Embrace a complex and changing environment
#TL;DR A fast-moving world means there are more opportunities than ever to envision the future and step up to a leadership role
All change!
Think of the first time you took a selfie, used a hashtag or read about fake news. It’s probably in the last few years, or even the last few months, but it will feel much longer. A decade ago, smartphones and social media were in their infancy; now they are all but ubiquitous. We are living at a moment of profound and rapid change, where new tools and technologies are transforming how people live, work and communicate. Today’s overnight sensation can be tomorrow’s status quo, and become so faster than ever before.
In response to this change, every industry is being reinvented every single year; and in incremental ways, businesses are reinventing themselves over months and even weeks. Words, ideas and technologies are entering the common consciousness at a dizzying rate. There is an unstoppable torrent of new information and ideas, much more than any one person or management team can keep track of. Yet people still look to leaders for a vision of the future and that’s why you, dear leader, need to start thinking about the future of your function/business/sector, understand how it’s developing right now and start to imagine how you’d like it to develop in the future.
What are its current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and existential threats? What in an ideal world could it become? Having a clear vision of where you want to get to in the future is the best way to harness the potential of so much change and will give you the best shot at building a future business that you want to be a part of.
This presents your first challenge and your first opportunity as an aspiring leader. On the one hand, the pace of change is something you will need to invest time in if you want to make sure you’re keeping up: immersing yourself in the new developments that are changing the industry in which you work. Equally, this puts you in an ideal position to develop a vision – or at the very least an opinion – on where your industry is headed, and start playing a leadership role.
When your business is entering unchartered territory, and there isn’t a rulebook to follow, you get the chance to write a new one. You can become the expert in something that no one else properly understands. You can provide the new ideas that will give your business competitive advantage. And you can do that just as well as a graduate recruit as you can from the boardroom. In fact, you are often better placed: working on the coalface in a hands-on role, with superior digital knowledge and fewer accumulated assumptions about how things should be done.
The pace of change is great news for emerging leaders. The opportunity to lead, to put forward new solutions and get listened to, is much greater than it used to be. You no longer need to serve your time and patiently climb the corporate ladder to be a leader. Instead, you can win a leadership role through the strength of your ideas, your vision for the future, and your ability to navigate and bring about change.
In this uncertain world, a leader can’t just be someone who is a budget wizard, a people management alchemist and a results junkie. You’ll need to be those things, and we’ll talk about them later in the book. But before all of that, you need to be someone who gets change, who develops a vision of what it means for your industry, and at the same time recognises the uncertainty of a world that’s moving faster than ever before. So buckle up!
Words of wisdom: Appreciate shifting patterns
The leaders of the future will have to be able to cope with a continuous fast pace of change. Whether from climate change, digital development, the geo-political environment, the sharing economy or any other new macro developments—the pace of change we experience now is not going to slow down. Leaders will have to quickly appreciate the world’s shifting patterns and create/adjust their products and services to match.
This generation of young leaders are impressive. They are tenacious. They have to be.
BARONESS MARTHA LANE FOX, FOUNDER OF LASTMINUTE.COM, CHANCELLOR OF THE OPEN UNIVERSITY
Make change work for you
The speed of change in business is opening new doors for you as an aspiring leader. How can you take advantage? You’ll need to take a persistently proactive approach, working to identify new opportunities, putting forward new suggestions and experimenting with different approaches. Here are some of our top tips for how you can make change work for you.
GET CURIOUS
The obvious product of change is uncertainty. Businesses are suddenly facing a future that is the equivalent of trying to navigate a cruise ship through heavy fog. You sort of know where you’re going, but you can’t see the destination and you don’t know what might be coming the other way. For an organisation, that can be scary. For you personally, it’s a huge opportunity. When companies are crying out for navigators of uncharted waters, it’s the perfect moment to step up and become one.
