The Aspiring Leader's Guide to the Future

9 Surprising Ways Leadership is Changing

Clay Scroggins

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780310124467
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities

You may not hold a position of leadership or think of yourself as a leader. But if you want to create, change, or impact the world around you—even in a modest way—then you're guided by a leader's impulse and shaped by a leader's principles.

You are an aspiring leader.

But the fact is that you've come to this role at a time when leadership—like everything else—is rapidly changing...and too many leaders are addressing the problems of today and tomorrow with the style and substance of yesterday's leadership. We need an update.

In The Aspiring Leader's Guide to the Future, Clay Scroggins (author of How to Lead When You're Not in Charge) explores nine new principles of leadership that will help leaders adapt to a changing world and work culture, such as:

• Today's leaders lean into vulnerability.
• Today's leaders develop relationships primarily around trust.
• Today's leaders celebrate the successes of others.

These may seem like counter-intuitive principles, but they provide a new way forward for leaders and teams and will prove versatile in the event of change and durable in the face of conflict. With humor and a pastor's candor, Clay will show you why the old ways need updating and what developing new leadership skills could look like for your future.

To be clear, the author of this book does not know the future. If he did, he would have used his talents on sports betting or stock trading. What he does know is that yesterday's leadership axioms are today's myths and what that means. The way forward requires an understanding of the past, a conviction of what's at stake today, and a vision for how different tomorrow will be.

You don't have to be a young entrepreneur with big dreams or someone looking to land a leadership role just to be considered an aspiring leader. You are one now. And by developing your skills for the future, you can become today's version of a leader worth following.

CHAPTER 1

A New World Order

It was a Sunday night in October 1999, and I was headed to a meeting at Georgia Tech, where I was a student in industrial engineering.

I was late.

And so I did what people in 1999 did when they were running late.

I pulled over to a gas station, rummaged through the car seats to find a quarter, and used a pay phone to alert a friend of my tardiness. A pay phone. At a gas station.

Last week our family was headed to a friend’s house, and we drove by that same spot. Different name but same station. And so I did what every nostalgic, always-looking-for-a-teachable-moment father does and took a minute to tell my kids the archaic story.

The main message to my kids? The world has changed drastically. Evolve or be left behind. Study in school, innovate, and create; don’t spend your lives staring at screens. Some leaders will be prepared and equipped for the future. Some won’t.

In my own estimation, it was one of my better speeches.

No joke, their follow-up question was, “Dad, did the televisions have color back then?”

These twenty-first-century kids are savage. (Did I use that term correctly?)

As I told the story, I was reminded of the size of the chasm between the world I grew up in and the world they’re navigating. They live their lives on their own devices, making their own calls, taking their own pics, and choosing what to watch, when they want to watch it, and whether it’s good enough to finish.

In the case of the pay phone, it was a relic from the past that they could hardly fathom. If it weren’t for our wildly interesting neighbor who has a replica of a red British phone booth in his front yard, our kids would’ve had literally no clue what a pay phone is. And when I say literally, I don’t mean it figuratively, the way the kids are using it these days. I mean literally as in the way Webster defines it.

Clichés, Old Ways, and New Days

As I set out to research leadership today, I noticed that nearly every book, publication, article, and blog started with the same clichéd phrase:

Leadership is changing.

After seeing it about seventeen times, I heard a little sarcastic voice in my head, mocking the phrase: “Thanks, Sherlock. What else ya got?”

Of course leadership is changing. That’s the easy part. The hard part is defining how it’s changing. Can you identify the change? Are you able to see it before it gets here? Can and will you adapt? Do you have what it takes to become the leader the future is calling for?

Well, good news: That’s why we’re here, chugging through this book together.

I would never claim to know it all. I’m an engineering-trained, sermon-preaching, barbecue-loving golf hacker who happened upon a few opportunities to write about leadership. It’s like Harry’s wand. I didn’t find the wand. The wand found me.

One thing I know to be true: no one knows the future. You should run the other way anytime anyone tries to convince you otherwise. All prognosticators are shooting in the dark, trying to find an empty wall where they can hang their dartboard. Also, if I could predict the future, I’m pretty sure I would use my talents on sports betting, stock trading, or political consulting.

All that to say, I certainly enjoy looking into the future. As an Enneagram Seven, I spend all my time looking out the windshield. I haven’t exactly ripped off the rearview mirror, but mine is very small. My wife gives me a hard time because I have so few memories from my childhood. I loved growing up, but I spend much of my brain space looking out over the horizon of time. What’s coming next? Where are we headed? What’s it going to be like? Those are much more common questions for my wiring.

I’m convinced that my age also gives me a solid perspective on the future. Being born in 1980 puts me right on the edge of being a millennial and a Gen Xer. That unique perspective can serve as a bridge between two groups of people.

I’m young enough to remember life without the Internet. I distinctly remember the sound of dial-up internet, and I’ve both held a CD with AOL Instant Messenger on it and played Space Quarks on an Apple IIc. All of that happened while I was a teenager. Kids these days have never had to blow into Nintendo cartridges to clear out the fuzz, and it shows.

Though I’m not exactly a digital native, I’m close. I was a freshman the first year our university required students to own their own computers. That’s not pay-phone old, but I can’t imagine that schools include that requirement in the student handbook these days. My foreign language in college was not French, Spanish, or Mandarin. It was Java.

When it comes to leadership, I’ve been taking notes on the changes for a few decades now. My first real job was with Andersen Consulting, which soon after became Accenture. Working with a business strategy consulting firm during those years gave me a front-row seat to the dot-com boom and the subsequent dot-com crash. I’ll never forget the day my roommate and I swung open the door to our room in our fraternity house and saw the display of groceries Webvan had just delivered. It was stunning. RIP, Webvan. The world wasn’t ready for your greatness.

