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Summary
Global events teach us many lessons. One is that our world is so interconnected that working together through complexity is a mindset and skill that is paramount to our joint success.
Another is that the rate of change continues to accelerate, while the scale of change does too. What is required to thrive in leadership positions has changed massively.
While charismatic leaders have been equipped with an advantage, their charisma, leadership is a practice that must be nurtured and continuously improved.
The field of management is working on upgrading itself to leadership. There’s more work to be done here.
The training market continues to offer short courses on new leadership approaches. This format makes skill development near impossible.
Renowned leadership programme providers have a strong background in core leadership topics. This type of curriculum doesn’t cover the realm of complexity.
Sam Kiani and I drew from our own experience in senior leadership positions, as well as our work with senior leaders guiding them through complexity, to review what the future needs to look like for leadership development programmes.
We’d like to share our learning with you. We also canvassed what’s out there and will share what we found. In short, there’s very little that covers what’s needed in a practical way, grounded in first-hand experience.
We took that as a calling to share our design for what 4IR-ready (4IR is short-hand for “4th Industrial Revolution“) leadership development ought to encompass.
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Key Highlights
“Everything that we talk about today is going to be stuff that you can leverage in your own organisation when you either seek leadership development or when you’re looking to bring leadership development into your organisation.” – Georg Fasching
“It’s not about the amount of time we have, it’s really about what we do with it, and when you look at the highest performers, it’s also about the organisations and the structures they build, the support system around themselves.” – Sam Kiani
“A top tip is to rock up in the morning and pick your three most important goals to really make a big difference to your objectives and then secure some time to work on those, and only then should you go on to engaging with other people and answering emails, messages and so on.” – Georg Fasching
“When we are talking about leadership development, we are focusing on actual development of leadership and that being a practice, so it’s not a leadership course. When we’re teaching, we’re trying to really maximise the amount of practice time you have to really see measurable behavioural impact.” – Georg Fasching
“A lot of the work starts on ourselves, so that we can really be very conscious about how we’re practicing leadership in our every day, how we can do that is very much up to us, we can design that, and what we refer to as designing our leadership brand.” – Georg Fasching
“We all work in the best way that we can, and so this is about helping people understand new patterns and helping leaders understand what a different mode of leadership looks like to enable that realisation of value.” – Sam Kiani
“The thing that naturally comes up is politics, the difficult conversations, and when you talk about silos, obviously around the senior leadership teams, high levels of management or even in the C-Suite, it’s about how we overcome what we might call fiefdoms and change resistance.” – Sam Kiani
“These challenges of managing power dynamics are really real, and part of the answer is to have a systemic focus, understand what systems are all about and how to think systemically. This takes time to embed but as we start to think systemically, we understand that there are no quick fixes, that there are many interconnecting variables and so we immediately start from a footing that avoids there being direct power dynamic issues.” – Sam Kiani
“We focus on the real issues that are holding change back: organisational patterns, optimisation goals, and again, how we’re showing up as leaders along this power spectrum. If we exert too much power, we lose people, and if we don’t leverage power enough then we also cannot really serve the organisation to the best of our capabilities.” – Georg Fasching
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