Challenges to Corporate Leadership in 2020

Corporate Leadership is comprised of the executives and managers who run Corporate Organization. Leaders themselves are responsible for effectively managing the company's resources, working with teams and inspiring others to do their best work. They also envision ways to improve the company from the perspective of overall involvement. Ultimately, the actions and decisions of executives are what is referred to as corporate leadership.

Challenges to Corporate Leadership in 2020

1. Getting and Refining Effectiveness: The challenge of developing the relevant skills — such as time-management, prioritization, strategic thinking, decision-making, and getting up to speed with the job — to be more effective at work. It is important how to balance being an inspirational and comforting leader while continuing to push on performance.  However, make sure to prioritize "connection" with your colleagues over "correction" of everything they are doing or not doing. Meet staff members, both mentally and emotionally.

2. Inspiring Others: The challenge of inspiring or motivating others to ensure they’re satisfied with their jobs and working smarter. How to respond to countless questions from managers and the frontline when no clear answers exist.  It's essential first to accept that perfection is impossible and the wrong thing to pursue. Don’t worry about being right all the time. Instead, aim for honest and consistent communication.  Honest communication means being vulnerable enough to say that you may not have the right answers at this time, rather than pretending you have it all figured out. While you might like to say the things people want to hear, they will respect you more if they know you are truthful about what you don't know than if they see through your overconfidence.  The mistake many leaders make is holding a belief that they must never make a mistake, let alone admit it, and that changing a point of view is a sign of weakness.

3. Developing Employees: the challenge of developing others, including mentoring and coaching. With social distancing, many corporate leaders worry about becoming isolated and losing the strength of connections they worked hard to develop. The same risk of becoming too insular applies to a leader's internal network, not just external customers. Be honest about your intentions, and show some vulnerability because it's the fears and anxieties that we all share, which draw us closer. If you operate with integrity and focus on the person behind their professional identity, you may develop even more significant influence than you have in the past.  

4. Leading a Team: the challenge of team-building, team development, and team management. Specific leadership challenges include how to instill pride, how to provide support, how to lead a big team, and what to do when taking over a new team. How to keep team engaged while working remotely is an important dimension. Working via videoconference, phone, and email is not less cumbersome than connecting with people all day.

5. Guiding Change: the challenge of managing, mobilizing, understanding, and leading change. Guiding change includes knowing how to mitigate consequences, overcome resistance to change, and deal with employees’ reactions to change.

6. Managing Stakeholders: the challenge of managing relationships, politics, and image. These leadership challenges include gaining managerial support, managing up, and getting buy-in from other departments, groups, or individuals. Knowing that these leadership challenges are common experiences for middle and senior managers is helpful, both to the leaders and to those charged with their development, according to our researchers.

7. Understanding Generation Z

Generation Z —generally, those born in 1995 or later comprises Generation Z.  Within the next two or three years, they will become the fastest-growing percent of the workforce. They don't remember a time before smartphones or social media. They live on their phones, not their laptops, and that's the way they want to communicate—on and off the job. Gen Z expects to go through the entire application process on a mobile device. Leaders cannot continue to keep an eye on their employees all the time, instead focus on creating self-accountability as the standard across the organization. Tasks need to be assigned appropriately, channels of communication need to be established and revisited periodically.

Managers need to think about how to give them freedom" in a traditional job, whether that means offering remote work, flexible scheduling or another solution.

8. Leaders Must Encourage Technology Savviness.

Organizations need to identify that technology needs to be integrated into the core of their work culture. Slack, Discord, Teams, Asana, Hangouts are just some random examples of software that every employee needs to be accustomed to should the occasion arise.

9. Constantly Look Out for New Trends.

An employee can only look beyond the scope of today by being aware of new trends and happenings in the world. Only then can something click that might be a game changer. Having a culture of looking beyond constantly is a major asset, one that is lost on companies in the need to perfect the day each day.

10. Shift to Learning Organization.

It is not enough anymore that an employee comes to work, does what they do and go home. Instead, they need to be learning about the current trends, the future forecasts and what are the skillsets that they would need to make sure they are continuing to be an asset for not just the organization, but for society as a whole. Great leaders MUST encourage learning as an integral part of the organization. Organizations need to invest in learning for the employees at a greater extent than ever before.

How to Respond to the Top Leadership Challenges Around the World

Here are 4 concrete things that4around the globe can do to help address these common leadership challenges:

1. Learning in complex environments

Be proactive in setting goals, as well as establishing the timelines — and deadlines — necessary to keep yourself and your teams on track.

Goals must be:

·        Specific. Write down a detailed description of what accomplishing the goal would involve.

·        Measurable. Set targets that you can quantify to assess progress.

·        Attainable. Stretch goals are fine, but you also need to make sure that achieving the goal is possible.

·        Realistic. Be sure you understand what you will likely need — in terms of time, resources, and talent — to achieve it.

·        Timed. Create deadlines for hitting milestones on the way to your goal, as well as for achieving the goal itself.

2. Developing the right way.

You’ll be more productive tackling leadership challenges, and you’ll empower your colleagues to take more ownership if you delegate. Effective delegation requires more than just getting a task off your desk — it involves

3. Maximize your unique value.

Prioritize by focusing on doing the most important tasks that only you can do. There will always be more things competing for your attention than you have time and energy to do. Prioritize the most important tasks that only you can do, and delegate everything else.

4. Moving ahead.

Understand what the core responsibilities are for your role, and what are secondary responsibilities, or even work that belongs to someone else.That won’t stop people from asking you to take on additional tasks and projects. And there are certainly times when taking on additional duties may be required due to unusual circumstances, or might be important for your own professional development. 

The workplace is and will constantly continue to evolve. No one can plan for the future, but it serves us best to always be on the lookout for anything that can provide our organizations with a competitive edge.