Setting sail into 2024

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“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”

So said Isaac Asimov and its incredibly poignant when discussing leadership so I’ll caveat from the start that these are my musings and are not based on scientific facts.

Last year I had the pleasure of engaging with some incredible leadership thought leaders – a notable mention to Scott J. Allen, Ph.D. and Luigi A. Pecoraro, Ed. D. who presided over a leadership course that a number of us at Crestron ANZ participated in last year. We covered a lot of ground in that course but the specific topics of influence as a component of leadership has been resonating in my mind ever since.

As it’s the beginning of a new calendar year (and in Crestron’s case a new financial year) we are all jumpstarting our enthusiasm engines and trying to refocus on the tasks at hand as we steer out of the proverbial port into the big wide ocean. We have a load of decisions to make about how we guide, inspire and motivate our teams.

I think it's fair to say that we have all had a hard time in the past few years, recessions and global pandemics have an uncanny knack of stunting the very motivation we seek to drive. Throw in chip shortages and supply chain challenges so prevalent across so many industries in the past couple of years (particularly across the Construction and Manufacturing sectors that are both dear to my heart and wallet) and we have an interesting mood that has become a challenge to many a leader. I, like many leaders are trying to look for ways to do things differently and drive success for myself and my team as we attempt to reboot or indeed re-image (maybe not the best word - inside joke) and begin our 2024 journey.

As a client facing individual, I’ve observed a growing undercurrent of motivational fatigue across the organisations I interact with. This has been caused by years of challenging economic factors but also a massive shift in the need to manage (and hence motivate) our teams who have become more remote - I’m referring to the places they work rather than how they feel about the work they do – but this may also be true as countless studies tell us.

This fascinating article from Forbes references “Industrial-era vs Digital-Age Leadership” which was ahead of its time considering this was “Pre-Hybrid Working” (if I’m allowed to carelessly flaunt that dreaded buzzword) which I believe was coined sometime in late 2021. Indeed, we saw many studies and surveys in the period immediately following the COVID lockdowns that described Hybrid working and the need to manage our people and teams in new ways as a result of the enforced working practices we had to adopt in 2022 and into 2023. This trend was described in this article before we as an industry began jumping on stages and advising people how to survive and manage people in a Hybrid world (...guilty. Sorry, not sorry.... )

Industrial-era vs Digital-Age Leadership is a wonderful way to describe the new needs of our workforce who are very enlightened and require their employers to be the same. These days, the transparency and honesty of an employer is what keeps people in their seats and drives them to succeed. Organisations are positioning their social responsibilities, their future centric thinking and progressive attitudes front and centre because this is what their people now care about (and by proxy, so do their clients).

Whilst the article focusses on a pretty brutal assault on the use of KPIs as an outdated measure to motivate employees (many will disagree). This is just an example of some of the elements we need to consider in the old vs. new way of thinking about how we approach leadership as a whole.

There's a belief that if an organisation seeks to add value to its stakeholders rather than mechanically seeking to only drive profits then the rewards will come. This is applicable to the way we lead and inspire. We should be appealing to the creativity, the responsibility and the passions of our teams. If we succeed, the results will follow.

As an aside, I think I’ll miss talking about Hybrid Working as something new and shiny but I also feel glad that we are heading in a direction of enlightenment as we seek to utilise modern ways of thinking gleaned from lessons learned to navigate some potential choppy waters ahead this year.

I’ll be looking further into this as the year progresses to see what works for my team. I’m keen to hear your thoughts if you have got this far in this article.

Thanks for reading.