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Resilient and Agile: A Perspective on Future-Ready Leadership in 2020
One thing is clear — leaders are facing unprecedented pressure. They need to deliver business results while navigating exceptional uncertainty.
All leaders are being forced by circumstances to meet the current moment. Smart leaders are meeting the moment — and building agility and resiliency within their organizations to ensure their business and their people not only survive but thrive. To succeed, they know they must challenge themselves to be future ready.
Download our Future-Ready Leadership Guide
As we approach the second half of 2020, here are some of the things we see smart leaders doing to meet business goals today, and to position themselves and their businesses for long-term success:
Embrace change.
Many people have been speculating what the “new normal” will be. Smart leaders already know the new normal is constant — sometimes radical — change. They don’t just accept change; they expect it and embrace it, along with all the possibilities change brings.
Know where you stand.
Realize that as a leader, you are almost always several steps ahead, so it’s essential to bring people along thoughtfully and patiently. Understand that you can’t lead if no one is following, and that sometimes you must go slow to go fast.
Build your team’s resiliency and capability.
Future-ready leaders are always building the change muscles of their teams. They are looking for the business change, anticipating the skills and knowledge needed to respond to the next challenge, and mapping how to build those capabilities . . . starting now.
Harness what’s working well for the long term.
Quick changes forced by circumstance don’t always last, especially if the new changes compete with the “old normal.” Future-ready leaders are quick to weigh the new vs. the old, and put in the processes to be sure the best ways of doing things—new and old—stick.
Foster relevant innovation by connecting the right individuals and teams.
Brilliant new ideas don’t often come from one person alone, or even from the same group of people meeting to talk about the same things. More often they come from old ideas seen from a new perspective or in a new light. Future-ready leaders recognize this, and orchestrate new connections designed to imagine new possibilities into reality.
Be relentless in your focus on vision and values.
The more uncertain the future, the more important your vision and values become. Shared beliefs, both in a goal and the way you achieve it, are a powerful force. They unite people and help them persevere through the inevitable bumps and detours of an ever-changing business landscape. But building and maintaining shared beliefs in vision and values takes steady leadership attention and constant, nurturing actions. Future-ready leaders have learned this by heart and practice it unfailingly.
We’re seeing firsthand the ways in which effective leadership is guiding businesses and people toward the future. Let us help you think through your future-ready change management strategy. You can start with our guide, which focuses on three key areas:
Taking a people-centered approach to leading business
Leaning into your company’s culture
Communicating clearly and often
Blue Beyond is a management consulting firm that helps build effective organizations where both the business and people thrive. We are experts in the “soft stuff” that is so often the hard stuff — culture, talent management, employee engagement, communications, organizational effectiveness, leadership, and change management. For more than a decade, we have partnered with global Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, universities, and small- and mid-sized firms to envision possibilities, activate their people, and execute with excellence. We’ve supported leaders and teams in nearly every industry to help them navigate change and build agile, thriving cultures. Blue Beyond has been recognized as a Great Place to Work for five years in a row and has ranked multiple times among the top 50 Best Small & Medium Workplaces in the U.S. by Great Place to Work® and FORTUNE. Blue Beyond is a certified women-owned business by the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC).