The Future Leader

9 Skills and Mindsets to Succeed in the Next Decade

Jacob Morgan

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781119518372
• eBook ISBN: 9781119518389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

WINNER OF CMI MANAGEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021

Are you a future-ready leader? Based on exclusive interviews with over 140 of the world's top CEOs and a survey of nearly 14, 000 people.

Do you have the right mindsets and skills to be able to lead effectively in the next ten years and beyond? Most individuals and organizations don't even know what leadership will look like in the future. Until now.

There has been a lot written about leadership for the present day, but the world is changing quickly. What worked in the past won't work in the future. We need to know how to prepare leaders who can successfully navigate and guide us through the next decade and beyond. How is leadership changing, and why? How ready are leaders today for these changes? What should leaders do now?To answer these questions, Jacob interviewed over 140 CEOs from companies like Unilever, Mastercard, Best Buy, Oracle, Verizon, Kaiser, KPMG, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Yum! Brands, Saint-Gobain, Dominos, Philip Morris International, and over a hundred others. Jacob also partnered with Linkedin to survey almost 14, 000 of their members around the globe to see how CEO insights align with employee perspectives

The majority of the world's top business leaders that Jacob interviewed believe that while some core aspects of leadership will remain the same, such as creating a vision and executing on strategy, leaders of the future will need a new arsenal of skills and mindsets to succeed.

What emerged from all of this research is the most accurate groundbreaking book on the future of leadership, which shares exclusive insights from the world's top CEOs and never before seen research. After reading it, you will:

• Learn the greatest trends impacting the future of leadership and their implications
• Understand the top skills and mindsets that leaders of the future will need to possess and how to learn them
• Change your perception of who a leader is and what leadership means
• Tackle the greatest challenges that leaders of the future will face
• See the gap that exists between what CEOs identified versus what employees are actually experiencing
• Become a future-ready leader

This is the book that you, your team, and your organization must read in order to lead in the future of work.

PART 1
UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF THE LEADER

1
The Leadership Gap

How many leaders would you estimate are in your city? How about your country? What about all over the world? If we're going to look at the future leader, then it's important for us to know just how many of these individuals we have now, and how many we might have in the future.

In the United States alone there are roughly 25 million supervisors and managers, people who are responsible for others. This is about 1 in 6 Americans. In the UK this number is around 5 million, which also comes to 1 in 6 people. McKinsey predicts that in 2030 the global workforce will be around 3.5 billion people (McKinsey, 2012). In 2020 the International Labour Organization estimates a workforce that is 45% self-employed, which has actually been decreasing over the past few years (World Bank, 2019). If we assume that 50% of the total workforce will be self-employed by 2030, that leaves us with 1.75 billion employed people (OECD, n.d.). The number of employees per manager or supervisor is referred to as the “span of control,” and the suggested number of employees per manager varies from 4 employees per manager to upwards of 20. This means that around the world, there will be roughly between 87,500,000 and 437,500,000 leaders, which is actually a conservative range since many of the self-employed individuals also have full-time jobs. That is a lot of leaders! Leaders help make our world, so we’d better make sure we have the right people in those positions. We all deserve to like (or, dare I say, love) our jobs, and this starts with having the right leaders at the helm of our organizations.

Leaders Today Are Struggling

Unfortunately, most of our leaders are, bluntly speaking, not good. If they were, then we would see that reflected in the data. It doesn't mean they are bad people, but the way that we teach and talk about leadership is extremely antiquated and that's largely what leaders today are familiar with and practice. It's a bit like trying to fly a modern jet when you were only trained on an original Wright Brothers plane. You might get it in the air, but you aren't going to go far.

According to a study conducted by Ultimate Software and the Center for Generational Kinetics, 80% of employees say they can do their jobs without their managers and actually think that their managers are not necessary (Ultimate Software, 2017). Another study by Randstad found that almost half of the 2,257 survey respondents said they could do a better job than their boss (RandstadUSA, n.d.). A second Randstad study conducted in 2018 found that 60% of employees have left jobs or are considering leaving because they don't like their direct supervisors (RandstadUSA, 2018). These numbers alone paint a picture of current leaders that makes them seem nonessential. Let's be honest: we've all felt that way about our leaders at some point during our careers. I certainly have; in fact, there have been several occasions when I would see a leader at work and my inner voice would say, “What do you even do here?”

A Gallup study of over 7,000 Americans concluded that one in two people had actually left a job at some point during their career to get away from their managers in order to improve their overall quality of life (Harter, 2015). Let that sink in for a moment. It's a very somber statistic, yet one that we can all relate to. The same study shows that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores. Even in the UK, research published by the Independent found that nearly half of British workers believe they could do a better job than their boss (Bailey, 2017). Perhaps the more alarming finding was that 13% said that their bosses are dangerously incompetent at their jobs.

Let's also not forget the seminal Gallup study on global engagement, which found that only 15% of employees around the world are engaged in their jobs. According to the study, “employees everywhere don't necessarily hate the company or organization they work for as much as they do their boss. Employees—especially the stars—join a company and then quit their manager” (Clifton, 2017).

