Redefining The Role Of The Leader In The Reskilling Era is an excellent article in the December 2019 McKinsey Quarterly
Below are a sampling of interesting quotes:
“Part of the solution may be for leaders to dial up their levels of empathy and humility and focus more on enabling the best in their people, rather than commanding it from them”
“It’s about transitioning your culture so that leaders see the need for change, are rewarded for it, and are committed to lifelong learning—and unlearning, because what got them into their current leadership roles is no longer sufficient.”
“Because it’s one thing to have the mind-set that the world’s changing really fast, but if everyone keeps operating in cubicles, sitting in on conference calls, and going over PowerPoint slides, then your way of working is not matching up with your new mind-set.”
“Most of all, we need humble leaders—in part, because increasingly they will need to be enablers of others, not in charge of others. This requires a very different mind-set. In a world of reskilling, a leader will be a person who needs to act in service to others, empowering a group of employees to do things on their own.”
“The leaders and organizations that will succeed are those that put human values at their core.”
Current thinking assumes that the today’s leaders are at a stage where they can transition and grow from being a reasonably effective leader in the current era into a more enabling empathetic leader needed in the era of reskilling.
What seems to be missing is how to deal with leaders whose top skill is “window dressing empathy”? Are they even in a place within themselves where empathy can be acquired?
I ask this because of my daily work with clients who are bullied in the workplace. Its my suggestion that nearly 30 percent of our clients have been psychologically harmed as a result of being bullied by their bosses who seem incapable of genuine empathy. Canadian and American studies have found roughly the same staggering percentage. Canadian studies show that 37 per cent of Canadian workers have been bullied.
Do bullies have the capacity to change beyond “window dressing empathy”? My experience is that companies do a dreadful job of managing bullies and frequently the victim is the one who is fired, at the hands of a highly manipulative bully who is well practiced in making it look like the victim is problem. In fact, bullies are often top performers within management systems that fail to see the collateral damage that trails behind their progress or they can see the damage but they value short term profit instead of putting human values at their core. Are today’s management systems ready for the reskilling era?
Are you being bullied and considering a career transition? Wayne Greenway is the Chief Executive Officer for Career Aviators. Career Aviators a Certified B Corporation® helps professionals, managers, and executives find positions in which they will excel, value highly, and love to do. The profits from our work support programs to help vulnerable youth flourish in the face of highly stressful life situations.
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