What a time to lead.
The scale and complexity of change in the world is unprecedented, and our research shows this is taking its toll on our general outlook. Data is enormous, some problems are too complex to understand, corporate power is shifting, and technology may be escaping our control as post-human futures crest the horizon. In this landscape, how can a leader be effective? What style of leadership can tackle the ambiguous, inter-systemic challenges we face to steer us towards a radically better future?
We’ll pose thoughts developed through conversations with Sarah Drinkwater, Head of Campus London at Google and Chair of Google Women UK, our CEO Sairah Ashman, and others who help shape our thinking daily, through our work. We’ll talk about how modern leaders must bring fresh energy to perennial concerns, and consider entirely new ones.
Beyond the bubble, via EI
Diversity and inclusivity aren’t just good for business; they can be a competitive advantage. Diverse teams are smarter because they understand diverse problems, and without them business can suffer.
In broader culture, expectations have shifted: 7 year olds give TED talks, people of colour take the highest accolades in fashion, film, and theatre, and feminist narratives thrive. There’s an appetite for better representation, but it’s not reflected in leadership. Private education – which caters to just 7% of the population – is still the passport to power. Women are absurdly under-represented: there are only 15 female heads of state out of 146, more FTSE 100 CEOs called Dave than female CEOs, and despite playing a central role in the development of computing, women struggle to be accepted in Silicon Valley.
Biases are hard to overcome. They’re entrenched, institutionalized and sometimes undetectable. To tackle them, modern leaders must recognise the value of Emotional Intelligence. EI competencies aren’t ‘soft skills’ that are weak or pliable, but essentials that may offer leaders an advantage over the AIs they’ll soon compete with.
Truly engaging with EI means significant shifts in leadership craft. Leaders need to understand their emotional limits, seek to extend them, and embrace those of others. They must recognize the differences and accept that they don’t have all the answers. Having ‘the ability to fire themselves’, as Sarah from Campus London describes it, is crucial.
Disrupting disruption
Experiments show that by ‘violating your schema’ you can ‘switch on’ your creativity. This suggests that creativity a) resides in all of us, and b) is a mechanism we have evolved to respond to and survive change. As Sarah sees it, people often think creativity is ‘producing things’, when really, it‘s ‘problem solving’.
In business today, to be ‘creative’ is often to disrupt. But disruption theory has been criticised for being ‘blind to continuity’, and ‘disruptive’ thought leadership is devolving into cynical billionaire-class propaganda at the expense of public intellectual analysis. We need new ideas, but we also need careful maintenance and systems-thinking to ensure our ideas have broad, long-term impact.
What if we reframed creativity, so that it doesn’t seek to create change, but anticipates and helps us find solutions for the problems change creates? The leaders we spoke to agreed that creativity, by this definition, is vital.
This means being willing to connect, to be open-minded and curious, to learn and play. Perhaps most importantly, it means being willing to encourage creativity in those around them by making room for experimentation.
Reaching beyond the now
Pressures to focus on the short-term are manifold. From the profit motive and short election cycles, to our preoccupation with mindfulness, nostalgia and instant-gratification, we’re constantly shortening horizons. Because we can so easily quantify, track and celebrate short-term results, they’re seductive.
Leaders need to help us look further ahead, beyond immediate reward and recognition. Long-term challenges require effort that may go unrecognised for decades. We are, as counterculture activist Angela Davis puts it, the ‘living imaginaries of past generations’. We realize their visions, as future generations will realize ours.
For this kind of long-term thinking, leaders need integrity and accountability. Rather than enter the stalemate between stubborn nostalgia and indefinite optimism on one side, and the sclerotic lack of alternatives on the other, leaders should seek coalitions and partnerships. To make them work they’ll need a degree of neutrality and, as Sairah Ashman put it, ‘a determined agenda but a very low ego’.
Ultimately, integrity means that social goals align with business goals, rather than taking second place. This cannot be value signaling. Positive change isn’t delivered by a tagline. Leaders must recognise customers and competitors as people and partners, rather than numbers and threats. They must push VC return cycles to raise capital to support long-term goals, that build a future we may never actually get to appreciate.
What’s clear is that in such uncertain times, leadership is vital. We need diverse leaders building inclusive environments. We need them to nurture creativity to solve existing problems rather than create new ones. And we need our figureheads to have integrity, to pursue visions that have incredibly far-reaching consequences.