As the Unexpected Becomes Routine: The Soft Skills of Adaptive Leaders
As the needs of the business change so rapidly — and as what we expect from our leaders is so harshly tested — many learning leaders are significantly rethinking leadership development. Health and economic crises, of course, test leaders’ mettle to set direction, navigate complexity, and execute effectively. Yet these challenges are hardly new.
Long before 2020’s pandemic, only 14% of CEOs said they had the leadership talent they need. That’s according to the most recent Global Leadership Forecast survey of 25,000 leaders and nearly 2500 companies. Other early warning signals have been flashing for a while. Digitization, automation, and the gig economy all affect not only the nature of work, but who we should think of as leaders, and what we need from them. We’ve seen a variety of predictions, but the themes are fairly consistent. Robots and automation will both eliminate and create jobs — and change what existing jobs require of workers. The geography of production and value chains will continue to evolve globally. And as the numbers and types of jobs change, so will the ways in which employers relate to workers.
As the nature of work changes, so do the skills we need in our workforce. While anticipated technical or “hard skills” gaps vary by industry, study after study confirms that companies across the board will experience critical gaps in so-called “soft skills” that are essential for adaptive leadership.
In Soft Skills for a Hard World, McKinsey notes the growing importance of social and emotional skills, as work automates and companies drive digital transformation. “But HR professionals report difficulty recruiting candidates who have the necessary soft skills for an automating world,” the study said. Missing skills include (as a bundle) “problem solving, critical thinking, innovation and creativity,” as well as the “ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity,” and communication.
Taking a somewhat different frame, but landing in a not altogether different place, Deloitte examines the future of work and argues for more focus on “enduring human capabilities” than specific, functional skills. In their article “Skills change, but capabilities endure,” Deloitte’s authors draw distinctions between “innate” skills that can be amplified vs. “developed” skills that flow from experience and practice. But they highlight a remarkably consistent set of capabilities as key to individual effectiveness, including adaptive and critical thinking, teaming, emotional intelligence, curiosity, empathy, resilience, and creativity.
The old view of leadership development, premised on employees having a “professional” (or functional) career and a “managerial career,” just doesn’t make sense in the current reality, Josh Bersin notes in his recent piece, “Why Leadership Development Feels Broken: And How We’re Fixing It.” Neither does the model of “getting people ready for leadership” as they get promoted stepwise over years and years. Instead, leadership development must be much more continuous, integrated with people’s work; we must build the capabilities that will enable individuals to rise to the occasion, as the unexpected becomes routine.
As we search for direction, we can look to Peter Drucker’s emphasis on impact — “leadership is defined by results not attributes.” Or to Bill Gates’ take on how leaders create that impact — “leaders will be those who empower others.” Others offer similar insights. What becomes clear is that in a rapidly changing world, leaders cannot expect to anticipate everything and instruct their people on how to respond. The point of developing adaptive leaders is not that when the time comes, they will make the perfect decision or deliver just the right message. Yes, leaders have to do (make choices and take actions), but they also have to enable their people to do, while guiding them to do better (whether “better” means more, or different, output and impact). As Edgar Schein put it so succinctly, “’Leadership’ is wanting to do something new and better, and getting others to go along.”
Leaders must enable better choices and actions by their people, under circumstances that are not entirely predictable. Therefore, leadership development must shape not just what leaders know and understand, but what they actually say and do, and how they think and feel. That’s because leaders shape culture and enable execution by their behavior. They demonstrate passion and intent — and what “better” means — by how they react to crises, how they respond to conflicting stakeholder demands, and how they enable the organization to find new answers to difficult problems. In short, to make a difference, leadership development has to change behavior, and it has to influence mindset.
This realization is shifting the leadership development agendas of some of the largest and most successful companies across industries as varied as oil and gas, life sciences, financial services, and information technology. At Vantage Partners, our thinking about how to develop adaptive leaders is also evolving, as organizations change how they operate and how they structure themselves, and as their customers, their employees, and the ecosystems in which they operate change faster and faster. As I think about critical skills for leading ourselves, for leading others, and for leading the business, I see much greater emphasis on a handful of capabilities, in particular:
- Creating value. The world moves faster, conditioning consumers to expect seamless, near-instant gratification, and competition is keener across all channels. Functional and enterprise leaders must be driven to create value and competitive advantage, not just argue with partners over shares of a diminishing prize.
- Collaborating and solving problems jointly with others. As organizational boundaries become more porous, the world seems more integrated; business behaves more digitally, and stakeholders experience more tension with one another. Leaders must actively manage conflict and help their organizations “do better” at solving problems not on their own, but collaboratively.
- Influencing others and building alignment. While it was never enough to have a great strategy if you could not execute it, today effective execution generally requires getting a growing variety of stakeholders on board. If you cannot bring your employees, your regulators, your creditors, and your ecosystem of suppliers, complementors, and customers along — no matter how great your strategy or your solution — you can’t execute.
- Enabling (and accelerating) change. By now we have learned (perhaps more than once) that change never stops, it only accelerates. How leaders listen, demonstrate empathy, and engage emotionally with individuals is critical to effective organizational change. Without that sense of connection, without real engagement, change fatigue sets in and real transformation fails.
This is the first in a series of five “Soft Skills, Adaptive Leaders” articles appearing on Medium. Over the coming weeks, I plan to dig into each of the four critical capabilities highlighted above. I examine how we need not just to shower leaders with content at selected stage gates in their careers, but how we can enable them to shift what they say and do (and how they think and feel) — and do so continuously. Drop me an email or leave a comment and tell me what you think. What is missing in this story, or what has been your experience with what works?
