When I was first a sales manager, if somebody came to me with a problem I would probably try my best to solve it for them, maybe making a suggestion of who they could speak to, what different approaches they could try or what I would do in that position. All the things my previous managers had done for me.
In January 2020, right before the pandemic really took hold, the Sloan Business School released a report called “The New Leadership Playbook for the Digital Age”; looking at the leadership challenges they saw up to 2025.
In it they predict a gradual increase in remote working, connecting over digital platforms and increasingly data driven decision making, they had no way of knowing the almost overnight changes we were all forced to adopt. The changes in working patterns they describe are here now, all around us, but have the behaviours changed at the same rate?
Sloan summarise the behavioural changes as being eroding, enduring, and emerging behaviours.
The primary leadership challenge isn’t simply to adopt a group of behaviours or to achieve a set of competencies. The deeper challenge is to develop a new mindset that anchors, informs, and advances these behaviours. Sloan says: “Leaders across the organisation need to change their attitudes and beliefs — their mindsets — about what leadership looks and feels like, if they want to produce behaviour change that lasts over time.”
Having the mindset to produce change will require effective coaching to embed those changes required to not only meet the challenges of the future, but to stay ahead.
Maybe in 2022, as the dust finally settles our challenge as a community of trainers and coaches is to support those leaders to leave behind those eroding behaviours and help them empower their teams to be independent problem solvers and decision makers?
Read the full report here