Road map for new-age leaders

Jappreet Sethi

Leadership and its definition have changed over the past few years, as a leader of your team or organisation you have to deal with multiple paradoxes at the same time. Most of the leaders who have grown from the ranks became successful by being strong, competitive, individualistic, and single-minded. This worked very well in the yesteryears. Today the role of the leader is like that of an orchestrator.

Challenges

Some of the new challenges that you need to be ready for as a new age leader are:

• Winning the hearts and minds of your people by engaging people with emotional intelligence, not just IQ.
• Doing more with less – which means realising the potential in others.
• Inspiring them to go beyond what they think they can achieve.
• Dealing with greater global interdependence and volatility.
• Embracing constant change.
• Orchestrating connections across boundaries.
• Relating across cultures
• Creating shared value for all stakeholder groups.

This is a reflection of the fundamental shift in global inter-connectedness, the speed of change and increasing political and economic volatility, technological innovation, and the nature of work, and therefore the kind of leadership required.

How to excel

Directive or do it leadership style is a thing of the past; it will do more damage to your team than anything else. As a leader, you are the facilitator of change and work. To be an effective leader, your most significant role is that of a coach. As a leader, you can practice these three types of coaching to become highly effective.

• Motivational coaching: Addresses the effort of the team and encourages process gains such as shared commitment to the group and minimising process losses such as “social loafing”. Coaching by the team leader can motivate members to devote themselves to the teamwork and share the workload.
• Consultative coaching: Addresses performance strategy and fosters the invention of new ways of proceeding with the work that is aligned with the task requirements. Successful leaders facilitate flexible problem-solving and team development.
• Educational coaching: Fosters the development and appropriate use of team members’ knowledge and skill.

Team leader coaching increases team psychological safety, which in turn increases learning behaviour and improves members’ skills and knowledge. By using these three types of coaching and understanding the new challenges of being a leader, you can increase your impact and company performance.

End objectives

To address these challenges, your objective should be threefold.

• The first is to improve some specific aspect(s) of team performance: As a leader, you have to makes sure the team is asking the right questions, at the right time, to achieve the shifting requirements. It will also help you in improving your ability to manage the performance of individuals.
• The second objective is to make things happen faster: Team coaching can help a team race through the stages of development, which may be hindered without a coach due to mistrust, poor communication, and avoidance of important but less obvious questions.
• The third objective is to make things happen differently or in a new way. Where individual and team coaching accompany culture change, the pace and depth of the change will rapidly increase by supporting people as they come to terms with new attitudes and behaviours.

— The writer is an HR & Strategy consultant . www.humanresourcesblog.in