Changing Leadership: How to Equip your Organisation for the Future of Work Part III

Recap: Recently, FlexiBees partnered with Transformance Forums to organise a summit discussing the Future of the Workplace. The people attending were leadership from Human Resources, Transformation and Digital Teams of top organisations - all with keen interest and stake in kitting their organisations with new ways of working. The whole day was packed with insights, and my one strong take-away was that leaders across organisations are thinking about how to prepare themselves for what is to come. 

Here below is the third and final of a three part series on the key insights from the event, which I reproduce here specifically with the intent to help readers think and evaluate future strategies for their own organisations. To read the first and second of these parts, please go here and here.

Part III: How Leadership is changing:

This entire day was, in fact, evidence of leadership thinking having undergone a massive change. Whether it was Rahul Sinha, HR President, Pidilite, speaking about his PUBG skills and the importance of keeping abreast with latest trends or Captain Raghu Raman, President Risk, Security & New Ventures, Reliance Industries, speaking about the foolishness of showing a 20 year career path as incentive to a new joinee today, it was clear that a set of forward-facing leaders are even as of today thinking very differently about how to manage their organisations and teams. The rest of us need to learn from them.

Here in this article I aim to bring out different facets of how leadership is changing or needs to change, so that it helps spark thoughts for the rest of us.

• Create Jigsaw teams:

Captain Raman as usual spoke fantastically, bolstering his talk with anecdotes from his own life, as well as bringing to the audience many interesting and vivid leadership models. The one I liked the most is the comparison of Tiled teams vs Jigsaw teams*, and the very different schools of leadership they represent. So jigsaw teams are those that get together a highly collaborative and diverse set of individuals, each with their own strengths and vulnerabilities that are complemented by others in the team, resulting in high performance, creativity, and agility on the part of the unit as a whole. Tiled teams as you can guess comprise standardised skill-sets replicated multiple times to drive scale in a predictable environment. Today more increasingly in a VUCA world, businesses have to learn to live with uncertainty and have to respond quickly in unprecedented ways to external events. This makes jigsaw teams perfect for the business environment of today and tomorrow, because not only are they geared to handle complexity and chaos due to their composition, but because of their basic premise of being built such that each team member complements the other that allows for transparency and acceptance, it ends up saving a lot of bandwidth that other teams expend in their team members covering up for their deficiencies. This - teams built on the bedrock of transparency and sharing - is a revolutionary idea in my view, one that is yet to fully catch on. Even today, large organisations are plagued with internal politics, much energy being wasted in the navigation of it.

• Adopt the Gardener approach:

Earlier in the day, Ashutosh Inamdar, General Manager, Strategy Cell, Lupin, in answer to how young leaders today cope with responsibilities and teams beyond their age-bracket so to say, said that leadership has changed from the Authoritarian, prescriptive, style to an Enabler style, where the leader of today might not have all of the skills or any of the skills that the team does, but is able to enable and facilitate them to perform their individual and collective best. This was further expanded upon by Captain Raman, who spoke of three styles of leadership that the world has seen over the last 100 years, starting with the authoritarian approach that transformed into the coaching approach which is on the brink of further evolving into the Gardener approach. The Authoritarian approach stemmed from the prevalent industries of the time, largely manufacturing led businesses, which were in those times, the chief contributors to jobs and the economy. A command and control hierarchical style worked very well then - production was linear and output could be precisely controlled by varying inputs. That meant the leadership challenge was to read externalities, understand demand and instruct teams under to change the composition of supply - hiring of more manpower, less production of a certain chemical, increased capability building for a certain factory - and so on. But with the arrival of more people-driven industries such as Services, Information, Knowledge, which not only ruled the economy but also shaped the minds of the millions coming of age under its aegis, output was not precisely a factor or multiple of input. This is more true today than ever before, where the quality of output is a function of the unique experience and talents each person brings to the table (forming a jigsaw team). A truly great marketing team today will have a branding/marketing professional, a digital media expert, a content development professional, a writer and a designer, as key people. Tripling the size of this team will not triple the number of campaigns or improve the quality of campaigns by 3 times. But if we hire talent such that each of the professionals has relevant experience - category, channel or creative medium - as the case may be, we can enhance output and increase speed of delivery. In teams of the future, such nuances will only increase, and other forms of diversity - gender, sexuality, geography, etc - will also become factors. Leaders of tomorrow will have to manage these diversities by being ‘Gardeners’ i.e. enablers, and help each individual differently, to perform their best, picking out obstacles from their paths, nourishing them with the right inputs and helping them flourish.

