The Fourth Industrial Revolution demanded that CEOs take responsibility for the massive transformation of their businesses and for the astonishing impact that this transformation will have on the wider society and all the stakeholders. Success requires CEOs to develop the right leadership capabilities, workforce skills, and corporate cultures to support digital transformation and become agile to face the many uncertainties. A revolution in skills and a transformation of organizations is highly needed to sustain one’s presence in the marketplace.
According to blessingwhite.com, those who take into account individual values and personal differences while creating an environment of shared responsibility create a place where individuals enjoy work more and become more productive. Hence, the leadership trends that support transformation in the market and the economy are the following:
- Coach and be ready to be coached: employees rely on the support of their companies to take on business challenges. Empowering employees makes them more innovative and intrapreneurial in addition to increasing their sense of belonging to the company. Empowerment should be preceded by delegation of authority.
Coaching should be purposeful and focused to enhance productivity. Being ready to be coached is rooted in the concept of being a lifelong learner to keep pace with the new trends of one’s profession. Leaders who seek and are open to feedback will be better positioned to gain the commitment and enthusiasm of the employees they lead.
- Realize it is a millennial and Generation Z world: millennials make up 50% of the workforce. According to the data obtained from the LinkedIn survey, the number one reason millennials change jobs is to advance their career, followed by compensation and the desire for more challenging work and roles that are a better fit for their skills and interests. Research shows that millennials want to be challenged and are willing to work hard. They are positive, creative, optimistic and forward-looking. At the same time, they come with some pretty strong ideas about work/life balance, company values, and career expectations.
They are also a generation for whom a remote work environment and wearable technology are the norm. Leaders have to adopt a collaborative mindset to get the commitment of millennials and Generation Z cohorts. This generation is personally driven to seek education and professional development to increase employment opportunities in a world economy hit by many crises.
- Create and leverage on a diverse work environment: Inclusive leadership must become part of the DNA of an organization. This kind of leadership surpasses tolerance and acceptance of others’ differences; it is about creating an inclusive workplace where employees representing all dimensions of diversity can thrive. Catalyst’s research identifies four core skills of inclusive leaders known as “EACH Mindset”.
EACH stands for:
a. Empowerment
b. Accountability
c. Courage
d. Humility Organizations like Catalyst have been able to demonstrate that there is an increased return on equity for businesses with more women and minorities in their executive levels. In addition, the research also shows that the more included employees feel, the more innovative and productive they are.
- Vertical development, ownership development, and collective development: Vertical development refers to the advancement in a person’s thinking capacities. The outcome of vertical stage development is the ability to think in more complex, systemic, strategic, and interdependent ways. This comes in contrary to horizontal development, which is the development of new skills, abilities, and behaviors.
Horizontal development is most useful when a problem is clearly defined and there are known techniques for solving it. Due to the uncertainties controlling the business environment, vertical development has gained more momentum.
Ownership development: People develop fastest when they feel responsible for their progress and are involved in decision making and planning regardless of their position in the hierarchical structure of the company.
Collective Leadership: According to Simmons & Weinrich “[g]aining everyone’s participation is essential to a team’s success. Without an individual’s participation, the unique skills, talents, experience, and knowledge he/she brings to the team will be wasted.”
Ownership development: People develop fastest when they feel responsible for their progress and are involved in decision making and planning regardless of their position in the hierarchical structure of the company.
Collective Leadership: According to Simmons & Weinrich “[g]aining everyone’s participation is essential to a team’s success. Without an individual’s participation, the unique skills, talents, experience, and knowledge he/she brings to the team will be wasted.”
Factors Contributing to Better Collective Leadership
- Open flows of information
- More flexible and flatter hierarchies
- Distributed resources
- Distributed decision-making
- Less centralization and control
Distributed leadership:
Distributed leadership can be considered to include shared, democratic, dispersed, and other related forms of leadership. It is a leadership style where leaders can emerge and exercise the power of knowledge wherever they are in the organizational chart. There are three premises of distributed leadership:
- Leadership is an emergent property of a group or network of interacting individuals
- There is an openness to the boundaries of leadership
- Varieties of expertise are distributed across the different levels of the organizational chart. Leaders might emerge based on the need of their expertise and how such expertise might be of impact
With the change in the pace of work, the impact of ever-changing technology, shifting demographics, increased environmental ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty, being a leader is more challenging than ever before. Good leaders understand these trends and equip themselves with the skills required to embrace them. Effective leaders are characterized by being visionaries, a trait that leads to seizing opportunities and developing products and services to satisfy needs and wants not attended to by competitors. Leaders contribute to the competitive advantage sought by their corporations.
