The future is here but what should we do with it, asks Martin Harder. A re-imagined leadership for the digital age is one which draws on a coaching style
A new era demands a new style of leadership. Today’s workplace is very different to that of 20, or even 10, years ago. Technological advances have brought companies much closer to their clients. With this, comes the need for re-skilling around how we live and work in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and the coming augmented reality.
Adaptation to this disruption translates into how we think about work, leadership and management, and coaching – and how we take action. We’re more alert and open to, yet often fearful of, change. But still the job needs to be done and engagement – and its corollary, employee experience – remain high on the agenda.
Today, individuals are increasingly seeking purpose as well as progression and are highly motivated by joint endeavour to a common goal. Yet, despite stunning technological advances, both employee productivity and engagement are in decline (Gallup, 2017), and employees are dissatisfied with the speed and direction of their career development (Aon Hewitt, 2017).
Together, these factors suggest the scale of people’s unrealised potential and afford employers an opportunity to offer more personalised development to support shared endeavours.
Rebuilding trust
Change narratives over the past decade note that we’re less trusting of big business and often our employers. Digitalisation – how digital technologies are restructuring social, business and economic models – means we don’t know if our employers, or even our profession, will exist in five years’ time. We work differently, too, with more virtual, and cross-functional and cross-border working. All these insights add fascinating dimensions to the critical issue of trust, and the interplay between human and organisational dynamics in fully realising our collective potential.
With the real and digital worlds colliding, leaders with the requisite behavioural skills to navigate these new spaces, and build the necessary agile organisational structures to respond effectively, can better capitalise on, not capitulate to, external change. They’re able to rebuild trust through a coaching style of leadership.
Learning to learn
For leaders responsible for building a sustainable business amid apparent turmoil, the challenge of properly engaging team members has perhaps never been harder, especially when we look through the lens of re-skilling.
A report published in late 2018 by the Big Innovation Centre, the UK Secretariat for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI, with, among others, professional services firm KPMG, concluded that ‘learning to learn’ will be the most important skill in our future world of work. This skill is particularly pertinent across the key themes of building, managing and working with AI, and having the capacity to live and thrive in an AI-driven society, suggests the report. It predicts increased demand for ‘broad’ skills, where the most valued qualities in people are their adaptability and ability to learn.
“In an agile, constantly transforming future, the most important skills for an individual to be equipped with is learning to learn – the ability to process new information into knowledge,” says Niki Iliadis, innovation and policy foresight manager at Big Innovation Centre.
Today’s engagement challenge is therefore to support organisations and societies to make the most of what humans can do working alongside AI.
“This is not simply a challenge of coding, but of leadership, design, imagination and creativity,” says Robert Bolton, head of KPMG’s People and Change Centre of Excellence.
A coaching style of leadership
The Academy of Executive Coaching (AoEC) agrees with this view. The training body identifies in its ongoing research and practice an evolving leadership style. It’s one that offers a purposeful, solutions-oriented and – critically – empowering response to change in this digital age. The coaching style of leadership’s behavioural aspects will be increasingly key for making the step changes needed to confront the leadership challenges of this brave new world.
Leaders who coach – coaching leaders – are those who empower and enable responsive attention to skills training, offer feedback in the moment, and encourage responsibility and accountability. They aren’t anything new but they are increasingly vital to delivering the agility, innovation and collaboration demanded for success today and tomorrow.
Driving innovation
In an organisational context in this era of digitalisation and augmented reality, everything is happening at the client interface. This is where innovation happens and means the role of leader changes dramatically. Leadership isn’t about organising work any more because most people are able to organise their work themselves. It’s really about keeping things together – vision and alignment – and to make clear what the business is and its direction, and to engage people in that.
In itself, this is a fairly standard view of leadership. Yet, when you add in aspects from coaching it has the potential to be transformational.
Listening, observing and simplifying
With digitalisation comes complexity – a clear threat to aligning vision and action. A coaching style of leadership is by definition more reflective and has the capacity to respond to this higher level of complexity than the old-style telling mode. By bringing a broader perception of multiple factors into play, it enables leaders to operate more effectively at the big picture level.
Coaching leaders create shorter, more responsive feedback loops through observation, conversations and communication. In doing so, they create the space to strengthen relationships through multi-stakeholder dialogue. Ultimately, creating strong connections simplifies the whole operating environment for everybody involved.
The more complex our world becomes, the more we need leaders and managers to manage that complexity. When people feel listened to and heard, they’re more ready to listen and share. This start of the trust process is absolutely necessary. There is nothing better in managing complexity than a trustful relationship where you don’t have to micro-manage.
A coaching style of leadership also speaks directly to engagement. In global organisations and those operating across international borders, the multiple viewpoints present in any workplace are strengthened by numerous cultural – national, local and organisational – and linguistic nuances.
Linking personal and career development
With inclusion being another critical aspect of today’s leadership narrative, behavioural skills inherent in a coaching style of leadership resonate even more deeply, especially when they support people in bringing their whole self to work.
