The Future Leader

“The most basic definition of leadership is you set the destination. You come up with a strategy to get to that destination and do your best to align and supply the resources to make that happen.” (Morgan, p.19) This is at its core the definition of leadership at the most basic level as Morgan states. Leadership is about determining the destination of whatever it is you are leading and then coming up with how to get to that destination. There are a multitude of resources out there and it is ever-growing the amount of “things” we can tap into to help us to achieve the destinations we are looking to get to. I think the crux of what Morgan tries to steer readers to in this book is to get leaders to think about the ways and really the foundational skills leaders will need to be leading not only now but into the unknowns of the future.

“A leader is someone who has the ability to see that something can be better than it is now, is able to rally people to move toward that better vision, can come up with a plan to create that vision, and can work toward making that vision a reality while putting people first.” (Morgan, p.24)?

I would say not only does a leader have the ability to see something that can be better than it is now, but also can see the abilities people have to become more and do more than what they are in that moment. Leading is part of seeing where the group or the organization can go in and grow, but also it takes on the ability to be able to see the people for their abilities, their passions, and their experience and how those can be leveraged into the best of themselves. It isn’t that you are making people something they don’t want to become, but you are taking the abilities and skills they have along with getting to know them and their passions to help their journey as an employee. I think at some point we all come across a leader in our life that sees something in us more than we can see for ourselves. It takes true effective leadership to put in the time to help individuals to become even more than that become along with piecing together those people so the organization can grow.?

“Make no mistake, being a leader in the future is the hardest job that will exist, and if you embark on this journey, it will be one of the greatest challenges of your professional career but also the most rewarding.” (Morgan, p.26) Leaders cannot become complacent and just be satisfied for where they are as well as where the organization is at currently. I think we find ourselves too complacent and we find ourselves too focused on the things of the present without putting stock into the future. I am not saying to focus only on the future without thinking of the present or reflecting on the past, but of the three I think the future is what we sometimes neglect the most. Being a leader in the future will be challenging because there is so much that is unknown in many areas. I think the flexibility is where leaders need to focus on the most in terms of just being ready and able to pivot and learn something different within themselves personally, professionally, and then organizationally.

“When you're leading an organization, you have to take into account that people are always the most important thing in the company. How you recruit those people, how you motivate them, how you task them with the overall mission and what you want to accomplish, is the core of leadership.” (Morgan, p.32) The data and objectives are things we can focus on throughout any company. These things sometimes drown out the importance of people and the importance of putting stock into their growth. In education there are too many times we look at data and we look at it without taking stock of the individuals and the people that are involved. We are facing a crisis in education that really is making it difficult and is forcing the changes within schools. Schools are not finding a large number of new teachers wanting to get into education. With this change means the pool of candidates is and has changed. What this impacts from there is the way we think in terms of supporting and walking alongside new employees from the support staff to teachers. Leaders more and more are going to have to take the time to help the staff to learn as we go and to learn the job some as we go. There isn’t the same competitiveness as it was when I first got into education over 17 years ago. Onboarding and support throughout a staff hiring is changing more and more and becoming very important to moving people and therefore the school in the right direction. People have always been the most important in schools, but now supporting them and learning from mistakes is becoming more and more valuable to seeing outcomes we want to see in schools.

“The second typical responsibility of great leaders is getting people to move in the direction of that decision, in other words, engaging, empowering, motivating, and inspiring people.” (Morgan, p.41)

This comes down to relationships. Regardless of the organization or business you are involved in the more it is becoming important to be able to motivate and inspire. It has always been important but with the way our attention is being pulled in a multitude of directions makes it even more important to think how we are motivating and inspiring. If leaders aren’t doing this we are going to find our people within the organization too complacent and too focused on the present and not the future. I don’t know for other industries, but for many in education I think this is a huge pitfall we see all too often. We see teachers not being motivated or inspired and therefore they find themselves teaching the same way over and over without really growing or even having that desire to grow.

“We will experience more change in the coming decades than we have experienced in the past hundreds of years.” (Morgan, p.45) Change is and really has become normal. Changes are frequent and they are regular parts of whatever industry we are involved in. It seemed to be many years ago there was change, but the changes were not accelerating as they are now. Technology has afforded so many positive changes and has moved us forward in so many ways, but also it is changing the leadership aspect because of how quickly changes are happening. “The role of leadership is much more focused on what is coming and getting people throughout the organization to change the paradigm and change it constantly.” (Morgan, p. 47) If we aren’t modeling and embracing changes in leadership we will not see this happen throughout the company or organization as it should. We should be modeling this and we should be working hard to keep challenging the thinking and the practices of our people starting with ourselves first.

