The one thing that most business professionals agree on is that great leadership is a way to motivate and build trust, which leads to high-performance teams that are more inspired to provide better work.
Great leadership is not something that comes as standard in many organizations, and in 2021 this is something that needs to change.
The Case for Great Leadership
The leadership of an organization can determine its future, both short-term and long-term. It’s a well-known fact that organizations that lack good leadership are unlikely to survive when the business landscape changes rapidly.
The health crisis of 2020 and 2021 has exposed cracks in some businesses that would be difficult to fill anyway, but businesses that have a strong culture of effective leadership are finding that they can weather the storm much easier than expected.
While it may be tempting to think that leadership itself is a talent that some people have, and that’s not necessarily untrue, leadership is more like a skill that needs to be practiced and improved upon constantly; it’s this strive for improvement that will separate the bad leaders from the good leaders.
Here are five ways business leadership will change over the coming few months and what effect this will have on the business landscape.
Hiring Qualified People with Flexible degrees
A great leader is only as good as the people who follow them, and in business terms, great management is only as good as the people they hire.
With this being said, in 2021, there is likely to be an increase in hiring managers prioritizing skills and flexible qualifications over the long tenure of experience.
While experience is important to most jobs, having a flexible qualification behind you -such as a Master’s in Business Administration- is a good way to gain the skills needed for the modern workplace. Most MBA degree courses also allow students to concentrate their focus on a specific area, such as finance or accounting; if that’s something they choose to do, find out more about the different MBA concentrations.
Culture Will Become Vital
The ‘culture’ of a business has been a bit of a buzz word for the last few years, but as the challenges of 2020, and now into 2021, are being realized, it’s becoming clear that having a supportive working culture is vital for the continuation of a business.
A supportive working culture that fosters independence of thought and individual learning and development is likely to see better results than a working culture that is still based solidly on a hierarchy model.
Working in a supportive environment has been especially important throughout the pandemic when employees have needed to be flexible and understanding while their employees have been going through sometimes tragic times. This has had a real impact on businesses, and only businesses who are likely to consider the human element are the businesses that will come out of this pandemic unscathed by negative media attention.
Businesses Will Care More About the Environment
Care for the environment has also been somewhat of a buzzword for the last few years, but the pandemic has shone a light on one thing where businesses are concerned about that we can all play our part to do more when it comes to caring for our environment.
With more people working from home than ever, carbon emissions in developed countries worldwide have been falling due to the lack of commuting. While many businesses have found remote working to be something they have had to embrace -whether they wanted to or not- the reduction in carbon emissions has shown that more businesses need to do better at caring for our planet, and that, maybe, having big officers that waste resources are not the way to do that.
There are plenty of big companies now making great strides to cut their carbon emissions and improve their environmental impact. The pandemic has shown us that working from home and working digitally is a great way to start with a lack of paper-based offices and more focus on what matters.
The health crisis has shone a light on the need for everyone to play their part to look after the planet, and to keep the planet healthy, both in terms of medical health and environmental health, because the environment and medicine are so intrinsically linked.
Diverse Workplaces Will Be Commonplace
Over the summer of 2020, the other big piece of news worldwide was the highlighting of racial divides in developed countries. Movement such as the Black Lives Matter movement were impactful in many countries, especially in the UK and USA.
How companies approach their hiring practices when it comes to hiring a diverse workforce is going to be something that will be closely scrutinized in the coming months
Forward-thinking and future-focused organizations know that having a diverse workforce has a positive impact on both the work they do and the workplace culture they are building
The important thing for businesses to remember is not to hire based on diversity but to allow diversity to flourish within their teams naturally.
Diversity also comes in many forms, it’s not just about race, or gender, or other immutable characteristics, but things like the diversity of thought of opinion, and learning styles need to be embraced by great leaders in great organizations.
Location Independence Will Change Hiring Practices
Great leaders can do to help hiring practices become more diverse to embrace location independence within their teams.
As more companies see the benefits of remote working from both an employee and an employer perspective, there seems to be no good reason to insist on specific locations for new hires. This could open up a whole world of talented individuals who may have previously not been able to apply for high-level positions.
Location independence will be one of the biggest changes we will see over the next few years, and great leaders need to be prepared to work with and adapt their working practices to suit this new trend if they are going to get the best out of it.
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