Giving and receiving feedback, and conflict management, are the main aspects of a coaching style of leadership. When we help leaders develop a coaching style, we help them integrate these into a whole approach. It’s not about managing conflict one week and delivering feedback the next.
We are each a whole person and we need to see all these capabilities as an integrated set. That’s what learning about a coaching style of leadership is all about: creating a consistent set of behaviours. That’s where you get credibility and trust.
Building capacity and collective intelligence
In a coaching style of leadership, the level beyond achieving alignment with the vision is helping people achieve what they set out to do once they’ve committed to it. This is about people’s capacity to learn, develop their skills and contribute. It links directly to the research on skills employees need for the future world of work – the all-important learning to learn.
People are extending their knowledge and capabilities all the time. A coaching style of leadership is about arousing team members’ curiosity, enabling people to make the break between what they know to do and what they are supposed to do.
This second aspect is very much a coaching style of leadership. We help people get the necessary self-awareness about their strengths and development needs, to ask for feedback and to raise their level of performance – of connectivity to the client – and do a great job. People want some frame in which they can realise their capacities and continue to grow. That is very important when you want to access the potential of your people.
Trust, collaboration and agility
While today’s requirement for greater collaboration is not the immediate focus of a coaching style of leadership, it is one of the most positive outcomes when leadership and company culture move to a more trusting state.
Of course, you can’t just tell people to be more open, trustful and collaborative. It’s more about encouraging specific behaviours. What we find when these behaviours are practised regularly and consistently is that other things start to happen.
These are about trust and being open. It could be feedback from clients when something goes wrong. If we feel unable to admit to making a mistake, we keep the error to ourselves. Where you create that culture of a coaching style of leadership, you will see step-by-step the development of trustful, more effective communications and something new coming in.
That something new is agility – an organisation’s ability to adapt and respond to change. It is the result of a set of behaviours. Agility emerges from a coaching style of leadership – it comes when we are really honest and practising this coaching style.
Preparing now for a very different world
According to Amara’s Law , the impact of new technology is overestimated in the short-term, but underestimated in the long term. Amid the emotional responses including fear, uncertainty and excitement that AI incites, it’s easy to fear the future and our role in an automated world.
However, the human mind and successful collaboration between teams and individuals have already enabled the creation of some truly game-changing technologies, like virtual reality.
With the right skills and leadership approach, we can prepare now for our digital future by unleashing our own potential and capacity, and those of our team members, to capitalise on this pivotal moment and build a solid base for long-term success. The key is the right investment in people.
Companies that pull together often-fragmented activities in leadership training, and focus on enabling executives to acquire the skills we bundle together in a coaching style of leadership, will thrive long term.
Developing a coaching style of leadership is not a quick-fix. But financially, and from the perspective of performance and engagement, the dividends of investing in a coaching style of leadership are very much worth the human input in this digital age.
- Martin Harder is managing director, AoEC Germany and an international executive coach and leadership development expert. He’s been engaged in executive development since 1999. He founded Praesta Germany in 2006. He is vice president standards of EMCC Germany.
CASE STUDY
The head of IT at a global company was charged with a huge project to insource data management and, in the course of this migration, to update and streamline the considerable amount of legacy software that had accumulated in many parts of the manufacturing company.
The CIO was aware of the dimension and complexity of the project, which was critical to the future of the company. He understood that success did not just depend on managing technology and software programs, but in the first place on orchestrating a vast process of information, on profoundly understanding the needs of the many functions involved, figuring out appropriate solutions with them, while maintaining the overall consistency of the project in the face of many special concerns.
And to put forward an implementation plan that made sure risks were mitigated and smooth operation assured, by keeping stakeholders involved and ensuring their ongoing collaboration.
The CIO made sure the project manager and the team not only had the backing of the leadership team but that they were also set up for success. A key element was that the project manager and his team were equipped with coaching skills. The CIO wanted to make sure they felt enabled to develop a constructive dialogue with all stakeholders and could coach them to work through the challenges that the IT transformation implied for each of them.
With many details of the project not known at the start, managing the project team required team member roles to evolve over the course of the project, thus assuring the range of activities stayed tied into the larger plan. Engaging coaching skills helped to instill the critical reflection, feedback, negotiations and reaching agreements.
The coaching skills workshops were organised in several one- to two-day highly interactive sessions. These were followed by a series of sessions for sharing experiences and learning from each other.
Evaluations periodically conducted by the project team repeatedly indicated one key factor of the chosen approach: the project manager and his team all pointed out that learning about and applying their new coaching skills had turned them away from seeing the project merely as technology change and into enabling them to engage in interactions with the stakeholders in a new and very successful way.
References
- Gallup (2017). State of the Global Workplace Report: http://bit.ly/2ndOOWb
- Aon Hewitt (2017). Mentioned: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/294634