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Study Reveals 4 Leadership Trends In Dealing With Complexity

This article is more than 8 years old.

recent study reveals the leadership trends that leaders follow today amidst a constantly changing environment, and how yesterday's solution often morphs into today's problem. It’s no secret that the competitive landscape of today moves faster and is more complex than ever before—and only becomes more so every day. No longer is it enough to rely upon the leadership and managerial principles instilled upon you after initially arriving at your position years ago. Technology has changed, which means how you go about communicating and inspiring others has changed, as well.

And this is the problem. Leaders haven’t adapted their problem solving methodology for how to navigate such complexity. One tendency for leaders, for example, is to tackle organizational challenges with the people and functions in their immediate vicinity (i.e. company) rather than reach out to globally dispersed members. What happens, then, is those on the outskirts don’t get the same exposure to leadership development than those who are closer to the problem, and it creates an unequal dispersion of professional development.

To work through the ever-changing situations in which we find ourselves today, here are four principles to keep in mind when dealing with complex situations:

1. How we see the problem is the problem. According to the study, the common belief among employees today is that one’s manager is responsible for offering leadership development opportunities. Not so. Contrary to majority opinion, nobody else is responsible for your personal leadership development more than you. What's needed is a cognitive shift towards greater curiosity because the more questions you ask your brain, the greater likelihood it will find an answer.

2. Unleash the creative beast. The number one rated competency cited by CEOs in the aforementioned report is creativity and the individual’s capacity to manage and deal with change. More specifically, the adaptive competencies that allow oneself to learn, unlearn and relearn (learning agility), the emotional intelligence to shift gears across different situations, the confidence to confront the unknown, and the ability to think at a macro level (i.e. strategically) are what—according to the study—allow employees to wither the storm of complexity.

3. Forget the “fixed mindset” of leadership. In Carol Dweck’s bestselling book Mindset: The New Psychology Of Success, she explains the one distinguishing factor that separates winners from losers (my words, not hers): Winners have a growth mindset, whereas losers’ are fixed. The difference between the two is this:

  • Fixed mindset: the belief that skill and will are intrinsic and therefore not learnable. A fixed mindsetter may say to himself, “I’m not good in social settings,” or “I can’t do math.” (This article offers more examples on the fixed mindset)
  • Growth mindset: those people with a growth mindset believe—you guessed it—the opposite; they believe that skill is learnable and that it just depends on one’s willingness to “get after it.”

How the fixed and growth mindset play into leadership is this. Aside from the personal qualities such as confidence, courage, decision making, charisma and the myriad other characteristics often cited as leadership traits, there’s also the common misperception that leadership is dependent upon one’s status, position or rank.

It isn’t.

Rather, leadership comes down to one’s personal willingness to expand, to broaden one’s reach and inspire others through demonstrable behavior. This leads to the next solution for dealing with complex situations…

4. Take a vertical—not horizontal—leap into leadership development. As employees enter into a new position they are expected to possess certain skills to perform their jobs (if they didn’t have them, they wouldn’t have been hired). As employees move up in position, however, they are expected to build greater competencies to fulfill the role and responsibilities of their new position. This is horizontal development.

What gets left behind from focusing on the micro (i.e. skill development), however, is the macro, or the new leadership expectations and responsibilities associated with that new role. Look at it this way. You can either add new software (horizontal development) or just update what you already have (vertical development). At some point, adding new software to an obsolete operating system becomes more wasteful than worthwhile.

How do you deal with complexity?

 

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