Building the new leader: Leadership challenges of the future revealed

Building the new leader: Leadership challenges of the future revealed is a white paper by Hay Group. How the global balance of power is shifting? Scarcity of resources is a mounting problem while the war for talent rages on. 

While a new breed of employees is entering the business workforce, the new leader has to embrace the digital natives and understand technology innovation. According to Hay Group’s Leadership 2030 research, the new leader of the future will need a host of new skills and competencies if they are to succeed. Leaders of the future will need to be adept conceptual and strategic thinkers, have deep integrity and intellectual openness, find new ways to create loyalty, lead increasingly diverse and independent teams over which they may not always have direct authority, and relinquish their own power in favor of collaborative approaches inside and outside the organization.

To successfully develop this combination of skills and qualities – and adopt what is, in effect, a ‘post-heroic’ leadership style – they may need to abandon much of the thinking and behavior that propelled them to the top of their organizations in the first place. But if they want their businesses to survive and thrive over the next two decades they have no choice. Unless they dramatically change their leadership style, starting from today, their organizations will lose out in the race for innovation, the march to globalization and the war for talent. They will be, quite simply, unsustainable.

This is the conclusion Hay Group has reached after working with Germany-based foresight company Z-Punkt to identify the megatrends they believe will affect organizations and their leaders profoundly over the coming decades and analyzing the implications of each at a corporate, organizational, team and individual level.

Megatrends are long-term processes of transformation on a global scale with a broad scope and dramatic impact. They can be observed over decades and can be projected with a high degree of probability at least 15 years into the future. They affect all regions and stakeholders, including governments, businesses and individuals. And they transform economies, societies and policies at a fundamental level.

The six megatrends Hay Group singled out are:
1 Accelerating globalization (‘globalization 2.0’)
2 Climate change, its environmental impact and scarcity of resources
3 Demographic change
4 Individualization and values pluralism
5 Increasingly digital lifestyles
6 Technology convergence.

Several of these have already been researched intensively. But they have not, until now, been researched in the context of leadership. Nor have these six particular megatrends ever been investigated in one single piece of research.

Read the complete white paper Building the new leader: Leadership challenges of the future revealed Hay_Group_Leadership_2030

Source: Hay Group