Opinion: Three leadership roles seen in future leaders

Abstract

Leadership has been a circumstance, an event, and a mode of operation, and executives follow recipes. Some recipes are used once, and some are thrown in the trash. The ones that are in focus are those that reap the largest benefits to the stakeholders. In practice, leadership is a set of roles that inspire employees and become role models for them. A leader’s personality must be also continuously discerned. This requires outside evaluation and suggestions. In this article, we explore leadership through a more detailed lens to define the roles of leaders for the future.

Introduction

The cognitive ability in doing a job well is not enough to be capable of leading others (De Jong, 2010; Goffin, 2020; Engin, 2021; Dåderman et al., 2022). Your promotion to a leadership position does not in any way mean that you become a leader. For many people that get promoted, there is virtually no training. Some folks go away to a 2-day supervisor training. This sensitivity-type training has merit but after 2 days of supervisory training, there needs to be much more leadership development. New leaders must develop their personalities to lead not grasp the new management fad (Pendleton and Furnham, 2016; Davis and Christian, 2018; Reiß, 2022; Zohar, 2022).

Some executives are usually reluctant to develop organizational leadership. This reluctance seems quite logical being that the development of leadership requires the personal development of leaders and the deepening of their insights in dealing with complex issues, we found that our first training with leaders incorporates a deep dive into the realm of introspection oneself.

When Steve Jobs came up the ranks of leadership, the complexities of leadership were continuously developing. As digital transformation and artificial intelligence started to emerge, the more complex leader-follower equation emerged as leaders came to use new tools for communication such as chatbots. For example, in an international financial company in Australia, in our meetings with lower-level employees, many employees pointed out that senior managers did not understand the value of their views on the knowledge management system in the past. They also pointed out that this was the reason that many employees had lost their motivation and sense of ownership of common goals and were looking for new opportunities outside their current work environment. The results of the meetings with the lower level of the organization with the participation of human resources in the redevelopment of the knowledge management system were excellent. The level of performance and morale significantly improved. This complexity of the leader-follower equation in the future requires more effective roles for leaders in the global business environment (Waghmare, 2019; Paliwal et al., 2020; Guarda and Augusto, 2022). This article introduces these critical roles for future leaders.

Leadership for the future

Leadership roles can play an important role in influencing others (Chhotray et al., 2018; Ötting et al., 2021; Uzorka and Olaniyan, 2022). Marshall Goldsmith, a leader in executive education, has a person call him every day to see how he is dealing with his hectic management consulting game plan. When we develop consultation sessions with the managers, we also state that before getting familiar with the leadership roles, managers should look at leadership as a service to develop a sense of common ownership in the employees. The only way to do this is to discover the benefits of diversity, equity, and inclusion (Issar and Navon, 2016; Carsten, 2017; Yarnell and Grunberg, 2017; Tang, 2019; Munsoor, 2021; Serrat, 2021). This leadership approach creates an environment of interpersonal motivation for employees, which results in the extensive participation of human resources in organizational processes (Austin, 2016; Montuori and Donnelly, 2017; Shekshnia et al., 2018; Inam et al., 2021; Kiß and Sulíková, 2021; Caldwell, 2022; Dean, 2022; Gündemir and Kirby 2022; Tipurić, 2022).

We also distributed a checklist that determined where they stood on their own managerial issues. Once this was diagnosed, we then asked the organization to distribute a checklist of the best possible behaviors according to the adoption of the best assumptions and try to completely master behaviors separately. This stage was challenging, but in training workshops for the managers, we convinced them that this stage could play an important role in their personal development. Then, we asked them to write down how humility could play an important role in developing leadership in their organization. As a result, the behaviors of these leaders with their employees had significantly changed and improved compared to before the workshop.

After the deep dive and the personal assessment criteria, we then describe the roles of leadership. Managers should be aware that the complexities of the external ecosystem and the emergence of factors such as digital transformation and artificial intelligence take the power away from them to force employees as leaders to follow them in the path of realizing the future. The view of creating a spark of innovation in the mind of a leader should give way to a new view that believes that all employees make the puzzle of innovation and each of them plays a role in it. This new perspective is strongly dependent on the democratization of the work environment, and leaders should provide as much human power in organizational innovation as possible through the expansion of the culture of participation and trust and the creation of flexible and flat structures. We decided to call them “ innovative democratic leaders .”

Innovative leaders are at the forefront of the future. The “democratic innovation leaders” are defined as leaders who are inviting all employees to participate broadly in completing the innovation puzzle. With the new genius culture, leaders take a step further from the extensive participation of intellectual capital within the organization in the innovation process. They look for intellectual capital outside the organization and involve them in the innovation process of the organization. We believe that organizations will rely heavily on freelancers’ intellectual capital in the future that brings new perspectives to training. In pursuit of acquiring innovative ideas from foreign intellectual capital, they will cross the limits of geographical boundaries and involve experts from all over the world in the form of remote work in organizational projects. We decided to call this important role the role of the “innovation leader search steering committee .”

The last role we suggest for leaders is the role of “ organizational excellence keeper ”. Always remember that small but consistent steps will lead to giant leaps. In this role, leaders should expand the continuous communication of human resources within the organization with the external ecosystem and the intellectual capital outside the organization (i.e., freelance experts). Leaders of the future should provide more opportunities for the expansion of knowledge transfer with intellectual capital outside the organization by expanding organizational communication.

In conclusion

Resistance to this new leadership path will lead to the loss of opportunities for companies and ultimately their failure and exclusion from global markets. In embracing this change, organizations will flourish with excitement and freshness. Based on our evidence, these three roles, along with personal development and improvement of leaders' behaviors influenced the performance of organizations and made reaching the peak easier for organizations.