An entire book could be written about how leaders around the world are failing us. These are supposed to be the people whom we look up to, admire, and want to emulate? These are the people who are supposed to lead our organizations and help us shape and create the future? While these numbers paint a bleak picture of present-day leadership, the numbers don't look any better when we look toward the future.

In its most recent Global Leadership Forecast report, DDI surveyed over 25,000 leaders around the world and found that only 42% said that the overall quality of leadership inside their organizations was high (DDI, 2018). Perhaps more shocking was that only 14% of organizations have what DDI calls a strong “bench,” which is ready-now leaders who can step in to replace those who retire or move on. This means that if a “leadership virus” wiped out all the present-day leaders, we would have nobody to step in to take their place. Even sports teams have talented players on the bench who could step up when someone gets injured, but our companies do not. Perhaps this is because our models of leadership are not changing, meaning we are teaching leaders how to lead in a world that no longer exists.

In another DDI report exploring the “State of Leadership Development,” half of the organizations surveyed said their leaders are not skilled to lead their organizations effectively today (DDI, 2015), and 71% said their leaders are not ready to lead their organizations into the future. A study by the Center for Creative Leadership found similar results in their aptly titled study “The Leadership Gap,” where the authors state, “Leaders are not adequately prepared for the future. Today's leadership capacity is insufficient to meet future leadership requirements. This finding is consistent across countries, organizations, and levels in the organization” (Leslie, 2015). Finally, in its report “Ready-Now Leaders,” the Conference Board in partnership with DDI found that 85% of executives are not confident in their own leadership pipelines. Here are a few more numbers for you to consider (DDI, 2014).

In Deloitte's most recent Millennial survey, which collected 10,000 responses from 36 countries, 71% of millennials said they are expecting to leave their employment in the next two years because they are unhappy with how their leadership skills are being developed (Deloitte, 2019). This is particularly disturbing because there is obviously a new generation of workers who want to step into leadership roles but organizations are not doing enough to make this possible.

Clearly something is wrong with leadership around the world, otherwise these numbers wouldn't be as abysmal as they are globally. Virtually every human indicator is telling us that we have a problem, yet most organizations and current leaders are doing nothing to address it. Just imagine for a moment that you're driving a car and in the middle of your trip the “check engine” light comes on, followed by the tire pressure warning, the low fuel light, and the battery light, all while your car temperature indicator is in the red. Now imagine your whole family is in the car with you. Would you really just keep on driving, hoping to make it to your destination? I would hope not. Yet in the business world we are on cruise control, and the worst part is that we are all sitting in the same car!

It's Time to Change

When I see all of the data presented in this chapter, I feel angry, frustrated, and just sad. We all should. This means that today and in the future we will live and work in a world where we have hundreds of millions of leaders globally who are quite simply bad leaders—unless we do something about it. It's not as though we just have millions of empty global leadership slots. As the numbers above show we actually have lots of people in leadership roles, just not all the right ones. But their days are numbered. I absolutely believe that leadership is a privilege that should be given to those who truly demonstrate the mindsets and skills outlined in this book. Make no mistake: there is a massive leadership gap inside of our organizations that will only continue to grow in the coming years. The organizations able to close this gap are the ones that will continue to exist and thrive in the future, and the individuals who are able to become future leaders are the ones who will lead these organizations. I know it sounds like all leaders are bad, but they aren't. We do have plenty of amazing leaders all over the world and I've interviewed many of them for this book, but we just don't have enough of them. My sincere hope is that this book and the research behind it will help change that but you are the one who has to make that change a reality.

Thankfully, this book will guide you through doing just that by teaching you how to implement the Notable Nine. These are a collection of four mindsets and five skills that the world's top business leaders have identified as being most crucial for future leaders. These Notable Nine are the solution to the leadership crisis that so many organizations and individuals around the world are experiencing. At the end of the book you will also find a path forward for how to become the future leader that we all need and deserve. Let's begin.

2
Three Essential Leadership Questions

In order to talk about the future leader, we must first answer three crucial questions about the present-day leader:

• What is leadership and who is a leader?
• Should someone be called a leader or a manager?
• Is the leader of 2030 really going to be that different from the leader of today? And if so, how?

What Is Leadership and Who Is a Leader?

The hardest question for CEOs to answer by far was, “How do you define leadership?” When I asked this question over the phone I would usually get long pauses or comments like “That's a really good question.” But by far the most common response was, “Hmmm, nobody's ever asked me that before.” In my head I would be shouting...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART 1: UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF THE LEADER
• PART 2: TRENDS AND CHALLENGES SHAPING FUTURE LEADERS
• PART 3: THE FOUR MINDSETS OF THE NOTABLE NINE
• PART 4: THE FIVE SKILLS OF THE NOTABLE NINE
• PART 5: BECOMING THE FUTURE LEADER
• References
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Additional Resources
• Index
• End User License Agreement