The Apprentice Leader: Why you should reflect on your leadership style and skill

As a founder and managing director at Excubate, I have to consider myself a leader in the company – a role which I try to live up to. I do appreciate the Servant Leader paradigm and try to serve my team best I can. However, a recent need to jump in for a missing senior consultant and manage one of our quite intense client projects largely by myself let me revisit the general role of a leader. As part of the project, I am doing a lot of basic ground work, framework creation, project process management, workshop moderation, creation of output on flipcharts and in PowerPoint. In other words, I’ve gone back to basics, rediscovering the activities that lie at the heart of consulting, but are very peripheral to the daily business of a consulting partner. At the same time, this detour brought me to a new insight: Specifically, because I have re-immersed myself into the daily doings of my team, I can be an especially effective partner by guiding them with empathy and credibility from recent experience.

Digitalization requires new and a greater amount of practical knowledge - and thus, a leader who can handle it hands-on. Let’s call him the apprentice leader, who goes beyond managing and serving, and puts an additional focus on learning and understanding.

The general role and perception of a leader has been based on past achievements and “earned” seniority, sometimes considering future growth potential and, in the best case, their ability to serve the needs of their team. But the proven ability to understand, learn and propagate fundamentally new technologies, business models and working methodologies may make the apprentice leader the more effective leader in the future.

Digitalization is a tectonic shift that makes past expertise and earned seniority less relevant - and less credible

Historically, and except for top management levels (where, e.g. a Pharma CEO easily moves on to become a Banking CEO) leaders have gained their credibility and effectiveness based on their education and training, which often dated back decades and enabled them to lead (or at least understand) the people on their shop floors, in research labs, at client front lines. Across industries like Manufacturing, Pharma, Banking, and most others, the basics of business models, products, processes were stable and optimized over time; thus, concepts learned 30 years ago were still very relevant. Digitalization and new ways of working are changing that significantly and quickly, and the half-life of know-how is diminishing. Indeed, today’s graduates who start positions in established companies already expect that their senior leadership team has little idea about their work, let alone possess the ability to guide them.

Serving is great, learning is greater

In the new world, leaders need to be apprentices again. They need to suspend past expertise and learn some new things by practicing (and not just reading about) building digital business models, managing teams in an agile way and developing minimum viable products. Where the Servant Leader is too busy serving – often just by trying not to do too much damage –, the Apprentice Leader gets his or her hands dirty, embraces the learning, and ultimately gains effectiveness and credibility with their teams.

Leaders need to be Doers for a while

My message is not a pitch for ?lifelong learning“, an abstract term everyone has embraced anyway. Rather, it is an invitation to senior leaders to experience a dose of humility and appreciation towards new ways of working along with the new kinds of capabilities, many of which did not exist back when they were juniors and may even go against what they were told was good. I already see many leaders who accept that their teams work in new ways, which is an important first step. The next level, however, is to master these skills and win back relevance and acceptance from their team. When I coach senior leaders on approaching this acceptance, we discuss pragmatic approaches. For example, attending an “app in an hour” workshop in which one learns how to understand a customer and develop a click dummy in 60 minutes – and feels the pain of forcing themselves to deliver an outcome even if it is not 100% thought through yet. It can also manifest in taking 60% of a leader’s time for a few weeks (yes, that means delegating) and spending it as a team member in a Corporate Startup Campus program that validates and develops a business model innovation to scalability.

The ability to do so is going to distinguish leaders who successfully manage their own digital transformation from those who will likely fail.

Three imperatives for the Apprentice Leader

There are many things that a leader can do to embrace the apprenticeship concept. From our experience, embedding three behaviors into your daily business already moves the needle:

• Get your hands dirty with digitalization, not (just) by visiting startups in Silicon Valley, but by spending a month with a corporate startup team and sharing their tasks as a team member.
• Be humble, ask questions and don’t pretend you know everything better – find a junior reverse mentor to teach you agile ways of working and digital technologies, develop an “app in an hour” prototype for a use case you always wanted fixed.
• Invest substantial time – not a few hours a week and not a high-profile seminar on agility. Learning took time in college, and it will take time now. Making a bold move and delegating the daily business to a star direct report for a month to really focus on learning will require – and demonstrate – leadership guts.

Lastly, this kind of learning is fun – just as trying out new things and seeing fast results was fun in childhood. For me personally, running a client team by myself and being forced to do what I expect my teams to do on a daily basis keeps my blades sharp and my know-how up-to-date, and it enables me to be the most effective leader I can be for my team.