In the early 2000s, I watched a significant transfer of power as Sonny Perdue, the first Republican governor elected in Georgia since the 1800s, took office. And, yes, government work doesn’t have a reputation of change, but the inherent transition of going from one party to another brought about quite a bit of change in and of itself. It also taught me that I didn’t have what it takes to tackle that kind of work. You’re welcome, Georgia.

I credit the majority of my leadership education to North Point Ministries and Andy Stanley. Of course, churches aren’t exactly known for great leadership, but Andy is a one-of-a-kind leader. As long as I’ve worked for Andy, he’s always told our organization, “This probably won’t be the last job you have, but I want this to be the best job you’ve ever had. I want you to look back on this season and remember this as the best organization you’ve ever worked for.” That’s a high bar, but for me it’s been true.

Andy and the team of people who manage our organization have built a culture of leadership. It’s more common for us to pass around leadership books and articles than sermons and books on theology. Of course, there are those who feel that what we do is not spiritual enough, but our organization has chosen to believe that great leadership is a spiritual matter. If you’ve ever had a bad boss who seemed destined to bring hell to earth on a regular basis, you can understand why great leadership is “spiritual” work.

Over the past decade, I’ve been observing and prognosticating leadership, searching for a wall where I can hang up my own opinions about leadership and what it will look like in the future. Why? Because it matters. Who you are as a leader matters, but who you’re becoming as a leader matters even more. Yes, of course leadership is changing. Drastically. And for you to become the kind of leader the future will demand, you have to see the changes, believe them, and change yourself.

No Bull’s-Eye without a Target

We show new staff members a scene from the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, where Paul Rudd’s character, Chuck, teaches Peter Bretter, played by Jason Segel, to surf. The scene creates some uncomfortable laughter for those who know the frustration of working in a job where the target keeps changing.

With Peter lying on the surfboard on the beach, an agitated Chuck spouts out these confusing orders: “I want you to ignore your instincts. Don’t do anything. Don’t try to surf. Don’t do it. The less you do, the more you do. Let’s see you pop up. Pop it up.”

Peter tries, but stands up on the surfboard too quickly.

“That’s not it at all. Do less. Get down. Try less. Do it again. Pop up.”

Peter stands up more slowly, but evidently still too fast.

“No, too slow. Do less. Remember, don’t do anything. Pop up. Well, you . . . No, you gotta do more than that, cause you’re just lying right out. It looks like you’re boogie-boarding.”

Many of us know the aggravation of the target on the wall changing. When the target moves, it can be flat-out maddening. You climb the ladder through hard work, determination, and hustle, only for the boss to tell you the target has changed and your ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. That’s why knowing what we’re aiming toward is so important. When it comes to the leaders you and I are growing into, it’s no different.

In leadership, clarity is kindness. The leaders we’re most likely to follow are the ones who paint a picture of the future that’s clear, attainable, and inspirational. Sadly, they don’t even have to be great people. Plenty of dangerous leaders have done it with great skill.

Hitler did it.

David Koresh did it.

Heck, Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork, did it.

Though predicting the future is nearly impossible, it’s a necessary practice of great leadership. To be able to say, “This is what the future is going to be like,” with some kind of certainty allows you and I to know where we need to develop and how we need to grow. We want to paint a Bob Ross–esque picture of what leadership looks like in the future because it gives us something to aim for, work toward, and develop into.

I do this with my map app. Seriously. I need something to shoot for, which is why the map app is one of the top three most used apps on my phone. Even if I know how to get somewhere, I still input the address of the destination to see if I can beat the predicted time. It’s a sick game I play to make me feel better about myself. And until you have to pay for a speeding ticket, it’s free to play. Ha!

The GPS system our map apps use has taught me a simple principle:

You’re in a mess if you put the
wrong address in the GPS.

Oh, that’s right. I’ve got bars. (Mom, that’s what the rappers are calling the lines they write these days.)

But seriously, you know how true that is. It’s the same in life. In a society where we’re consumed with personality surveys, temperament tests, and emotional awareness, understanding where we’re headed is just as important as knowing where we are.

If you don’t know the destination, you can’t map a route to get there. And without a route, it’s nearly impossible to know what steps to take along the way. It all starts with the destination. See it and you can start moving toward it. Miss it and you’ll find yourself lost.

That’s what this book is about. I hope to bring greater clarity to what you probably already know. You may not be shocked by the way leadership is changing, and, in fact, I bet you will be pleasantly surprised. I believe the driving forces causing these changes in leadership are steering us to a better way of leadership. As we see the future with more clarity, the way to get to the destination also becomes more clear.

So, yes, as clichéd as it is to say . . . leadership is changing. And it’s changing in surprising ways.

New Leadership, New Skills

I noticed one way leadership is changing in a recent interview I did with Angela Ahrendts.

Angela is a force. An inspiring, bright, thoughtful, and impressive leader, Angela has a history of success. When she took over as CEO of Burberry in 2006, the company was g...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. A New World Order
• 2. You Don’t Have to Know It All to Start Leading
• 3. Even the GOATs Will Have a Coach
• 4. Leaders Never Fail—They Just Have Loads of Expensive Learnings
• 5. Be Aware of Your Weaknesses But Intimate With Your Strengths
• 6. Get the Right People On the Bus . . . and a Few Who Aren’t So Right
• 7. You Have to Give Trust to Be Trusted
• 8. Conflict Never Gets Easy, Goes Away, or Feels Great
• 9. The Strongest Leaders Will Lead With Vulnerability
• 10. Success Doesn’t Have to Be a Scarce Commodity
• Conclusion
• Notes