The environment and context of leadership have changed, becoming more multifaceted, unstable, and unpredictable. Because of these changing trends, a leader’s skills are more demanding in the sense of having more complex, adaptive thinking abilities and being vertically developed. With the new form of economy and the advent of information technology, more individuals now have the chance to show and exercise their leadership abilities to reach higher positions in the organizational chart or start their entrepreneurial ventures.
Hasan Youness 
This is an interesting, well developed, and informative article that illustrates the role and characteristics of a leader in an organization. To be an effective leader, one needs many qualities and has to stay updated with the modern needs of the new generation and market.The discussed topic is highly important and applicable to a wide range of areas, local business organizations, worldwide business organizations, educational organizations and much more. The author provides interesting perspectives on leadership, its ongoing need for development, and the necessity of studying the market changes and their consequences on the organization.
That’s an interesting point of view: leadership is not an innovative skill, it should be learned. Employees should constantly be given training and opportunity to expand their knowledge and skills in leadership. It is not about giving commands and being heard but being involved, influencing your team members and empowering them. In an ever-changing world, such articles play a significant role in enlightening new generations and developing old generations to follow the trend and stay updated. Reference to the article, leadership is a multi-directional process, when planned effectively, awesome results are obtained.
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typing mistake: innate not innovative
That’s an interesting point of view: leadership is not an innate* skill, it should be learned.
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The ability to guide and influence followers is defined as leadership. A leader sees a ray of light in the darkness and guides his followers to it. A leader is a problem solver whose primary goal is to address problems and reduce their occurrence in the future. A leader ensures that all followers understand, accept, and work toward the goal at hand.
Because life is constantly changing, a good leader must stay current and develop his leadership skills. Being a leader is not easy because it requires a lot of effort on one’s own self and talents to be able to lead people with different perspectives and mentalities.
It is critical to recognize that a leader must be a coach while also being willing to receive coaching guidance, i.e., he must be open to debate and not close his mind. A good leader must also understand the millennial work system because young workers are the future, and a good leader must help them to bring out the best in them. Furthermore, leadership takes many forms, and the leader must be able to use each one in the appropriate context. This article taught me a lot about leadership, and I believe that the leader must be that one person in the group who has the keen eyesight required to guide the group throughout the mission toward the establishment’s vision.
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To survive on an increasingly competitive and global business environment, an entrepreneur should be careful for all the competing aspects of global business environment.
A wise entrepreneur believes that the power of success is in her/his workforce; the more you improve the performance and capabilities of your workforce, the more you’ll achieve your goals.
Investing in the leaders of your workforce is a brilliant key for success, where the leader is considered on the top of the pyramid of employees, of the top is professional and successful the whole work will be accomplished perfectly. Therefore, this article is a professional unique one where it helps in providing all the methodologies to improve the skills of a vital organizational resource which is the leader.
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Leaders play important role in a productive working environment.. they can not only grow an Organisation with their skill but also can motivate employees to stay loyal with their organisations for long run.. leaders can actually impact on the brand name of Organisations as well.
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Maya Kachacha comment – 25 May 2022
This is an interesting, well-developed, and informative article that illustrates the role and characteristics of a leader in an organization. To be an effective leader, one needs many qualities and has to stay updated with the modern needs of the new generation and market. The discussed topic is highly important and applicable to a wide range of areas, local business organizations, worldwide business organizations, educational organizations and much more. The author provides interesting perspectives on leadership, its ongoing need for development, and the necessity of studying the market changes and their consequences on the organization. That’s an interesting point of view: leadership is not an innovative skill, it should be learned. Employees should constantly be given training and opportunities to expand their knowledge and skills in leadership. It is not about giving commands and being heard but being involved, influencing your team members and empowering them. In an ever-changing world, such articles play a significant role in enlightening new generations and developing old generations to follow the trend and stay updated. In reference to the article, leadership is a multi-directional process, when planned effectively, awesome results are obtained.
This is a fascinating, well written, and instructive piece that depicts the job and attributes of a leader in a company. To be a good leader, one must possess a variety of skills and remain current with the needs of the new generation and market.
The mentioned topic is extremely essential and applies to a wide range of industries, including local businesses, global businesses, educational institutions, and much more.
The author offers unique viewpoints on leadership, its constant need for development, and the need to understand market developments and their implications for the firm. That’s an intriguing point of view: leadership is a learned skill, not a creative one. Employees should be offered ongoing training and opportunities to broaden their knowledge and abilities.
