Skilling up for a better world

As we head into a new year we may be reading about the challenges leaders have identified as most important for the year ahead. These will often be couched as the top five/ten leadership dilemmas for 2025. Though given the climate organisations are operating in – social, environmental, economic, political – there are many more than ten.

Here’s an alternative perspective – the biggest dilemmas/the biggest risks facing leaders come down to two things – the quality of leadership itself and being unprepared for what comes next (all the other stuff we can’t predict).

The quality of our leadership, the way we lead, and our ability to operate well in uncertainty are interdependent. The world isn’t going to get more certain. Recent history is characterised by unpredictable events, often beyond imagination. Organisations are subject to these shifts, requiring the nimbleness of a dancer and balance and agility of a tightrope walker to continue making progress.

We need to rethink how we lead and operate in these conditions, going beyond ‘best practice’ into forming new and novel practices.

This doesn’t negate what’s gone before or the skills and qualities we have already (though some of these may serve us less well going forward). Instead we need to lean more into the ‘skills’ that will best serve us in this emerging context. Some we may find on existing leadership competency frameworks – being able to see the bigger picture, for example, or take considered risks.

Thinking about those for a moment, we might consider the scale of our bigger picture – likely different for each of us. Yet in the context of a challenged and challenging world we must expand the frame, becoming more conscious of the interdependencies between our choices for our organisation and the effect of these on the world around us, and caring to do things differently.

Considered risk is a tricky one. Largely organisations are risk averse so sticking our neck out isn’t particularly tempting. We need to think, instead, about experimenting and moving forward with (sometimes) micro steps, testing what works and doesn’t in each situation.

Another ‘skill’ is that of reflection. Some leaders are practised in this area, taking time to think things through, sift and synthesise from the advice and feedback they’ve gathered. But does that reflection go deep enough? In our brave new world deeper reflective practices – like mindfulness and meditation - are needed to get us beyond the rational/tried and tested thinking and connected with a deeper, higher source of wisdom we might call intuition. (A few years back research from Harvard Business School and INSEAD presciently cited meditation and intuition as the two most effective business tools for the 21st Century).

Connected to intuition is our ability to sense – to connect with what isn’t visible, as well as what is, within any situation and to intuit what may be needed or at least brought forward in experimental form.

Whilst these ‘skills’ may feel less concrete, less measurable, they are some of the essentials of a more conscious form of leadership that we need if we are to find our way to building a better world for all.