Leadership Under Scrutiny - What does leadership mean in 2022?

In the past 2 years, the pandemic and its impacts have been unprecedented and more far reaching than ever imagined. The economic & employee demands have impacted how businesses operate now, and how they plan for the future. Leadership, therefore, has been challenged and has evolved more aggressively than in any other recent years.

At TH Daniels, we have had a unique experience of this changing landscape, and how this translates into the long-term success of talent acquisition & retention is the perspective we are acutely interested in, and something we will be writing about and investigating further.

In talking to business leaders, it has been exciting to see these changes in action and learn from those who have emerged successfully out of the past 12-24 months.

Leadership has changed. There is no doubt about it. New demand and scrutiny on leaders have raised, once again, the intriguing question of whether leaders are born so, or whether it is an acquired skill set through learning and experience. This question, and its impacts, is what we investigate in this article.

A recent McKinsey report outlined that “leaders need both an elevated of human empathy and the advantage of making decisions during uncertainty and chaos.” Again, is this an innate or acquired skill? It is a fair assumption to say that this would fall under an innate skill, as many of us would agree that some are better than others in pressurised situations. Although capability will increase with experience. However, the wholesale changes the world has gone through in the past 2 years pushes this assumption. While agreeing with this being an innate skill, it’s also an acceptable conclusion to say that no individual leader can make their way successfully without the benefits of associative leadership development and learning from lived experiences and wider organisation.

Leadership is more people focused that every before. Corporate leadership and leadership of people is more interlinked and has rapidly accelerated recently. The focus of employees has changed. Working life is more than ever based on family, work-life balance, and overall workplace satisfaction. This has created a shift both in business leadership and shifted the landscape of talent acquisition and retention. This “humanitarian” aspect in leadership is something we would consider as being primarily developed through “associative leadership” due to the continued changing and developing nature of it.?

Through a collection of engagements and our own polling, as a conclusion, we do land somewhere in the middle. Additionally, 65% of respondents to our poll also agree with this conclusion. Respondents of which poll are Business leaders themselves, coming from a wide range of industries from food, to pharma, to the automotive industry.

Something of this nature can be deliberated on in Volumes, not pages but what comes as a common thread is that there is no agreed-upon-handbook for this. What can be said however is that there is a core, innate capability of what one would call a ‘leader’ but that this is by no means the only path to leadership. A good leader after all has to have the capability to adapt, and as we have seen recently, and deal with unforeseen circumstance. Hence, as the poll suggests – it is a combination of both innate skill along with circumstance. How successful leaders navigate this will be directed by all of the above.?

References:

McKinsey & Company Article - https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/leadership-in-a-crisis-responding-to-the-coronavirus-outbreak-and-future-challenges