The four mindsets and five skills of the future leader

To explore the future of leadership, the winner of this year’s CMI Management Book of the Year interviewed more than 140 chief executives (collectively employing more than 7 million people around the world) and 14,000 employees. The result is a uniquely comprehensive project to define the mindsets and skills of the future leader. These are the notable nine...

Words / Jacob Morgan

Mindsets

01) The explorer

Sir Ernest Shackleton once said, “The only true failure would be not to explore at all.”

Throughout history, explorers have risked their lives and have travelled to the farthest corners of the Earth and beyond. Exploration is part of human nature.

As a leader, one of the most effective things you can do is ask questions and challenge the status quo. It’s likely that your organisation has certain customer or employee policies, procedures and ways of doing things which have been around for decades, long before you ever joined the organisation. But if, as the world’s top business leaders have identified, the pace of change is one of the biggest trends shaping leadership and work right now, then it’s time to revisit how work gets done and how we lead.

If you ask questions and challenge conventions, then so will your team members.

02) The chef

02 Any great chef will tell you that one of the things that makes a dish amazing is the balance of ingredients. Too much of any one ingredient will throw off the entire flavour profile. Creating the perfect dish and balancing flavours and ingredients is as much an art as it is a science. Leaders of the future must have the mindset of a chef.

At the core of this mindset is the understanding that your job as a leader isn’t just about making the business more money. You need to look beyond the organisation to see how the work you are doing is affecting society, local communities and the world.

Simply listening or collecting data will only get you so far, though. As a leader, what you do with the feedback you get is just as important as getting the feedback. What good is the information if you don’t do anything with it? If you want to practise the mindset of the chef, then make sure that those around you are going to hold you accountable.

03) The servant

Being a leader doesn’t mean that you get to sit at the top of the pyramid and tell everyone else what to do. It means that you stand at the bottom of the pyramid and help prop up everyone else.

Ask yourself these questions on a regular basis and you will find that they will change your behaviour: What did I do to help my leader today? What did I do to make the lives of my customers easier and better? What did I do to help make employees more successful than me? What did I do to make sure that I am taking care of myself and allowing myself to be the best leader that I can be? Did I have fun at work today?

04) The global citizen

Leaders who embody the mindset of a global citizen are able to think globally, lead a team of diverse and distributed employees, spread ideas and messages across the globe, and find and attract the best talent regardless of where they might be. In today’s connected and rapidly changing world, it’s almost impossible to think locally, regionally or even nationally. Instead, you must think globally.

You should also actively seek out others who are different to you. The emphasis here is on the word “actively”, because it’s not just about being OK as a part of a diverse team. Instead, you need to ask for it and demand it.

Skills

01) The futurist

Futurists help make sure that individuals and organisations are not surprised by what the future might bring.

Thinking like a futurist is about looking at different possibilities and scenarios, as opposed to picking one and sticking with it. In a sense, you’re actually looking around many corners so that when your path takes you down one of them, you will know what to expect. The best way you can start thinking like a futurist is by asking yourself a series of questions when presented with a decision you need to take: Why might this happen or not happen? What else might happen? What do I want to happen and how can I make it happen? What factors might influence why this will or won't happen?

02) The translator

Leaders of the future must be translators, which means that they are great listeners and communicators. Even though these are perhaps the most basic and timeless traits for great leadership, they are also the ones that we have struggled with the longest and the ones that have changed the most in recent years.

As a leader, ask yourself the following: What are the best channels to use to get this information across? How does the way I communicate make those around me feel? Am I communicating in a clear, open, passionate and humble way? Am I being human? If someone communicated with me in the same way I am communicating with others, what impact would it have?

03) Yoda

Leaders of the future must learn to channel their inner Yoda, which means being emotionally intelligent, specifically being able to practice empathy and self-awareness.

Empathy is controlled by a part of the brain called the supramarginal gyrus, and researchers have found that when decisions need to be made quickly, this region doesn’t always function correctly. This is why it’s crucial to start with listening and taking some time to pause and reflect before responding or taking action. When it comes to self-awareness, the biggest piece of advice that Tasha Eurich, an organisational psychologist, has to offer is to move away from asking “why” to asking “what”. Focusing on the “what” is more effective when it comes to helping you develop a plan. Then you can start asking yourself questions like, “What am I going to do in the future to make sure I don’t feel this way?” or “What can I do to make sure that I make better decisions in the future?”

04) The coach

Future leaders must be great coaches. This means that you need to know how to motivate, engage and inspire people. That way, you can create other leaders, work across generations and cultures, and put together effective teams.

At the very core of being a great coach is truly believing that your job and your privilege is to help other people become more successful than you. Another crucial aspect of being a great coach is the ability to connect with the people you work with to truly understand them as human beings, instead of just as workers. Try asking yourself a few basic questions about the people you work with: What excites them the most? What stresses them out or drains them the most? What are they most passionate about? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What are their hobbies or interests outside of work? Do they have a family? If so, do I know anything about them? What are their professional and personal goals? What do they think of me as a leader?

05) The tech-savvy teenager

Whenever parents can’t figure out a certain technology, the first person they turn to is usually their teenager (if they have one). Why is that? It’s because teenagers are technologically savvy and digitally fluent. Leaders of the future must be the same.

Leaders don’t need to understand the details of how the technologies will be deployed, but they do need to understand what impact a particular technology might have on the business. They need to be able to have these conversations and should be able to answer questions like: What does the general technology landscape look like? What are some of the emerging technologies out there today? Which technologies are going to affect my industry? How might my organisation use various technologies to improve things like customer satisfaction, the employee experience and productivity? What might happen if the organisation doesn’t make investments in technology? How are customers and employees using these various new technologies?

This is an edited extract from The Future Leader: 9 skills and mindsets to succeed in the next decade, by Jacob Morgan (Wiley, 2020). It was recently named CMI’s 2021 Management Book of the Year