How Should be the Leaders of the Future? Inspiring Strategies from 4 Giants

New generation leaders are empowered by the success of their team. This is the foundation of their thought. Today, the overbearing leadership model is replaced with more collaborative, more inspiring and more empathy-oriented approaches.

So, what difference this change has made in management of talents and companies?

Concept of Trust in Leadership and the Example of Netflix

A leader must build a bridge of trust to their team, founded on honesty, transparency and integrity. A leader must give assurance to their team not just by their words, but also by their actions.

Building trust in leadership is a whole comprised of concepts including ensuring equal opportunity, treating everyone equitably, being objective in performance evaluations, using an open and effective communication method, providing constant feedback to keep personnel vigorous and motivated, keeping one's word, showing integrity in decisions and actions, and understanding feelings of personnel.

Practice of these approaches makes team members feel appreciated and increase their loyalty to the company, raising general performance with a more motivated and productive personnel group, ensuring the team stays together and becomes more resilient in moments of crisis.

In this context Netflix can provide a good example.

This company implemented policies which allowed their talented start personnel to made more independent decisions, providing a performance-oriented but flexible work environment. The company adopted an approach which constantly kept their personnel vigorous by an honest and open feedback policy.

This model allowed leaders in the company to occupy the position of a guiding and reassuring mentor. This increased personnel loyalty and performance of personnel rose to utmost levels by supporting their creativity.

Concept of Personalised Talent Management and the Example of Spotify

Personalised talent management is the concept of taking personal abilities, career goals, interests and development needs of each person into account in order to provide their with a custom work model, plan and opportunities.

Companies who adopt personalised talent management encourage problem-solving and novel approaches, allowing personnel to find career advancement opportunities and thus not feeling the need to easily consider swapping jobs, discovering and developing potential abilities of personnel with personal training and development opportunities, allowing them to take part in projects they are interested in and achieve satisfaction in their work.

Spotify's approach provides the best example in this regard.

Spotify supported personnel development by providing mentorship and coaching programs, increasing independence and decision-making authority of their teams, thus implementing an "agile organisation" model, allowing personnel abilities to flourish and created career change programs.

This approach allowed personnel to gain new abilities, increase dynamism inside the company and prevented monotony.

Equal Opportunity, Inclusivity, Diversity and the Example of Unilever

These three models can provide the three foundational pillars of corporate culture in the modern business world. Creating a culture of equitability in the workplace, ensuring inclusivity and providing equal opportunity are the primary goals of this three models.

Creating a team including members coming from differing ideologies, beliefs, backgrounds and experiences ensures diversity in the company. In order to practice this approach the company should form their team on basis of ability, without discriminating on gender, age, ethnic origin, religious belief, ideology, sexual orientation or disability, especially avoiding ideological sympathies.

A company with diversity must also create an inclusive culture where every person can feel valuable, respected and accepted on their own merits.

Every person contributing to best of their abilities, diversity-oriented activities, meetings where personnel have a larger voice than the boss lead to increase in loyalty, satisfaction, motivation and performance of the personnel.

In addition to these, the most important factor completing the three pillars is equal opportunity. This concept means evaluating all personnel under equal and equitable conditions and providing them with equal opportunities at the workplace.

The main point of this approach is not to have everyone start at the same point, but to provide equitable support to every person according to their demands, needs and abilities.

Equal opportunity starts at hiring process. Discrimination must be prevented at this stage. Transparent criteria should be applied for promotions and salary increases, and emotions should not be mixed into the process.

Undeserving people should not be given undeserved advantages just because they share the same ideology with decision-makers.

Companies ensuring these conditions remove obstructions before disadvantaged groups, increasing personnel loyalty, providing assurance by a feeling of equitability, thus allowing personnel to more clearly display their potential in an equitable environment.

Otherwise, failure, loss of time, inefficiency and refusal of development becomes inevitable in the company. After some time, such companies will not be able to hold onto personnel with star worker potential even with financial opportunities.

Collectively referred to as DEI (Diversity, Inclusion & Equity) model, this approach increases creativity and innovation, strengthens personnel loyalty, improves company prestige, prevents loss of talent and even increases gains in ability.

Unilever can be pointed out as the most appropriate example of a company embracing DEI approach.

Unilever increased diversity in their hiring processes to ensure diversity and inclusion, which gained the company different points of view.

The company prioritised female leaders to shape diversity, adopting an approach of organising personnel awareness trainings.

Unilever leadership built a shared success culture by embracing unique identities and viewpoints of personnel originating from their ideologies, gender, etc. This approach was particularly effective in holding onto personnel with start worker potential.

Transformative Leaders, Future and the Example of Microsoft Vision

Today technology is directly integrated to business processes, strategies and culture. Therefore companies utilising technology to perform efficient, innovative and customer-oriented activities is referred to as digital transformation.

However, contrary to what one might think, this transformation is not limited to use of technology, it also reshapes methods of business, leadership approaches and corporate cultures.

In parallel with this transformation, operational efficiency increases, new business models and revenue sources emerge, company competitiveness rises on the global scale and faster decision-making processes become possible.

In such a company creating a vision, providing inspiration and giving motivation to the teams falls on the shoulders of a leader. This type of leaders are referred to as transformative leaders.

By their nature, transformative leaders foresee the future, make quick decisions based on the principle that even the worst decision is better than no decision, they determine long-term targets, motivate their teams, reward high performance, follow technological and cultural developments, help their team members to reach their personal goals based on the principle of ability, and protect them from being supplanted or overstepped by backhanded means.

It is beyond doubt that companies engaging in digital transformation and adopting a transformative leadership model will soon fly past their competition.

Microsoft can be pointed out as a good example of digital transformation, and Satya Nadella, current CEO of Microsoft, can be shown as an example for a transformative leader.

The initiatives started in 2014 under leadership of Indian-American Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella bear important examples for these two concepts.

Under leadership of Nadella Microsoft accelerated their digital transformation processes and became the leader in data analytics.

They founded in-house academies to support continuous learning, integrated a hybrid work model, prioritised data sciences and specialised on reading the condition of their personnel and company directly based on data. Company personnel were rewarded according to this data.

This entire picture was also reflected on financial data of the company. Market value of Microsoft, which was at $ 300 billion in 2014, has reached around $ 2.5 trillion today.

So, How Should be the Leader of the Future?

Based on the aspects discussed above, the leader of the future must be capable of empathy, have ability, ensure equal opportunity, harmonious, inspiring, mentorship-oriented and open to technological developments.

Leader of the future must be able to understand needs of personnel, be open and honest, keep their work, keep up with the changing world, possess vision, develop personnel rather than direct them, be uplifting and have the necessary abilities and understanding to effectively utilise digital tools.

It is hard to be leader for change.

It requires one to have high standards of equity, possess ability, avoid ideological sympathies, and act equitably according to ability and level.

An adherent of a class of an ideology cannot be a leader for change.

Adil Can Kavcar

25 December 2024