5 Must-Have Traits of Future Leaders

We are well into the 4th Industrial Revolution – it’s fast-paced, technology-driven and holds higher customer expectations than ever before. Watch a string of commercials, and you’re sure to find many businesses that claim to be focused on transforming for this new era. But many are only focused on surface-level changes. True transformation requires a complete reimagination of how we work.  

Within my organization, I had a realization a few years ago that we were not structured in the right way - so we shattered our internal boundaries and organized ourselves into cross-functional teams, peppered with brand new skill sets.  

This has resulted in an amazing shift in how we solve problems for our customers end-to-end. But it also means that the leaders in my division (including myself!) have needed to differentially shift our mindsets. What’s being asked of leaders in this new world is astronomically different and exponentially more critical. And past successes will not ensure future vitality.

The more traditional role of management in large organizations was to lead specialized teams within siloed job functions like finance, tech, HR and marketing. In the old environment, leaders could focus on a narrow scope of work that their teams were responsible for without being expected to know the ins and outs of other job functions upstream or downstream from them. You could be a subject matter expert in one area, meeting all your key performance indicators without really understanding the technology or product design side of the business.

Now, as job functions co-locate in smaller teams, the lines between roles are blurring. If you’re leading a multi-functional team, you can no longer operate as a single-function leader. Business leaders across the spectrum must have a strong understanding of each job function in their world. The speed of continual improvement and technological changes requires quick, but informed, decision making from those closest to the action.

The best way to describe this to my leaders has been to urge them to adopt a product manager mindset. Marty Cagan, who literally wrote the book on product management in Inspired, very clearly captures much of what I envision for my own organization:

“Like a CEO, the product manager must deeply understand all aspects of the business. The product manager must ensure a business outcome, not just ensure a product gets defined. You must simply have a broad understanding of how a product can affect a business and work with people from your team and across your company to cover everything that’s important.”

Within my business, I have asked each of my multi-functional team leaders to operate as if they are leading their own mini company. In effect, they should act as the CEO of their team. To be clear, everyone has the power to adopt a “CEO mindset” to maximize their potential. But if you actually hold a CEO-style role – one where you’re leading a multi-functional team – there’s an even higher bar. This goes beyond general oversight and keeping a high-level view of your product roadmap or the deadlines for deliverables. You should dive deep enough into design and technical knowledge to know what questions to ask, where to prioritize resources, and how to work within your constraints by leveraging creative solutions. 

For my team of “CEO leaders,” my expectations are high, and there are five qualities I look for. 

Human Centered 

Everything begins with the customer and understanding them on a deep, human level. Customer empathy can’t be farmed out – you need to be deeply embedded in this process. By tapping into people’s hopes and dreams, along with their pain points, you’ll define the right problems to tackle first and solve even unexpressed needs. At the same time, you need to become a connoisseur of beautiful, human-centered design. This is both art and science – but you have to train yourself to know what quality design is, so you’re prepared to spot bad design before it reaches your customers.

Business Grounded

In understanding how to lead your multi-functional team, you’ll obviously be deeply rooted in the delivery of your product. But you should also be grounded in the metrics that will tell you whether or not it’s a success. The easy path is to keep track of the metrics that are closest to you and tell a positive story. But “business grounded” means you are looking at the holistic view of how your product is doing. I think of this across four broad categories:

• Customer metrics. What do customers say about their experience? (Measured in satisfaction, referrals, etc.)
• Quality metrics. Is your customer experience flawless? (Measured in errors, rework, etc.)
• Economic metrics. Do you have cost discipline? (Measured in % of budget spent, dollars saved, etc.) 
• Employee metrics. Often the most overlooked – but still very important – metric. How does your team feel? (Measured in satisfaction, attrition, etc.)

Technology Driven

I have been in situations where someone presented what seemed like an amazing new system at the time. But five years after implementation, open the hood and you find a spaghetti mess. Why? Because leaders – who likely had no knowledge of technology architecture – pushed for speed over quality. Leaders need to understand end-to-end technology architecture on a whole new level – including key concepts like cloud-native, APIs and microservices. They must work incredibly closely with the technologists on the team and partner to ensure products are built in the right way, to avoid continually remapping broken systems in the future. Making good technology decisions cannot be tossed over the fence. 

Integrated Problem Solving

Great problem solving is a long process. It requires you to slow down, take a step back, go deep into the data and clearly define the problem you’re trying to solve. It also takes courage. It’s uncomfortable to be the person pumping the breaks when everyone else is barreling down a different path. I’m sure it is highly frustrating for my colleagues when I ask them to slow down. But honing this skill will enable you to make better decisions and tackle issues across functions and even industries.

Effective Management + Leadership 

I once had the opportunity to ask Andy Grove, one of the brilliant minds behind Intel, if he thought it was harder to find great management or great leadership. He shared my belief that most teams are over-led, but under-managed. Many folks believe that leadership is about setting a bold vision and delegating the actual work to those under them. It’s one thing to come up with a vision. You can dream up incredible ideas. You can rally folks behind a grand plan. But to actually execute that vision requires a ton of disciplined, daily work. Dreaming is easy. Doing is hard. A good leader translates a vision into action, with the right checks in place to ensure things are progressing in the right way. They don’t delegate something away and never see it again. They allow their talent to do great work while providing coaching and redirection along the way. You can’t abscond your responsibilities by delegating away. Your job is to help your teams win – and accept responsibility if they don’t. 

It’s my belief that these five qualities will be table stakes for the leaders of the future. Do you agree?