Prism’s Future Fit Leadership Model
A long-term client approached us earlier in the year asking us to support them in defining and building the capabilities which their leaders required to succeed and thrive in the business landscape of the future. Prism’s research team worked to codify that landscape and to identify the mindsets and skillets in order to deliver a bespoke series of training programmes to support the development of these “future fit” leadership capabilities within that team of leaders at this client’s global organisation.
More and more frequently, we have been hearing this request from clients and it sparked us to create a stream of work with several other organisations to help teams ‘future-proof’ their leaders – at every level – to thrive in the increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex (VUCA) business landscape in which they find themselves. While the specific and individual capabilities we identified for each of our clients have inevitably varied slightly due to industry or company contexts, we quickly discovered strong themes and similarities across these projects, teams, and businesses. Based on this work and related meta-research, Prism developed a model to support the development of ‘Future-Fit Leadership’, based on the latest business research and neuroscience. Our model focuses on the key mindsets and skillsets that serve leaders of the future to ensure the sustainable success of their businesses rooted in personal and professional growth of the leaders and of the people and teams working with them.
Prism defines Future-Fit Leaders as ‘leaders who are driving high performance in an increasingly complex context that delivers sustainable value for stakeholders’. Through our work in this area incorporating extensive research and countless discussions with business leaders, we have identified four critical competency areas required of Future-Fit Leaders:
Inspiring Others: Leaders’ skills in facilitating, strengthening, connecting and engaging employees are absolutely critical to creating an environment where ideas and improvement are welcomed. Inspiring leadership encourages employees to feel valued, supported and safe. This can increase employee engagement, wellbeing and productivity. It also helps to improve employee retention, as 75% of employees leave jobs because of the relationship they have (or rather, the relationship they do not have) with their manager – and not the job itself.
Leading Self: Defined as the ability to acknowledge and understand your own behaviour, emotions, and beliefs that drive decisions and actions. This is increasingly important with hybrid working, as leaders are physically interacting less with employees. In this setting, there is less opportunity for others to have the consistent experience borne out of frequent interaction that often provides an understanding of intention. Therefore, leaders are judged by action alone in many instances. Self-aware leaders are more credible, inclusive and understanding of employees and tend to make better decisions.
Navigating Change: The ability to respond, lead and communicate effectively in ever-changing environments is a new hallmark of strong leadership. Poor leadership and a lack of management support are cited as key reasons for change programme failures in organisations and increasingly rapid, transformational change is the new normal. To successfully navigate in these increasingly turbulent times, leaders must master agility, creativity and resilience as skillsets and mindsets to lead effectively.
Results at Pace: Certain leadership characteristics and skills can generate greater business results and delivering these results at pace is a prerequisite for leaders today. One such characteristic that drives results, iteration and a perpetual “raising of the bar” is the ability to cultivate a feedback culture in teams and organisations. A study of US companies found those with the strongest feedback cultures had double the net profit margin of those without. Feedback can also ensure team members feel seen and valued, and that their aspirations are being guided. Leaders and teams who can harness feedback as a superpower are able to move faster, and more sustainably by creating a context of trust and psychological safety to underpin the delivery of ambitious, measurable, reportable and celebrational results.
These focus areas are not necessarily obvious or inherent for many leaders, as the approach draws on a much more adaptive and relational lens as opposed to the more traditional technical expertise and “knowing/telling” management style that may have been utilised by the leader to succeed up until now. The realisation and acceptance that “what got me here, may not get me there” is an important starting point. And then the good news is that these future-fit leadership capabilities can be acquired and developed through coaching, training and targeted development.
For example, with our client referenced at the start of this article, we designed a twelve-month leadership development approach that included three days together as a leadership team understanding the new landscape, VUCA, its impact on the team’s purpose, and creating a safe space to learn and experiment with new ways of creating/aligning on team vision, mutual understanding and bravery to drive clarity and agility to experiment. This experience was then reinforced by creating online reflective leadership huddles where specific concepts such as feedback, compassionate leadership, psychological safety, belonging, mindfulness, stress harnessing and attention focus were explored. After a full year, this cross-functional, global operations leadership team found itself in the centre of two significant organisational changes in the form of a business unit sell-off and then a subsequent acquisition in the space of 6 months. The self-reported level of clarity, control, calm, support, resilience and focus across the team throughout the upheaval was remarkable and was modelled through their ability to deliver their operational targets without interruption. They were viewed across the business as steady heads who could show empathy, settle the ship and keep teams moving forward in many of the rooms they were in – often where they did not have hierarchical authority and yet showed themselves to be stand-out leaders in the uncertain landscape of today and well prepared for the shifting sands of tomorrow.
