training skills on fostering leaders are truly exponential and long-lasting. Leaders simply providing answers tend to shut down learning opportunities and create a transactional leadership that shies away from the responsibility to develop their own people. An old metaphor of "if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for life" applies here.

Future-ready leaders understand that 'future-ready' is not a steady state but a continuous and gradual process of becoming and refining. They know that learning is always the answer because the leadership skills of tomorrow will always continue to evolve.

(The author is a Vice President, KL Deemed to be University)