Leadership Mindsets for a New World
Tanmay Vora
For organizations to be truly effective, leadership can not be confined to the top boxes of the organization chart. When leadership is not a role but a behavior that people practice across the organization, then organizations are better placed to navigate the complexities surrounding us.
In my experience, this involves:
a) creating an ecosystem of “emergent leadership” where people are not afraid to raise their hand and take initiative when the right opportunity to solve important problem aligns with their unique skills. This comes from creating a psychologically safe environment, trusting people for their competencies, enabling their learning through experimentation (and navigating through ambiguity) and building an ecosystem of high performance.
b) aligning people managers/leads at all levels to a collective mindset of leadership. This happens through an ongoing conversation on leadership in a community, experience sharing, valuing leadership behaviors and enabling people through one to one coaching on the job.
c) leaders working really hard at becoming better role models of leadership behaviors that they wish to see around them. This does not happen automatically, but through constant learning of new leadership paradigms, applying them to work, reflecting upon the lessons learned, sharing that learning with others and making visible change in their leadership behaviors through all this to deliver the outcomes.
In this context, I read MIT Sloan Management Review article titled “Leadership Mindsets for the New Economy” by Douglas A. Ready with great interest. It underlines the importance of having right leadership mindsets to navigate ambiguity, create customer value, developing people, building strong working relationships (network) and learning through combination of curiosity and experimentation.
Here is an excerpt:
We surveyed more than 4,000 managers and executives from more than 120 countries and conducted interviews with dozens of C-level executives, with the objective of understanding how a changing world and a changing world of work is influencing what it means to be a great leader. One of the most striking findings from this ongoing research initiative is that both the survey respondents and those interviewed believe that their leaders lack the mindset needed to bring about the strategic and cultural changes required to lead in the new economy.
And here is a sketchnote summary of the key leadership mindsets:
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