Channeling Your Inner Leadership Strengths In A Post-Covid World

In September 2018 h2h held a Round Table event in London where we we disseminated current research and provided fresh thinking on the theme of ‘Leadership 2020’ – not knowing of course how the last year would test all of our leadership skills in the most extraordinary way.

At the event we identified 10 of the areas that the 2020 leader needed to perfect –

Inspirational Communicators

Socially Responsible

Connectors

Disruptors

Global Thinkers

Learning Zealots

Tech Savvy

Lean Leaders

Deep Workers

Career Coaches

And everything else!

Hindsight is a wonderful thing – how could we have ever known just how useful the Tech Savvy, Connectors and Lean Leaders skill set would become?

Tech Savy

We have all had to upgrade our technological capability and the Tech Savy leader was perhaps already a few steps ahead. They understood that innovation , agility and technological advancements should be high up on the priority list. Their ability to explore, anticipate and optimise new systems, processes and equipment meant they and their organisations were confident in how to move to a remote working and were able to establish this with reduced levels of disruption.

Connectors

With over 50% over the UK working population now working remotely a recent h2h survey has already confirmed just how important connection and communication have become.  The Connector recognized the need to build meaningful alliances and partnerships internally and externally and was already an expert in how to use new networking channels. They therefore relied less on hierarchy and preferred localised decision making through collaboration which put them in a strong position to ‘get the job done’ when the first of several lockdowns was announced.

Lean Leaders

The concept of lean has been applied to business processes for decades and the lean leader understands the need to apply this philosophy ourselves. They demonstrated high levels of personal effectiveness, had incredible resilience to proactively manage the ‘tsunami’ of emails and meeting requests and could efficiently remove the waste and inefficiencies that sit in our inbox, calendar and heads! They were incredibly well positioned to make the current working situation as sustainable as possible and recognised the importance of balancing family needs and physical and mental wellbeing alongside the demands of the day job.

In conclusion, it’s important to remember that the principles of leadership have not fundamentally changed and are still underpinned by– emotional intelligence, agility, engagement and enablement, coaching and mentoring. However, it is crucial that we don’t lose sight of our personal growth and development and our top 10 characteristics may be a good place to start your thinking as we emerge into a post- Covid business environment.