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“Leadership trends” article describes the real picture and description of a leader in any organization. We should note that there is stereotypical picture of a leader which is the People who are in Power and these people are pictured conquering their reigns and their main role is assigning tasks and orders for their subordinates. This is not the case, especially in our modern times of evolution. Employees are never assessed fairly unless they are given the chance to be leaders themselves and in their own domains. This will be a supporting point to their career thus opening wider opportunities for them ahead.
When authorities are delegating power among employees, this allows tasks to be divided. What is required from employers, which is empowering their employees and investing in their human capital, will be divided as tasks for these employees to be accomplishing themselves. This brings back to my thought a training course that the organization I work with was able to attend with a limited number of teachers not all the team due to financial restrictions from the training committee’s side. However, when done, these teachers were given the chance and responsibility from the organization’s administration to perform cascade training sessions for their fellow colleagues for them to benefit from the training course as well since it included tool kits represented by different activities that the trainees were able to use and apply in their classrooms. This cascade empowered teachers with responsibility toward their colleagues to benefit just like they did, confidence from the managers who could have looked for another chance for the other group of teachers to attend another training course later on rather than delegating these teachers to do it, and experience in a different task other than teaching children but becoming trainers in their own domains.
The example above was the first thing that popped into my head while reading this article since employees need to be always one step ahead of where they are in order to excel and evolve in what they are doing and this can never be done without having managers as TRUE leaders who believe in their team members not people with useless power positions that are too rigid to be flexible and collaborative with what should be team members not subordinates.
Hoping for a change, always!
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This article is useful for providing the true meaning of leadership. Nowadays, it’s not enough to be just a manager, it’s important to be a true leader and coach your team. As well, many qualities are considered to encourage and motivate employees so they can be productive and committed to the organization which will be they key of it’s success.
Furthermore, this article focused on the good results that a leader can do in the organization by showing his team the right way to solve a problem without letting them be afraid of making issues.
Leadership is all about to be a coach and to be coached at the same time. That’s why a leader should work hard and be responsible to reach the organization’s goals. So leadership is not a skill , it should be learned by both new and old generations.
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This article is self-explanatory, no actual comments can make it more transparent, so I will use this space to include more knowledge collected from observations about the upcoming working force that mainly have GenZ and millennials. As a Gen Z, I have learned much from Millennials, but also I contradict them on many traits and visions, to look at and study a generation we need first to take a look at what their collective subconscious has been fed through their young years, most young millennials grew on Hollywood movies and MTV music, that boomed in their time, fantasy and optimism, lively music, rock, rap, Eminem, Movies like The wolf of wall street, the fight club, American Pie, The Matrix, the fast and furious, and so much more (mostly directed by baby boomers and GenX) this artwork, created a brain circuit that believes in doing anything, very optimistic, unlike us GenZ who are very realistic, we watched Millenials fail in owning even the simplest of necessities which is Homes, Older generations have been able to effectively price millennials out of the housing market in 2022, and this is not an American thing, its a universal thing, mainly in countries that have no progressive property Taxes over unused apartments and houses, leading to an inflation in property prices, with some 47.9 percent of Millennials owning homes in 2020, meaning that the percentage of us, GenZ will be lower, and worst for the upcoming generations, we aligne politically with millennials on most topis but we disagree on solutions, but how does that affect the workforce?
As minnellias introduced more flexibility to firms, Genz introduced more stability, we follow values mainly, we work in firms that aligne with our personal political and social Values, we can easily door slam on one position for one that is basically more “right” or “politically correct, GenZ are far more political than Millennials, and this stems from social awareness, unlike Millennials who got introduced to social media and many other communication tools, we were born into an open world, never really safe. A leader who will be working with the new generations should be aware of these differences and guide the working individuals according to who the are, more values to Genz and more flexibility for Millennials.
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This is a fascinating, well-written, and instructive article that depicts the job and attributes of the leadership trends that support transformation in the market and the economy. In this article it was stated that to be a good leader one must possess a variety of skills and remain current with the needs of the new generation and market. Discussing such topic is extremely essential. Unique viewpoints on leadership, its constant need for development, and the need of understanding market developments and their implications for the firm was clearly stated as well.
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A collective leader should relinquish the need for control, power, or prestige if he is to be effective. Its purpose is to enhance the process of collaboration, enabling the group—the staff and others involved in an organization, or the individuals and organizations participating in a community initiative—to take control of the organization’s vision and actions. He should trust that people will make good decisions if they have all the relevant information.
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