It is not easy these days to be a leader. We live in new realities. Society is about to take a leap forward, similar to the time of the Industrial Revolution and we are climbing to the next level. This means changes in technology, in the power structures that rule society, and in organizations. The way we collaborate is impacted, too. To remain successful in this changing world, the following five skills will help: 

1.  Sense and respond

The pace of change is huge, and so is the scope of change. Change is changing. We no longer have start and end dates; change is happening all the time and literally anywhere. Be it at work or in our private lives, things are turning fast. The dynamics of change require us to constantly adapt to new realities and learn new technologies and skills. We used to learn methods for coping with change, and there were many change management tools. The current reality is getting the better of these tools, and we cannot “manage” change anymore as we used to. What we need is to be on top of the changing requirements around us, and we need to respond to them – constantly and fast. Robertson and Laloux describe it as riding a bike where we have a direction, but constantly sense and respond. When we ride a bike, we are present, we take in lots of input and we constantly adjust to the reality in front of us. This is what we need to do in business, too. Sensing and responding – an evolutionary leadership. Helpful methods to support us with that are “agile” or “design thinking”. 

2.  Resilience

The pace, the amount and the complexity of change can be pretty overwhelming. This has an effect on health, and while health challenges used to be our private problem, they are on the agenda for leadership today. Burnout cannot be neglected anymore; it is a sad part of our daily work. To be able to manage uncertainty and the number of changes, resilience is the skill we need to develop. Resilience is what gives people the psychological capacity to cope with stress and hardship. It helps to overcome setbacks and better cope with challenges. Self-reflection is a fundamental aspect of resilience. Both self-reflection and resilience can be built with mindfulness. Mindfulness is the awareness that arises through paying attention, purposely, non-judgmentally. It is a kind of wake-up call to become conscious of how we respond to life’s situations. The more mindful we are, the more resilient we become. Resilience is important for the individual, but also for teams and organizations. 

3.  Lifelong learning

Education does not stop with a degree. We cannot rely on what we learned before the age of 25. We also cannot rely on what we have learned working 20 years in the same job. We have to build new capabilities throughout our entire life. The challenge here is that while many young people have grown up as digital natives, older generations also need to learn how to learn using distance learning, massive, open online courses and other digital resources. 

4.  Letting go

The skill of letting go is probably the hardest skill to learn. “We’ve always done it that way” is a killer sentence in today’s business. We might need to unlearn what we have learned. It is hard, because what we have learnt has made us successful. And we do not yet fully know what is needed to be successful tomorrow. On top of this, not only do we need to let go of practices or tools from the past, we also need to let go of power and status. Now, think of most members of top management – many are in the baby boomer generation, and only a small group is willing to let go of power and status as we know it. “The number of people who report to you” or “tiles” are still important in society. As we are on the cusp of change, it requires a lot of courage to let go of these things. This leads to conflict in organizations, resulting in low engagement. Companies are rolling out “agile” methods, while top management still acts in the same hierarchical manner as before. This is not really a recipe for success and only demotivates employees who are asked to work in an agile way. 

5.  Building teams

There is a strong shift away from the individual to collective intelligence. Whereas individual performance management was the main driver in the past, we now need to learn how to work collaboratively and get the most out of a team, not just an individual anymore. Building successful teams is an imperative skill to learn. A very helpful source for learning it is the outcome of “Aristotle”, a project that Google started a few years back to understand the secret sauce of a high performing team. The interesting outcome was that it did not matter who was on the team. Friends or not, same academic background or not – it  did not seem to matter. What really mattered was the way they treated each other. Psychological safety had the biggest impact. Speaking up without the fear that what you say will be held against you later was developed in teams where there was equality in conversational turn-taking, where team members listened to each other carefully and they were empathic about how others in the team felt. Next to psychological safety, there were four other ingredients in the secret sauce of success: clarity, meaningfulness, impact, and reliability. The project was called Aristotle for a good reason, as it was he who said “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. 

Looking at these five skills, we should not underestimate the effort required to develop them. While we all have a responsibility to ourselves and need to invest personally, C-level management together with their HR teams need to work together closely to empower people. Yes, it requires time, focus, thinking and a lot of inner work to build them up, but it is worth it – for the individual and for the company’s success. 

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