“Purpose acts as the bridge between the work you are doing and the impact that the work has on customers, other employees, communities, or the world. But do you get meaning from the work you are doing? Meaning is very subjective and unique to each of us and this is often where employees struggle. Meaning is more about why you are personally doing something and the feeling you get from doing it.” (Morgan, p.51) I say all the time the ways to inspire ourselves in education to get back to what we love doing requires us to think of the “why” behind what we are doing. I think there are too many educators that are falling into losing the “why” that got them into education from the beginning. Part of this is due to the outside factors and pressures without feeling the same payoff that used to be a more regular part of education. Educators have always been underpaid, but unfortunately the plates of educators have reached a breaking point of being too full. Meaning is subjective and unique to each individual. This means that the only person able to find the “why” to what you are doing and that inspiration comes down to you. What leaders can do to help this though is to make sure to model and discuss reflection as part of the regular practice for all individuals.

“Future leaders must practice constant reflection and transparency, not just by themselves but with their teams. When I hold meetings, anyone is allowed to question a practice, a policy, or a behavior in our company and they are also allowed to question me as a leader. There should be no place for leaders to hide in their organizations.” (Morgan, p.67) This is what I was just saying about reflection and finding your “why”. Modeling questions and questioning is so important because it brings a more natural and impactful way of reflection. If you aren’t reflecting you aren’t really growing as you should be growing. Reflection is taking what you can learn from what you have done, what you are doing,, and where this should be leading you from there. “One of the things that makes a great leader is their ability to learn from the old but to create the new.” (Morgan, p.90) When you are in the regular practice of reflection you are going to find yourself doing just this…creating something new from the old. You take what you have seen and done and you learn from it in such a way to create a new and different way of doing it. Most of the time I think this really is just about thinking of ways even some of the smallest changes make a huge difference.

“You can't expect others to be authentic and transparent if you as a leader are not prepared to be these things yourself. In this hyper-connected world, we have to lean toward humanism, putting people at the center of things.” (Morgan, p.92) Being authentic and transparent is something we have to model when it comes to leadership. As Morgan says here we want to see authenticity and transparency from our colleagues, but if we aren’t willing to model this there shouldn’t be that expectation. We need to consider how much we are using technology in terms of communication and relationships. There is so much involved with technology that can help with being more productive and also to be more effective in our communication. What we can lose though if we lean too much into the ease of technology is the communication that matters in terms of being authentic and transparent. This happens because we lose some of this without the body language and tone that comes with face to face interactions. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen a disagreement or problem arise from miscommunication when it comes to reading too much into an email or text instead of having face to face interaction.

“Future leaders must instill a learning culture in their organizations. Organizations that are not continually learning and adapting will lose their competitive edge and ultimately won't survive. We've seen this over and over, and we'll see it happen more often and faster in the future.” (Morgan, p.119) What is interesting about this quote in terms of my career in education is there are many educators I have come across that aren't learners themselves. I think this has stifled many educators and it has become a problem not just in education but in many different industries and companies. Instilling learning means first as leaders we must be learners ourselves. We must also be willing to share the learning that we are doing.

“What if, instead of obsessing over how busy we are, we obsessed over how we can give ourselves more time to be curious.” (Morgan, p.131) This feeds back into the point I made earlier when talking about how we are filling our lives too much and not giving enough time for reflection. The same could be said for reflection or curiosity. We don’t give ourselves enough time to reflect or be curious about a topic. Part of the problem is we don’t even find ourselves having enough time to be curious about a topic we enjoy or have passion about.

“The future is not about technology versus humans; it's about technology working with humans against a problem.” (Morgan, p.140) We are facing problems now and we will continue to face a multitude of problems in our future. We aren’t to think of technology and human interaction to be the problem as much as working together to solve the problems at hand. I would agree with Morgan that too many times our culture thinks in terms of human vs technology instead of realizing the fact of problems we are facing, not the interaction but using that interaction to solve. This is the reason for leaders and all learners to be willing to find out more about the technology that surrounds us. There are ways in which we can use and more importantly leverage the technology around us to solve issues we are facing each and every day. We just need to make sure not to fight against the technology.

“The first layer of skills a good leader must master are internal: managing himself or herself as an individual human being.” (Morgan, p.202) If we are having a battle or problem internally we won’t be able to effectively lead others externally. This goes for productivity for all of us regardless of how we are leaders. We are all leaders in some way and if we are struggling or if we are not managed internally we will not be able to externally be as productive or effective as we should be. There has been much said recently about self care and making sure this is a priority for us all, but it still lingers as an issue for many leaders and many workers in general. There is still a problem and stigma with the outlook on self care or mental health care.?

“We spend most of our lives learning how to do, teaching people how to do, and yet we know that in the end it is the quality and the character of the leader that determines the performance and the results. So leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do.” (Morgan, p.203)? If we are focusing on being and not doing we are focused on people and ourselves instead of the data and the to-do lists we always have. All leaders could take note not to get too caught up in the how as much as the being of the people we work with. In education I think the equivalent for us is that we are working on the whole child and working on how they are developing as a whole. We are easily caught up too much on the doing and how they are done instead should focus a bit more on the being and the person. Once we figure out more about the growth of the person the how will easily follow along.

References

Morgan, J. (2020). The Future Leader: 9 Skills and Mindsets to Succeed in the Next Decade. Wiley.?