In every human domain, whether in business or politics, in the wider society down to personal relationships, the quality of leadership is considered critical to the success of the unit.
What collection of behaviours, traits and characteristics, or application of these, constitute effective leadership continues to be a focus where we strive for improvement. By better understanding how people are influenced and motivated, the better our means for achieving our aims.
In the earliest ages of human existence, the leaders were the elders. They held the wisdom and the tribal stories they used to enable and enforce social cohesion and cooperation that enabled their survival. With the invention of weaponry, societies reorganised into an age of empires. This drove the Great Man Theory of Leadership: that leaders were a rare breed, natural born not made. Proof of the theory was drawn from “the great” figures of history: Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great.
From the 1800s, leadership theory evolved and the Trait Theory of Leadership proposed that leaders could be born, or could be made by learning and applying the qualities of born leaders. With industrialisation, power was redistributed to the owners of capital and new theories of leadership evolved in line with neoclassical management that recognised organisations as dynamic ecosystems of people with diverse values, needs and motivations.
The version of leadership that prevails in today’s education and workplace expectations comes from the Situational Theory of Leadership. This development, incorporating Contingency Theory, has followed on from the diversification of industry, the rise of the megacorporation and the evolution of knowledge workers. It is leadership that recognises that people are multi-dimensional and there is no one-size-fits-all. To be effective, leaders must have the breadth of skill and the flexibility of behaviours and traits to respond according to the conditions and the situation.
If our ability to lead changes with the shift of organisation, power and the type of tools that enable our productive participation, then it follows that our current version of leadership must also change.
The age of artificial intelligence represents as ground-breaking a transition as the steam engine did over 200 years ago. If we agree that a key responsibility of leadership is to prepare the leaders of tomorrow, it is beholden on today’s leaders to develop and update theories of leadership relevant for our rapidly evolving world.
In this age, leadership will have an equal focus on provide stability and preparing people to constant and continuous change. As the technology that democratises us becomes more powerful and accessible, leadership cannot be divorced from ethics, and consequential thinking must be part and parcel of leadership decision-making.
The more we adopt the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence, the more we can expect the nature and pace of competition to change. Leaders, not just the organisations they lead, will need to become agile, innovative and regenerative in order to succeed.
Leaders will also need to consider their workforce of the future. Already today, employers are finding it difficult to hire their way out of staffing shortages. Having access to the right skills will depend on fast-learning programs and people developed to be fast, experiential learners.
If we agree the bases on which we value leadership today has moved beyond those early narrow aims of achieving the leader’s ambitions, and even beyond seeing to the well-being of a unit’s members to a belief that leaders also need a regard for a wider constituency, we have the basis building a leadership model relevant to the digital age.
Transformational Leadership theories are gaining ground to account for the growing need of organisations to have leaders who are able to handle complexity. They need the ability to build the collaborative environments able to move people through change where progress is more likely to be lumpy and sudden than smooth and continuous. It will be increasingly likely that the information, knowledge and experience leaders desire to make sound decisions may not be available in advance, and so change will need to be vision-based with actions guided by principles as much as data.
For industries that have a hand in moulding skills, attitudes and mindsets; those industries such as early learning, sports and toys, leadership for the digital age goes beyond efforts aimed at the organisation’s internal teams. It is needed to provide inspiration and experiences that build character, resilience and aptitude for a sustainable workforce and those who will be our future leaders in the digital age.
This article is written by Isabel Wu from Meta Management and covers all things digital. Meta Management is a consultancy specialising in helping its clients with the organisational assets that drive effective digital transformation and create value in a hyper-connected, constantly changing world.
About Meta Management
Meta Management is a consultancy specialising in helping its clients with the organisational assets that drive effective digital transformation and create value in a hyper-connected, constantly changing world.
This article originally appeared in Edition 48 of The Bugg Report Magazine
