Modern Leadership Development

It is particularly pertinent at this time of year when the new wave of freshers start their leadership journey. These wide-eyed leaders of the future put their trust in University to start them off well. It is our responsibility to ensure we prepare them for the business world they face ahead rather than preach about the business world we knew at their age. All too often new generations of leaders are guided  only with the retrospective - and don't get me wrong - this is very useful. However, this is limited and must be accompanied by future led guidance. We must prepare this valuable young talent for the  next fast changing few years - not the ones just gone - or in some cases ones from a very long time ago - yawn.

The fact is that leadership for the next decade will change at an even more rapid pace than anything we have seen before. As change itself gets faster so must our approach to facilitating leaders of the future. It is important that it is facilitation in that talent from within is brought out by encouraging the new wave of leaders to think for themselves so they are more readily innovative and reactive to their future business environments. This is opposed to an instructive approach which merely duplicates what has been before so only prepares them for the past. It is our duty to the next generation of leaders to serve them with opportunity to develop their own talents and propagate their own predictive and solution led thinking. This way they stand a higher chance of success.

The days of didactic and instructional 'death by PowerPoint' are over and modern universities provide innovative approaches, creative methods and multi-media platforms for a leadership facilitation that is as fresh and eager as the wonderful new talent that stands before it.

The days of the clipboard manager are over as collaborative and service approaches show better outputs and indeed our offering in education must be the same. The Task driven box ticker is dying off in favour of more people focused leaders who gain willing effort from staff. Better to embrace the willing effort and get more  - than merely order them about and get less. Better to listen to gain valuable information which helps strategic planning than rule by authority and fear where no one tells you what you really need to know. Such a difference manifests in the strength of competitive advantage.

I was very fortunate to have worked with a number of people focused leaders. They set the bar in leadership service to the talent rather than force or wing clip the talent to serve you.
I also worked with a few leaders who showed me how not to do it judging from the covert reactions of their staff. Indeed, that talent will willingly serve you better, harder, stronger and more eagerly anyway if led in the right way. It was these future led leaders who taught me that the most valuable pairs of eyes in a business were the ones in the new eager recruits who saw the business with modern and future led vision and it should be their views which colour the nature of the leadership provision in the company.

Serving the new wave of talent sets up a formidable partnership of sage and energy - each of which serves the other creating a synergetic output - indeed I think we have created a new word -' senergy.' Mmmm - perhaps there is another leadership paper needs writing on that.

About the Author: Linda Lee-Davies

Linda currently works as a Principal Lecturer at University of Bedfordshire Business School. With both a commercial and academic background, Linda completed both an MBA and a PhD by publication in international journals in the field of Leadership.