• Build an open culture:

All of the above new styles of leadership are in part the result of the worker of today and increasingly tomorrow being averse to hierarchies, and they further create an ecosystem where hierarchies are made even more irrelevant. On a panel with Sahil Nayar, Associate Director, HR, KPMG, Ashutosh Inamdar, General Manager, Strategy Cell, Lupin and myself, moderated by Praveen Arora, CEO & Founder, FGnC Consulting, Sahil Nayar raised an important point about building culture around this new reality of dissolved hierarchies by giving the example of a 21 year old who today can stand up in a town-hall and ask a tough question, to the CEO no less. Someone in the audience wanted to know how such a culture could be built, that led to an invigorating discussion. I made the point, and about which I think often as a new parent, that this culture needs to be built not only in our offices, but also in our homes. India has traditionally been a hierarchical society, where age/experience is venerated and the young challenging the old is seen as ‘back-talking’. Today if the zeitgeist needs our youth to challenge status quo, think differently and come up with creative solutions, we need to create that culture in our homes and our workplaces.

                                                        Challenge status quo

• Devise new-age talent management models:

Another point made excellently by the Captain was on the impatience of the current and future generations, and how that is leading to very different business models and thinking for a lot of industries who aim to serve these generations. The youth of today, having grown-up in an age of abundance and change, does not see value in long-term planning and has different definitions of permanence and loyalty. Consequently, businesses are changing their thinking, insurance models are evolving to bring rewards more upfront, car manufacturers and phone companies are no longer designing for long-lasting features, high-novelty consumer-facing products are in an unprecedented race to innovate, are some of these examples. Similarly, organisations need to think about career progression, talent management and talent retention differently, too. Showing a new joinee a 20 year long career path is no longer adequate incentive. One way to look at it is the way Patty McCord, former Chief Talent Officer of Netflix, does**: in the era of high talent churn where good people leave good companies if they find something better, more interesting, or closer to their strategic goals, why don’t companies become great places to be from rather than great places to be at? But of course there is a cost to this, and another way is for companies to fight to retain their best talent. A recent survey by the Manpower group already paints a picture of a global talent shortage with 45% of employers globally saying that they cannot find the skills they need. For India, that figure is 56%. Leadership plays a crucial role here, with their talent vision, policy decisions and management style defining how attractive an employer their company is. For example a leadership that myopically refuses to offer flexibility to its women employees will sooner or later experience a talent drain. They also bear the responsibility of unlocking new sources of getting the right skills, for example, through gig workers and/or returnship women.

• Imbibe new skills:

The captain ended his talk by speaking of the skills future leaders must have, that spanned a number of areas, from understanding the external environment, to gearing up their teams for accelerated learning, to communication and negotiation. What was interesting was that it included some very strong ‘soft’ skills as well such as a sense of equity & fairness, empathy, an understanding of cultures and the ability to connect. This goes back to a point in the first part of this series, where we spoke about how the leadership of tomorrow in their mission to lead extremely diverse teams, must combine their left-brained skill-set with EQ-led right-brain understanding and collaboration. It also reminds me of a fantastic question asked by Yuval Noah Harari in in latest book, where he says that what separates humans from advanced machines of the future is possibly consciousness, or the ability to feel. Why then are we spending so little time and money on understanding the human consciousness or in deepening and expanding human compassion?

Well, everything that I have understood so far about the future of work, namely, a rise in complexity of work, more diverse teams, autonomy, purpose and flexibility loving employees, gig-work that leads to geographic dispersion, tells me that the leaders of the future will be highly empathetic, connection-seeking people, in stark contrast to the shock & awe styles of the past. And I have to say it make me feel optimistic about the future.

And so here we are at the end of this series. Hope it made for interesting reading. Big shout-out to Transformance Forums for envisioning and implementing the idea of targeted industry meets to discuss powerful ideas of the future. And finally, dear readers, while we speak of the future, it is as always, already upon us. Let me know in the comments what you are doing at your organisations to meet it head on.

* You can read about Tiled & Jigsaw teams in more detail here. **You can watch the rest of what Patty McCord says here.

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