Start by being curious, very curious, about your team, your business and your industry. What are the big hairy problems your company is trying to solve right now? What does your boss need to pole-vault over troubled waters? Find out which white papers are being produced by trade bodies in your sector, carefully read the latest press releases from competitive businesses and see whether you can spot any patterns. Follow a relevant trend from inception to the current day. How has it evolved in the last three months and the last three years? Now think about how this trend might develop in the next three months, twelve months, and the next three years. Repeat the exercise for other trends, always looking for patterns. Repeat this often enough and your brain will be primed to look for patterns in your business, and you’ll soon find you’ve got plenty of opinions on what the future of your business could look like. And not a crystal ball in sight!
TEACH YOURSELF
Identify an area where you can develop specialist knowledge and expertise that allows you to stand out. Choose an area that genuinely excites you! It could be about how you work together as a team, or communicate with customers. It could be related to product innovation or changing legislation that affects your sector. Whatever you choose, invest time and energy in becoming the in-house expert on your chosen topic: set up search alerts for your chosen keywords, subscribe to daily or weekly newsletters from authorities in your chosen field, read everything you can get hold of, attend seminars and events, try to meet established leaders in the field.
Then be generous about your expertise and work to spread it within your company. Share breaking news on your social profiles, offer to host lunchtime lunch ‘n’ learn or Q&A sessions; share key material and ideas with your bosses, whether that’s via a simple email or a strategy white paper. Turn your learnings and ideas into a shared initiative which people can buy into and take forward.
Words of wisdom: Be curious
If I have one piece of advice, it’s go after what interests and excites you, even if it seems risky. There’s no ‘best’ path to the C-suite. It’s a winding road with many interesting stops along the way, so search out roles that interest you and make the most of them because having a variety of experiences will make you a better leader. Of course, this doesn’t mean rushing from one experience to the next. I really think it takes 2–3 years to learn something well, so take that time to learn and squeeze the most out of every job you take. And don’t be in a rush to manage people, it’s not the only way to be leader.
If you don’t know exactly how to get your next role, do informationals with leaders who inspire you, have lunch with people who are working on cool stuff, and ask lots of questions. The most successful people I know are extremely curious. They aren’t embarrassed to ask questions and they’re always striving to learn more. They also know what they bring to the table. No one knows everything, so be confident in what you know, lean into that, and then be willing to stretch yourself. If you’re not being challenged, you’re not growing. Hone your skill set and remember that confidence comes with experience. Give yourself the time to earn that experience.
CHRIS CAPOSSELA, CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER, MICROSOFT
BACK YOUR IDEAS
Another by-product of rapid change is that good companies know they need good ideas, and they care more about the strength of new suggestions than the source. In a good company, it doesn’t matter if you’re new to the business, fresh out of school or not used to making decisions. What matters is having an idea, a solution or a suggestion and having the courage to step forward and share it. It’s more likely than ever to be listened to and put into practice.
You should take advantage of this new licence to think and contribute to the important decisions. Familiarise yourself with the key decision-making moments in your company and find out the best way to input your ideas. Try putting forward your suggestion at the company All-Hands meeting, emailing the CEO or asking to be invited to a strategy session. Back your ideas. We know you’ve got some!
TRY THINGS OUT
Today, you can start a business for £12 in less than 24 hours. You can create broadcast content on your smartphone. You can communicate with almost any public figure via social media, or at least try to. The barriers to pursuing your big idea and making something happen have never been lower. The technology at your disposal means you can do things quicker, more cheaply and more collaboratively than ever before. You have the capacity to experiment, and you need to use it.
Whether you’re working for someone else or considering starting out on your own, experiment with a new idea – it could be a new way to advertise, a new platform for communicating with customers or a new productivity #workhack. With communication and distribution channels evolving so quickly, the most efficient way to learn is by doing. Try something that’s quick and cheap and see what you learn from it. If you can share your learnings and questions on Twitter or LinkedIn, better still, as you might get some helpful answers, find some like-minded people and at the same time position yourself as an experimenter in the field.