Lessons For Future Leaders
Part of the Paul Myers Series
This article is in response to a Paul Myers MBA article titled Do We Know How to Lead? He asked five poignant questions concerning the future of leadership and the lessons that could be learned from today’s environment. Several authors have already expressed their thoughts in their own separate articles. I will tag them below for you to read.
The way I wrap my head around a subject, whether it be leadership, business, philosophy, religion, or politics is by running it through a leadership and management framework that I have developed over nearly 34 years of study.
As for the questions, I will list them here and discuss the overall significance of the questions, because I found them to be really telling of our troubled times. And if I am able, I will try to answer some of them. They were tough questions.
How do you prioritize your emotional function? — this all comes down to the emotional balance present within the individual. Whenever emotion is discussed, it is really talking about connection. It is about how the individual feels connected within themselves and how they feel connected to the outside world.
Not everyone commands the ability to create and appreciate connection equally. Those who find connecting with others to be a more natural state for themselves, will have a greater advantage in their ability to lead others. Anyone can improve their power of connection by learning about others, learning their passions, and learning about their hopes and dreams. Learning about others is powerful, however it is nowhere near as powerful as actually being interested in others. But at least it’s a start.
How do you thrive in a crisis? — this about the processing of new information. This is going to be about the future leader’s ability to create a viable vision for the future while taking that new information into account. In an organizational setting, it would benefit future leaders to avoid hubris and surround themselves with others of different perspectives — not those who would merely parrot the words of the leader.
How about radical innovation? — this question is also about the processing of information, but it tends to deal with seeing the same old data in a new light, like the turning of a prism in your hand to find the beauty. This would involve the creation of a vision that would raise the plane of existence. Successful ascension to this higher plane would also require a complementary effort given in the areas of structure, collaboration and action.
Are you equipped for defining moments in conflict? and Do you know your followers? — these last two questions are actually tied together and that’s because from the perspective of a leader, everyone else is a follower. But the only way for that to be true is for leaders to understand all of their followers, especially those who have no wish to follow them right away. These two questions largely deal with collaboration, which you may recall I wrote about here. The best way to minimize conflict is through understanding their team. As leaders, if they are allowing conflict to become the key moment of greater understanding, then they have failed to collaborate effectively.
The thing that I found interesting about the questions was that they centered around the leadership skills of vision and collaboration, and not around the management skills of structuring or action-orientedness. With both sets of leadership and management skills being crucial to the success of every endeavor, the questions appear to arise out of our current need. In a time when the management of things seems to reign (control without regard for feelings and action without thought to consequences), especially here in the United States, it is encouraging to see there are those who see it is important to maintain the balance between leadership and management.
The most important thing to understand about the endeavor process is it will always be dynamic. As much as management will try to control the future, through structured contingency plans coupled with present day action, sole reliance on management is doomed to fail.
The reason for its inevitable failure is because of information. There will always be new information, and managed structures and efforts do not deal well with information that is new. It is the leadership skill that adapts incredibly to new information, as well as new, soured and even ended relationships. It is through the analyzing of all of this new information that a leader, once again, is able to formulate a viable vision, a viable direction for the future of the individual, the team, and the organization.
It is only after this new vision has been created that we can hope to achieve for ourselves, a moment of respite through the development of temporary structures, rules, and processes. A small moment of time that the team will be occupied with organized production. But time does not sit still, and information will change. The world will change, and the attitude of the people will change, and their needs and wants will change. The leader will step up, absorb the changes in information, and create the new vision.
As you may have gathered, the needs of the endeavor swing wide like a pendulum, never staying too long in one area of leadership or management, before moving away in another direction. It is something for which we have an innate understanding, even if we can’t always articulate it properly. We move with the flow of this pendulum because we have it within us to make our endeavors successful. We shift for individual, organizational, societal, and national endeavors. Sometimes we even shift to fulfill the needs for one of the largest endeavors on the planet — humanity.
For the next generation, and all the generations to follow, they will know what to do. They will shift according to the needs of their own endeavors. The best we can hope for is that they are aware of the swinging pendulum and that they do everything in their power to ensure it never stops.
Thank you for reading. Please enjoy the other articles in the series by these great authors.
