As in all things, the future promises an array of new ways and new understanding in the practice of leadership and leadership development. These are critical role-changing contexts which will play an important part in leadership development.
Several trends will assume major roles in the days to come, changing perspectives and changing premises of old assumptions and general thinking.
Leadership competencies
First, leadership competencies (requirements) will still matter. However, they will change as the competitive environment changes.
A study indicates five critical forces will shape leadership in the future: 1) global competition, 2) information technology, 3) the need for rapid and flexible groups, 4) teams, and 5) differing employee needs.
Globalization
Future leaders will have to be familiar and fluid in doing business on a global basis. Globalization, in effect, will require leaders to deal with more and more complex groups outside the realm of their organizations.
There will be more components involving international markets, global economic trends, and outside regions like the Asia Pacific rim, the Southern Hemisphere, etc. There will be an extensive use of the internet in the marketing of products and services.
Technology
The revolution in technology has drastically altered organizational life. It has changed the ways information and knowledge are obtained and spread.
One of the most important changes is in the way people communicate. This had produced some deep implications in terms of effective leadership. In the future, technology will have a vast participation in leadership development.
Leaders will have to be more knowledgeable with technology and its uses. As a matter of fact, technological savvy is slated to become an integral factor in leadership.
Character and integrity
The 90s had produced some of the most blatant corporate arrogance among executives of certain huge corporations. (Think Enron and WorldCom.)
This had triggered and accelerated sentiments among governing board members of companies that character and values shall be made more prominent in the leadership business.
There is a trend among the new crop of CEOs to be self-effacing and modest. (This is in direct contrast to the self-promoting styles of well-known business leaders before them who did not have enduring positive impacts on their companies after they exited.)
Return on investment
The strongest pressure of leadership practitioners in the future would be to demonstrate ROI (return on investment). Leadership development may be strategically important, but it is altogether expensive.
Today’s leading-edge companies (Pepsi, IBM J&J) have been quantifying the benefits of spending time and resources on leadership development for years.
In the future, it is likely that leadership development investments will be a priority of organizations committed to this end. However, plans are afoot to maximize ROI for leadership development efforts by way of effective planning, implementation and evaluation.
New thinking
Some time from now, the thinking would be that leadership and leadership development are going to be inherently collaborative, social and relational processes. It shall be understood as a collective capacity of all members of the organization.
This kind of leadership development is more difficult to design and implement. This is because it is in direct contrast to the popular notion of the past decades where the focus is to train individual leaders.
Some of today’s leadership development initiatives are now generally conducted inside workplaces. These would usually feature performance support and real world skills applications.
This is done by way of several methods: training programs, coaching and mentoring, action learning and developmental assignments, among others. Real skills application means making potential leaders gain crucial skills within a working organization and facing relevant and real-time issues.
Along with proper performance support (coaching, mentoring, training, action learning, etc.) candidates are immersed with real issues, not lectures. This is in line with the ultimate goal of leadership development which necessitates action rather than just knowledge.
Learning from work
One of today’s development methods provides candidates with opportunities to learn from their present work rather than taking them out of the workplace (and presumably herded to a stolid classroom) to learn. The goal is to integrate their experiences at the workplace with other (leadership) developmental techniques.
There is now an increasing number of organizations whose CEOs are committed to teaching and developing leaders internally. (One big reason is that this leadership development is usually tied to the company’s own business goals.)
In addition, most organizations are starting to recognize leadership as an important component to jobs at all levels. As such, they are committed to producing leaders in their organizations.
Leadership development methods
Some effective leadership development methods outside of the workplace had also been noted by these organizations. One significant factor that came out: the better forecaster of effective executive leadership is emotional resonance with others rather than the expected general intelligence.
Researchers had also uncovered data that specific parts of emotional intelligence and specific behaviors are connected with effective leadership.
Effective leadership
Today, effective leadership is now commonly perceived as crucial to organizational success. Also, there is now more weight placed on leadership development than before.
Even if it is still an important factor, producing individual leaders is no longer the main target in leadership development. Also, the definition of leadership had undergone some shift these days.
More and more, leadership is perceived as not what leaders do. Rather, it is seen as a process that results from relationships – interactions of both leaders and collaborators and not just the competencies of leaders.
Experiences and business objectives
The practices on leadership development inside a working organization are geared to integrate various developmental experiences and their business objectives. This is done in order to produce a larger combined impact.
Some critics declared, however, that this approach is rather more events-based than systemic. One method of systemic leadership development is to make sure participation involves more than simple training.
Meaningful integration
They contend that there should be an array of developmental experiences to be designed and implemented that should be meaningfully integrated with one another. These efforts must also be ongoing and not just a single program or a one-time event.
Ideally, leadership development within organizations should aim in linking a variety of developmental practices (including the work itself) and those of the other HR systems and strategies.